Kamala Harris faces Donald Trump tonight in their first presidential debate in Philadelphia, at a time when the candidates’ campaigns are neck and neck.
With just two months left until election day, the debate offers Harris a high-stakes opportunity to regain momentum in a race that has recently tightened significantly, with the former president beginning to narrow the polling lead Harris has maintained since Joe Biden dropped out.
Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan, told Newsweek that both candidates are effective debaters, and that the event will likely be viewed by tens of millions of people.
“Donald Trump in 2016, part of the reason he was the Republican nominee was because of his success on the debate stage,” Kall said. “Obviously, in the last debate in June, he prevented President Biden from running for re-election.”
Kamala Harris at Pittsburgh International Airport on September 9, 2024. Harris faces Trump tonight in their first presidential debate in Philadelphia.
Mandel Ngan/Getty Images
“Harris will be more methodical, very efficient, prosecutorial—like what you would see in a courtroom. Whereas Trump is a little more free-flowing, and you never exactly know what he’s going to do; there’s nothing that he won’t do.”
Harris faces the added pressure of making her first impression as a presidential candidate on the debate stage.
Kall acknowledged that Harris has a difficult task ahead, as she has to pass the “commander-in-chief test,” demonstrating that she is capable of going toe-to-toe with a former president who has considerable experience on the national stage.
“I think what she wants to do the most is to not fall into the trap of Trump and get into a tit-for-tat ad hominem attack, because it’s not going to fit well, and it won’t be perceived positively.”
Last week was marked by one of Harris’s most challenging periods since launching her presidential bid in July.
Criticism came from multiple fronts, creating a sense that her campaign is facing its first major inflection point.
The discovery of six Israeli hostages killed by Hamas last week, after Harris had publicly warned against Israeli military action in the area, has sparked outrage from Republicans, who have used the incident to paint her foreign policy as ineffective.
Furthermore, Gold Star families whose relatives were killed in the 2021 Kabul airport bombing have criticized Harris for what they perceive as her role in the Biden administration’s mismanagement of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The criticism came after Harris criticized Trump for his controversial visit to Arlington Cemetery.
Polling expert Nate Silver has pointed to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll as evidence of this shift.
The poll shows Trump narrowly leading Harris nationally, 48 percent to 47 percent, a development that Silver said “confirms” that momentum has moved toward Trump in recent days.
Trump has doubled down on his favored campaign issues—immigration, inflation and crime—which Kall said will likely be central to his strategy on the debate stage.
Kall said Harris will need to convince audiences that she has moved to the center from her 2019 campaign, where she was one of the most progressive candidates on issues like fracking, the Green New Deal, and healthcare for illegal immigrants.
According to Kall, Trump sees these topics as areas where “he has an advantage,” and the debate will be a key test of whether he can maintain discipline in sticking to those issues or if he will allow Harris to get under his skin.
“Does he have the discipline to let that go or not? That’s a big question,” Kall said. “Some of the worst Trump moments, saying Hillary Clinton should be in jail, calling her a nasty woman, those sorts of things would have the potential to really hurt him,” he said.
