On the eve of her first and maybe only debate with Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris is getting a ton of advice. That’s especially true after a bunch of polls showed her contest with the former president to be as tight as it’s ever been, sending Democrats into a kind of subdued panic.
By Matt Bai
Based on what I’ve heard and read over the past few days, though, she should ignore pretty much all of it. Because the good news is that the mission here is actually quite simple, and it requires no brilliant feats of debating jujitsu.
I’ve seen all the expert analysis, and I’m sure you have, too. Harris needs to get under Trump’s skin, expose his temper and misogyny. She needs to go full prosecutor mode, the way she did in the Senate. She needs to show how old and out of touch Trump is and generate some big viral moment.
All of which sounds satisfying and expert-like, except this isn’t an episode of “Law and Order.” Focusing all your energy on exposing Trump is just terrible advice.
The first order of business in any debate ought to be figuring out whom you’re talking to. In Harris’s case, the critical audience isn’t in the ABC studio, or in the media center, or even in most of the 50 million-plus homes where Americans will gather to watch. Most voters already know whom they’re voting for.
No, Harris is primarily speaking to a small but meaningful subset of viewers: moderate conservatives and independents who find Trump detestable but who worry that Harris and her party will balloon the size of government and prosecute a retributive culture war.
These are the voters who, like it or not, will almost certainly decide the margin of victory or defeat in critical states. The most striking number in last week’s wave of polling, I thought, was the 28 percent of likely voters in the New York Times-Siena College poll who said they still need to learn more about Harris. This will be their first extended look at her without a teleprompter and with her opponent standing a few feet away.
The most powerful appeal to anti-Trump conservatives is, essentially, the one former vice president Dick Cheney eloquently made in his endorsement of Harris last week: that Trump is a liar who tried to subvert the democratic process and cannot be entrusted with power again. But that by itself probably isn’t enough to close the deal. Harris has to clear the bar of being a viable alternative — a president who won’t spend all her time dreaming up vast new social programs and shaming White voters for their privilege. In other words, the antidote can’t seem worse than the disease.
If you accept this premise, then you understand why going at Trump like a prosecutor would be a truly boneheaded strategy. You wouldn’t be showing these right-leaning voters anything they don’t already know about Trump; all you’re likely to do, instead, is flash the kind of contempt they fear you might harbor for them. Self-righteous anger might be gratifying for the core Democrats watching at home, but it’s a counterproductive emotion for the audience that counts.
Harris seems to think she can placate conservative voters with a bunch of small-bore economic policies calibrated to sound non-threatening and moderate, and maybe that helps. But no one’s taking her thrown-together policy agenda all that seriously. What she really needs to do is remind them of her own journey.
It’s a stale cliché in politics that a candidate just needs to “be herself.” (I’ve known plenty of candidates for whom being themselves was precisely the problem.) In this case, what I’m saying is Harris needs to be her story, which ought to be the easiest and most instinctive strategy in the world. She needs to sound like the triumphant and grateful child of immigrants she is, raised in a broken home, who somehow willed herself to the pinnacle of politics. It’s essentially the same story she told in her convention speech, when a lot of undecided voters probably didn’t stay up to watch.
That way, while Trump sputters and rambles, Harris can reaffirm for wavering voters exactly what they still want to believe about America: It’s not an inherently unjust country, but one where you can still transcend barriers of race and adversity through sheer persistence. By focusing on her own narrative in a way that’s relentlessly upbeat, Harris can signal that a vote for her is a vote for the American story of community and self-reliance, not simply a rejection of Trump. She can make that vote mean something more than the lesser of bad options.
I know that’s not the message a lot of amped-up Democrats would like to hear Harris deliver. They’re desperate to see prosecutor Harris show up and spring some kind of masterful trap on the unsuspecting perpetrator, taking him down once and for all.
But Harris shouldn’t get sidetracked by any of that. Debating, like governing, is all about choices. And if Harris chooses the right voters Tuesday night, they’ll probably choose her.
