Harris-Trump debate preview: What the presidential candidates need to accomplish Tuesday night

The debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump on Sept. 10 will be the second such clash of the 2024 election — but the first to feature Harris instead of President Biden, who ended his campaign a little more than a month ago.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. As anyone paying attention to U.S. politics knows by now, Biden’s wobbly performance on June 27 was pretty much the reason he dropped out a few weeks later.

These quadrennial spectacles, in other words, can have very real consequences for the candidates — and that’s especially true for Tuesday’s debate, which may be the only time Harris and Trump collide before voters start casting their ballots. (There are no other presidential debates on the schedule.)

So what do Harris and Trump need to accomplish in Philadelphia? Here’s a quick Yahoo News guide.

What Harris needs to accomplish

Make a moment … The high point of Harris’s otherwise unsuccessful bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination actually came on the debate stage.

In the first clash of that cycle, Harris slammed Biden, then a rival candidate, for working with segregationist senators to oppose federally mandated busing in the 1970s.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public school, and she bused to school every day,” Harris said. “And that little girl was me.” The clip went viral — and pretty soon the Harris campaign was selling “That Little Girl Was Me” T-shirts on its website.

Most voters don’t watch these debates live; they absorb the high and low points afterward, usually on social media. In the past, Harris has shown a knack for making viral moments — particularly when she’s in prosecutor mode, grilling Republicans. Do the same to Trump Tuesday night — perhaps on abortion, an issue on which he’s recently tied himself in knots — and Harris could be well on her way to a “win.”

… but not a gaffe. Harris has also had plenty of bad viral moments. They tend to happen when she’s caught off guard — and she starts to spew meaningless, meandering platitudes in response. Trump has seized on such slips to claim Harris is uninformed and ill-prepared for the presidency. Fair or not, she needs to avoid serving up more word salad in Philadelphia lest she reinforce this line of attack.

Connect on policy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Harris has started to get specific on policy. On Aug. 16, she unveiled a detailed economic agenda designed to lower the cost of groceries, health care and housing for working- and middle-class Americans. On Wednesday, she announced a plan to tax capital gains and small businesses at lower rates than Biden.

Harris can’t devote all of her time Tuesday to wonkery. But she does have a theory of the case, according to Politico. Just like friends who immediately look for photos of themselves in your wedding album, her thinking goes, voters should be able to see something for themselves in a candidate’s proposals. Harris’s advisers call it the “wedding album” question — and the vice president would do well to provide viewers with a few concrete, memorable examples during the debate.

Be the bigger person. Trump hasn’t been shy about attacking Harris — her competence, her intelligence, her appearance and even her biracial heritage. He recently reposted a crudely misogynistic comment about her on Truth Social. But as Trump’s previous opponents can attest, it doesn’t pay to mud-wrestle with him on the debate stage. (Remember what happened to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio after he mocked Trump’s … hand size?)

Trump is in his element when he’s pushing the envelope. So far, Harris has resisted the temptation to tangle with him. Asked in her recent CNN interview about Trump’s comment that she had only recently “turned Black,” Harris simply said: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.” That sort of above-the-fray approach could help solidify her as the more “presidential” option Tuesday night.

What Trump needs to accomplish

Let Harris beat Harris. Because Trump is such a familiar figure at this point — and because views of him are so fixed — there’s less upside or downside for him here than for Harris. Think about it: What could Trump say or do at this point that would change how voters see him, one way or the other?

What Trump really needs to do is change how voters see Harris — or let Harris do the job herself.

During his June debate with Biden, Trump was at his most effective when he simply got out of the president’s way. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump muttered at one point. “I don’t think he knows either.” As usual, Trump made dozens of false claims that night, but Biden was the big story — in part because Trump was canny enough to cede the spotlight. The best-case scenario for Trump is that Harris stumbles … and that he doesn’t do anything to draw attention away from her mistakes. Less is more.

Don’t be weird … After Harris took the reins from Biden in July — and especially after she selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate — the main Democratic attack on Trump and his number two, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, shifted from “they’re a threat to democracy” to “they’re weird.” Whether you approve of that message or not, “weird” is a lot easier to demonstrate on a debate stage than “dangerous.” If Trump spends Tuesday night on saying odd things — about sharks and electrocution; about the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter; about paying for child care with tariffs— or even just denying the charge (over and over again), he will help Harris and Walz seem normal in comparison.

… especially on race or gender. Trump has a history of acting strangely in the presence of powerful women. Recall how he prowled the stage and loomed over Hillary Clinton during their first 2016 debate. “He was literally breathing down my neck,” Clinton later recalled. “My skin crawled.” Evidently, voters didn’t like it either.

Harris is, of course, a Black and Indian American woman. If elected, she would be the first female president in U.S. history. Harris has chosen not to campaign on her trailblazing identity, leaving it implicit rather than making it explicit. But race and gender are explosive topics, and if Trump decides to “go there” Tuesday night — the way he did when he recently accused Harris of “turning Black,” for instance, or when he previously said any number of derogatory things about women — it will overshadow the rest of the debate. And that’s unlikely to be good news for Trump.

Stop flailing on abortion. Trump has been “privately emphatic with advisers that … the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November,” according to the New York Times — and since Harris has emerged, she has only increased the pressure on a guy who has long claimed to be “the most pro-life president in American history” for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.

In response, Trump has recently tried to rebrand himself on the issue by criticizing bans in Arizona and Florida, watering down the GOP platform’s abortion language and claiming that his administration ​​would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”

But that’s led to accusations of flip-flopping on both the right and left. Trump recognizes that strict abortion bans are unpopular — and that Democrats tend to perform better when the issue is front and center. If the former president can clarify his position Tuesday night, perhaps he can neutralize Harris’s advantage to some degree. If he further muddies the waters, however, that will only strengthen her hand.