Previewing Tonight's Harris Trump Debate

Ahead of the debate, where does the race stand and what should we expect to see?

LEFT: US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images. RIGHT: Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.

Tonight from 9pm-10:30pm ET, Kamala Harris will face off against Donald Trump in their first and perhaps only debate of the 2024 campaign.

As always, we will be live blogging the debate here at The Big Picture, so look for a link later this evening. But in the meantime, we wanted to preview what to expect tonight as we sit here on the edges of our seats.

After all, if there’s one thing we know after the Biden-Trump debate, it’s that, on rare occasions, debates really do matter and can change the course of a campaign. 

VP Harris spent the weekend preparing for the debate in Pittsburgh’s Omni William Penn Hotel, reportedly “practicing with extended mock debates, with a focus on policy and an effort to draw a contrast with the former president.” In between visits with everyday Pennsylvanians that is.

Harris has sent a clear message heading into the debate: She’s the “underdog” in this race. 

As Harris spokesman Brian Fallon puts it:

Trump, on the other hand, has reportedly been “reviewing policy positions with advisors” in preparations that are being characterized as “somewhat informal.” So…not preparing.

It does appear Trump is going into this debate a bit cocky, with his team raising expectations for his performance to sky-high levels. First, his spokesman Jason Miller likened Trump to Mohammed Ali, and then his Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called him “one of the most skilled debaters in modern political history.” 

Sure, if you count rambling nonsensically and lying through your teeth “effective”...

Here’s a rundown of what to expect as Harris and Trump face off in tonight’s historic showdown.

The Rules

Tonight’s debate, which will air on ABC and be simulcast on other channels live, will be moderated by David Muir of World News Tonight and ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis.

The debate will run 90 minutes with two commercial breaks and, as in the last debate, the candidates will each stand at a podium on stage with no audience, and notably:

Microphones will be live only for the candidate whose turn it is to speak and muted when the time belongs to another candidate. Only the moderators will be permitted to ask questions.

There will be no opening statements in the debate, with closing statements to run two minutes each. Donald Trump won the virtual coin toss to determine the order of closing statements and podium positions. Trump will give his closing statement last and Kamala Harris chose to have the podium to the right side as you look at the stage.

Additionally:

Each candidate will be allotted two minutes to answer each question with a two-minute rebuttal, and an additional minute for a follow-up, clarification, or response.

Candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate and no props or pre-written notes will be allowed on stage. Each candidate will be given a pen, a pad of paper, and a bottle of water.

Two major questions loom regarding how involved the moderators will be during the debate. The moderators of the CNN Biden-Trump debate were widely maligned for not jumping in to fact-check Trump’s lies when he spewed them. Co-moderator Dana Bash has since defended that move, but ABC News is not committing to such a limitation this time.

As ABC News political director Rick Klein told The New York Times:

“I don’t think it’s a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ proposition. We’re not making a commitment to fact-check everything, or fact-check nothing, in either direction. We’re there to keep a conversation going, and to facilitate a good solid debate, and that entails a lot of things in terms of asking questions, moving the conversation along, making sure that it’s civilized.”

Also, will the moderators use their prerogative to unmute the mics when needed to illuminate for viewers at home exchanges that may be happening on the stage?

Let’s hope that tonight, unlike CNN, ABC News is committed to informing the public first and foremost and that the moderators will be empowered to adapt the format in real-time to that end.

New reporting indicates one way VP Harris is trying to get under Trump’s skin even before the debate begins:

“Former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who served only 10 days before he was fired, and former Trump national security official Olivia Troye will attend the debate in Philadelphia as the vice president’s guests and surrogates.”

Well played!

The State Of The Race

Today marks exactly 56 days until election day and the race is widely considered a deadheat.

On ABC News’s own 538 forecast, Kamala Harris leads Trump nationally by 2.8%.

Of course, the presidency is not won or lost with the national popular vote, but rather in the swing states and the electoral college. And that’s where the race is tied, with the seven swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada too close for comfort.

As you can see from The New York Times polling averages of the seven crucial swing states, Harris is tied or slightly ahead in each of them.

One thing that is keeping Democrats up at night is that in both 2016 and 2020, the polls indicated a severe undercount of Trump’s support. In 2020 in particular, while Joe Biden went into election day with an 8-point polling lead, he ended up winning the race by just 4.4 points.

While pollsters have said they’ve made adjustments to their models since 2020, and polling will not be as thrown off by partisan differences in responses to Covid lockdowns this time, the tightness of the race would seem to support Harris’s contention that she is the underdog. But they may have overcompensated for 2020; in 2022 the polls favored the GOP but undercounted opposition to extremist candidates, and the vaunted “red wave” never crashed ashore.

We are all hoping Harris can land a blow against Trump that will lead to a chipping away at his support, particularly considering his disturbing statements recently advocating the jailing of his political enemies and his utter inability to articulate a coherent childcare policy at a recent economic policy event.

And in the spirit of the notion that debates sometimes do matter, it’s helpful to remember that back in 2019, as Kamala Harris faced off with Joe Biden and a slew of other Democratic candidates on the primary debate stage, Harris had a breakout performance, in which she talked about race and her own experience having been bussed to integrate her elementary school.

Memorably she told Joe Biden:

"There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me."

As a result of that debate performance, Kamala Harris gained on Joe Biden in the polls by a net of 12%, which was a monumental shift, albeit fleeting.

It’s true that primary polls are famously more volatile than general election polls, but it’s also true that Harris is a much better candidate than she was 5 years ago. Her potential to deliver a viral moment that could really impact the race should not be underestimated.

Speaking of which, I’m just going to leave this here…

What Do People Want To Hear From The Candidates?

In a New York Times/Siena poll that was released over the weekend showing Donald Trump one point ahead of Kamala Harris, there was a crucial finding:

Despite a month of favorable coverage, voters still don’t know enough about [Harris]: 28 percent of voters said they needed to learn more, compared with only 9 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump. 

While I am skeptical that the voters are pining for policy specifics from Harris, especially considering she has rolled out comprehensive economic proposals and in far more coherent detail than Trump, the reality is that Donald Trump is very well defined and, despite being Vice President for the past 4 years, Kamala Harris is a recent arrival at the top of the presidential ticket. It’s fair that people would want to know more.

In a piece for The Bulwark Substack titled “The Case For Staying Optimistic About Harris,” Sarah Longwell wrote:

The debate is Harris’s best opportunity to give voters like these a sense of who she is and what kind of president she will be.

Which is why she should focus on clearly articulating what her policy priorities will be and not letting Trump turn the debate into a circus.

People already know why they don’t like Trump. They need to figure out why they like Harris.

And as Longwell notes, the more people learn about Harris, the more they like her, which is the exact opposite for Trump.

Indeed, according to a new Marist poll, which shows Harris up one nationally (and up three points among “Definite Voters”), this finding gives a sense of the importance of the debate:

• 70% of Americans will watch all or most of the presidential debate between Harris and Trump and an additional 23% say they won’t watch but will closely follow the news coverage of the debate.

• 30% of registered voters say the debate will help them a great deal or good amount in making their selection for president. 

One thing I’d like to see from the Vice President is Prosecutor Harris to return to the scene. While Harris will have limited opportunities to address Trump directly, reframing the race as she did when she launched, as the prosecutor versus the felon, is a winning dynamic for her. Her prosecutorial toughness has certainly served her well in earlier debates.

As for what to expect from Trump, we can dispense with any hopes that he will be “disciplined” or “policy-driven” tonight. Even during the June debate against Joe Biden when he was widely seen as “restrained,” he was in fact a firehose of lies and incoherent nonsense.

But there are some issues I hope the moderators force him to address, namely his recent threat to jail his political foes.

As he wrote on Truth Social in a bonkers post recently:

And his unfounded claims that the election is already being rigged against him. 

It’s his usual loser playbook, of course, but it’s time for the media to call him out and make him defend his indefensible claims.

There’s a reason this simple front page headline in The Orlando Sentinel went viral: because it’s so rare for Trump to be held to normal journalistic standards, rather than being sanewashed by a complacent…and at times complicit…media:

It’s really just that easy, ABC.

I hope tonight ABC News does its job and uses the extraordinary platform of the debate to expose Donald Trump’s lies and violent threats to the entire nation.

I know Kamala Harris will be doing her part to both call out Trump and explain to voters how she will usher in a new way forward for the country.