Harris-Trump debate becomes latest milestone in 2024 election – NBC New York

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will meet in person for the first time on Tuesday evening. It will perhaps be their only debate. After a turbulent summer of campaigning, it will be an exciting opportunity to present their very different visions for the country.

The event will take place in Philadelphia at 9 p.m. Eastern Time and will offer Americans the most detailed look at a campaign that has changed dramatically since the last debate in June. In a flash, President Joe Biden withdrew from the race after his disastrous performance, Trump survived an assassination attempt and both sides chose their running mates.

Harris is eager to show that she can make the Democrats’ case against Trump better than Biden, while Trump is trying to portray the vice president as an out-of-touch liberal while winning over voters who are skeptical of his return to the White House.

Trump, 78, has struggled to adjust to Harris, 59, who is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president. The former Republican president has at times resorted to racial and gender stereotypes, frustrating allies who want Trump to focus instead on policy differences with Harris.

The Vice President, for her part, will seek to take some of the credit for the Biden administration’s achievements, while also addressing its low points and explaining her departure from more liberal positions she has held in the past.

Harris, who has given only one formal interview in the past six weeks, will face a rare moment of sustained questioning during the debate.

“If she does well, it will be a nice surprise for Democrats and they will cheer,” said Ari Fleischer, a Republican communications strategist and former press secretary to President George W. Bush. “If she fails, as Joe Biden did, it could completely upend the campaign. So even more depends on it.”

Tim Hogan, who led Senator Amy Klobuchar’s preparations in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, said Harris, a former California attorney general, would “bring the instincts of a prosecutor to the debate stage.”

“That’s a very big strength in this situation: having someone who knows how to land a punch and how to translate it,” Hogan said.

The first ballots for the presidential election will be mailed just hours after the debate moderated by ABC News. In Alabama, mail-in ballots are expected to begin being mailed on Wednesday.

Trump wants to denounce Harris as too liberal

Trump and his campaign have highlighted the far-left positions she espoused during her failed 2020 presidential bid. In his informal debate prep sessions, he was joined by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who sharply attacked Harris during their primary debates.

Harris has tried to justify her shift away from liberal issues toward more moderate positions on fracking, expanding health insurance for all and mandatory gun buyback programs – and even her shift away from her position on banning plastic straws – as pragmatism, insisting that her “values ​​remain the same.” Her campaign team posted a page on its website on Monday detailing her positions on key issues.

The former president argued that a Harris presidency would be a threat to the country’s security, stressing that Biden had tasked her with dealing with the influx of migrants, as the Republican again issues dire warnings about immigration and people living in the country illegally, which are at the heart of his campaign. He has sought to portray a Harris presidency as a continuation of Biden’s still-unpopular administration, particularly his economic record, as voters are still feeling the effects of inflation, even if it has cooled in recent months.

Trump’s team insists that his tone will be no different toward a female opponent.

“President Trump will be himself,” his senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters in a phone call on Monday.

Gabbard, who also took part in the conversation, added that Trump “respects women and doesn’t feel the need to be condescending or speak to women differently than he would speak to a man.”

His advisers say Harris tends to express herself in a “word salad” of meaningless phrases, prompting Trump to say last week that his debate strategy is to “let her talk.”

The former president frequently engages in rambling remarks that deviate from his political views. He regularly makes false claims about the last election, attacks a long list of enemies and adversaries working against him, praises foreign rulers and makes comments about race, such as his false claim in July that Harris recently “accidentally turned black.”

Harris wants to argue that Trump is unstable and unsuitable

The vice president, who has been the most vocal advocate for abortion access within the Biden administration following the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade ruling in 2022, is expected to focus on denouncing Trump’s inconsistencies on women’s reproductive care, including his announcement that he will vote to uphold Florida’s ban on abortion beginning at six weeks of pregnancy in a statewide referendum this fall.

Harris also wanted to present himself as a steadier hand when it comes to leading the country and securing its alliances while war rages in Ukraine more than two years after Russia’s invasion and Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip drags on with no foreseeable end.

She will likely warn that Trump is a threat to democracy, starting with his attempts in 2020 to overturn his presidential election defeat and ending with his angry supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. And just last weekend, he made comments. Trump sent another retaliatory message on social media, threatening that if he wins the election, he will jail “those who have engaged in unscrupulous behavior,” including lawyers, political activists, donors, voters and poll workers.

Harris has spent most of the past five days preparing for the debate in Pennsylvania, where she participated in hours-long simulated sessions with a Trump surrogate. Before the debate, she told radio host Rickey Smiley that she was working on how to respond when Trump lies.

“There is no lower limit for how low he will sink,” she said.

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AP Poll Editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington and Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Las Vegas, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Josh Boak in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.