Sep.05

electoral-vote.com

Dem 49

   

GOP 51

Harris Is Not Going to Fall into the Debate Trap That Biden Fell Into

When Joe Biden prepped for his ill-fated debate with Donald Trump in June, he focused on making sure he knew all the facts about all the policy issues, which did him no good whatsoever. Kamala Harris is not making the same mistake in prepping for her debate with Trump next Tuesday. She understands that facts and figures don't move voters and neither do innocent mistakes that are flagged later. Her whole approach will be radically different from Biden's.

Instead, Harris will focus on exploiting Trump's Achilles heel, which is ... Donald Trump. She is planning on goading him and unnerving him in an attempt to get him to say something that offends voters. She will also call out his lies and attempt to get him to say things that will go viral on social media. She knows from her own debate with Mike Pence in 2020 that policy doesn't matter. What mattered then was the fly that landed on Pence's head and upstaged him, not his views on abortion or anything else. Maybe she could bring a jar of live flies onstage and release them just before the debate starts.

She will also attack Trump for all the promises he made in 2016 and then broke—for example, building a wall on the Mexican border and getting Mexico to pay for it. And she will blame him for mismanaging the government's response to COVID.

That said, she is also going to learn as much policy as she can absorb. It is her nature. Starting today, she will hunker down in Pennsylvania, where the actual debate will take place, isolated from the outside world, and do one mock debate after another because she is out of practice. The prep will be run by D.C. lawyer Karen Dunn, who helped Harris prep for the 2020 debate, and Rohini Kosoglu, a longtime policy guru. Many other people will be involved as well.

One weakness Harris has is her penchant for getting into the weeds on policy. Her advisers will have to train that out of her. The debate will not be won or lost on knowing how many murders were committed in Detroit last year. She needs to focus on the big messages: Trump is incompetent and we need to go forward, not backward.

Democratic strategist James Carville wrote an op-ed in The New York Times yesterday giving Harris three pieces of advice:

• Let Trump be Trump: Carville knows that Trump often speaks from his gut and his gut doesn't have a very good political sense. He wants Harris to goad Trump into saying things that will play well with his base but be a horror to swing voters and suburban moms. Her challenge is to say things that really get under his skin and make him explode. Instead of calling him an authoritarian, she could say he is even weirder than Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). If that leads to a discussion of which one of them is weirder, she gets bonus points. Carville believes that one good joke is worth 100 fact checks. No doubt her team is working around the clock to think up jokes that will infuriate him. If she can work "small" and "Stormy Daniels" into the same joke, he'll blow his top. That's what she needs. When he explodes, all she has to say: "Same old tired playbook. Even an elderly gerbil can learn a few new tricks, but he can't." She needs to make it funny. "Gerbil" is funny. "Dog" is not funny.
  
  
• Break with Biden: One of the things Trump will try to do is tie Harris to Joe Biden's least popular policies, possibly Gaza. Consequently, she needs to break with Biden on a couple of high-profile policies to show that she is not Biden II, but her own woman. This will negate Trump's attacks on Biden since she will be able to then say: "I'm not Joe Biden and I am not running on his platform." One obvious area is abortion. Biden, an observant Catholic, didn't like talking about abortion. Harris can say that guaranteeing every woman's right to an abortion whenever she needs one is her top priority. This is not only a break with Biden, but very popular on its own. She can also tout her tax plan for small businesses. Many small business owners are Republicans but they may like her tax plan very much. She can surely find another issue to emphasize. People can't remember more than three things anyway.
  
  
• Toto, I Have a Feeling We're Not in 2020 Anymore: Trump is going to hit Harris with positions she took during her abortive 2020 presidential run. She needs a clear response. Carville suggests: "I learned from my time governing in the White House. These are my positions [now]." If Trump insists on trying to tie her to her old positions, she can point out to evangelicals that, before he jumped into the presidential race in 2016, he was a strong supporter of abortion. And again, she could do it in a way that will make his head explode, like this: "Back before your presidential run, when you were raping women, you were all for abortion. Now you are suddenly not. Why?" He will naturally then forget everything Susie Wiles has tried to drill into his head and deny it. That's when she can point out "a New York State judge said you raped E. Jean Carroll and a jury ordered you to pay her $88 million as compensation." She could also note that a dozen women have accused him of sexual assault. He really doesn't want to have that discussion on national television, but if she is clever, she can goad him into it.
  

With Carville publishing his plan in the Times, Trump's handlers know it. But can they get him to realize that he shouldn't fall into the traps she is going to set for him? That could decide who wins the debate—and the presidency. (V)