In his campaign appearances of late, Donald Trump has seemed positively unhinged. At a press conference in New York on Friday, which the New York Times characterised as “a venting exercise”, he took no questions from reporters and instead attacked many of the women who, over the years, have accused him of gross sexual misconduct. As he ranted and rambled for almost an hour, he even appeared to forget the name of one of his accusers.
This is the aggrieved, undisciplined Trump that Kamala Harris hopes the world will see at the presidential debate on Tuesday night, in sharp contrast to the presidential bearing she will try to project.
The past month has been trying for Trump and rewarding for Harris, who starred at a successful Democratic convention in late August and has pulled ahead in polls of several key battleground states. She’s also been hauling in campaign cash at a record pace, raising $361m from three million donors last month, triple the amount that went to Trump.
The Canadian-American cartoonist Barry Blitt captured their contrasting fortunes perfectly on the cover of the New Yorker magazine on 26th August. It showed a rollercoaster with Harris and her running-mate, Tim Walz, joyously climbing upward in their car, while Trump and JD Vance, both grimacing, are careening downward, their red and blue ties flying behind them.
Still, most national polls show the race is extremely close—a New York Times poll published on Sunday found that 48 per cent of likely voters were siding with Trump, and 47 per cent with Harris. This first debate—which may turn out to be the only one—is crucial for both candidates, though for sharply different reasons.
Trump is by now very well-known to most Americans. He seems to have a lock on about 45 per cent of the vote, according to virtually all the polls taken over recent months. To win the election, however, he must convince the thin slice of undecided and independent voters that he is the better choice. Judging from his most recent campaign appearances, this will be hard. At a recent rally, he flipped from one topic, the rising price of meat—he has previously falsely claimed that bacon prices had quintupled in the past few years—to another, his oft-cited hatred of wind power.
There is already a wide gender gap in voting intention, which performances like the one Trump gave on Friday will only widen, despite his efforts to attract women voters by softening his anti-abortion stance. Even his closest aides express private worry that if debate audiences see the raging, wildly meandering candidate he has been of late, he will fail.
The reversal in fortunes has been head-spinning for both camps. For many months, when he faced an unpopular, octogenarian president, a confident Trump seemed to be gliding towards a second term in the White House. As vice president, Harris had an unimpressive record and received criticisms of her management style and communications skills—which the blogger Andrew Sullivan described as “rhetorical blather”. But almost from the instant she replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she has generated enormous enthusiasm among the Democratic base and has hardly made a false step on the campaign trail. Her surge has infuriated no one more than Trump. It seems to have knocked him off his game.
Will he be able to turn his fortunes around again in the debate? His uneven past performances give little certainty. In his June debate with President Biden, he was mostly subdued as he watched the president’s halting, disastrous performance. He had the good sense to step out of the way and let an enfeebled Biden implode before the cameras. But when he debated Biden in 2020, Trump, recovering from Covid, sweated profusely and was deemed to be overly aggressive, repeatedly interrupting Biden and talking over him. Hillary Clinton described Trump as a “creep” in her three 2016 debates with him, but he landed some effective attacks on her. She recently told the New York Times that Harris “just should not be baited. She should bait him. He can be rattled.”
As a debater, Harris proved effective when she faced vice president Mike Pence in 2020, especially when she sharply chastised him for interrupting her, with a sharp, “Mr Vice President, I’m speaking.” The rebuke went viral. Speaking on Fox News last week, Trump said the exchange proved Harris is a “nasty person”, one of his favourite descriptions for women. “The way she treated Mike Pence was horrible. The way she treats people is horrible.” Harris landed a hard punch on Biden during a debate before the 2020 Democratic primaries, accusing him of racial insensitivity on the issue of desegregation busing. But she is less experienced at debates than Trump.
Harris has spent five days holed up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in exhaustive debate preparation. Trump’s debate prep has been more haphazard, though he has held a few practice sessions at his posh golf club in New Jersey.
Because she has not held press conferences and has conducted only one televised interview, the debate could be a dangerous moment for Harris. She has so far not really been pressed to explain why she has disavowed left-wing stances she held in her aborted 2019 Democratic presidential primary campaign, such as endorsing “Medicare for all” and opposing hydraulic fracking. She’s also moved away from some of Biden’s positions, such as increasing the capital gains tax rate on wealthy investors, perhaps because she wants to project a more business-friendly face. Lately, the American press has highlighted that she now no longer supports a ban on plastic straws.
Harris hasn’t yet really explained the reasons for her changed positions, but the rationale of political expedience is obvious. She was trying to win in a crowded field of liberal Democrats in 2020, but moving closer to the political centre is probably necessary if she is to woo the undecided voters she needs to win the general election in November.
The downside of Harris’s strategy is that it allows Trump to attack her as a flip-flopper who voters cannot trust. She can parry his assault by noting his disavowal of severe state ballot restrictions and flip-flop on abortion (in contrast to her steadfast position), including his shifting views on a federal ban.
Several Republican consultants have told me they hope Trump will use the debate as Ronald Reagan did in 1980, to hammer at voters’ economic discontent. Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and went on to defeat the incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. Carter turns 100 next month; his son has said he is staying alive mainly because he so badly wants to vote for Harris and see her elected.
Democratic campaign veterans have emphasised that Harris’s opportunity on Tuesday is to show voters that she can be a strong and stable president, and a favourable contrast to Trump, who they predict will not be able to contain himself and will scare off undecided voters.
As Blitt captured in his cartoon, this has been a rollercoaster of an election, and the fortunes of either candidate could still quickly change. In such a tight race, this debate could prove decisive.
