Jonathan D. Salant | (TNS) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
WASHINGTON — When Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump take the stage Tuesday for their first — and perhaps only — presidential debate, the stakes will be enormously high.
With just eight weeks to election day and early voting in Pennsylvania beginning Sept. 16, there’s little time for either candidate to recover from a bad performance.
“The debate could be another defining moment,” said Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll. “This is the first time we get to see these two on the same stage. … Who knows what could happen given what’s happened so far?”
It will be one of the few chances Harris has to show the nation and Pennsylvania residents how she operates under pressure.
Pennsylvania is a must-win for each candidate.
The debate stage is in Philadelphia; Harris is prepping in Pittsburgh. Both sides have been campaigning regularly here and pouring unprecedented amounts of cash into the state, the most populous of the battleground states whose trove of 19 electoral votes likely will decide whether Trump or Harris takes the oath of office in January.
The Real Clear Politics polling average has the race as a dead heat in Pennsylvania after Trump led President Joe Biden by 4.5 percentage points. Harris is spending the weekend in Pittsburgh’s Omni William Penn hotel preparing for the debate after joining Biden in the city at a Labor Day rally. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, just finished a two-day barnstorming tour, while Trump picked Harrisburg for a Fox News Channel town hall meeting last week, and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, toured businesses in Erie.
Tobe Berkovitz, associate professor of advertising emeritus at Boston University, said the candidates need to “stay on message and most importantly stay under control.”
Polling shows most Americans have already made up their minds and won’t be swayed; a handful of undecideds will determine the next president. Yost estimated that 85% of the electorate is locked, with about 15% still up for grabs.
Both candidates need to play to those undecided voters, experts said.
“This election, as with the last one, will be decided on the margins,” acknowledged Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
Trump needs to appeal to the almost 1 in 5 Pennsylvania Republican voters who backed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in this year’s Pennsylvania primary, even though she had ended her campaign weeks before.
Harris needs to address energy issues and thread the needle on an increasingly complicated union vote.
Her appearance at Pittsburgh’s Labor Day event was another effort to keep the union support Biden, a native of Scranton, had shored up. Biden won 56% of the votes of union households in 2020, up from the 51% who supported 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton four years earlier, according to CNN exit polls. Meanwhile, Trump’s share of the union vote fell from 46% in 2016 to 40% in 2020.
Harris joined Biden — and Trump — in siding with the United Steelworkers union and opposing the proposed sale of U.S. Steel, Pittsburgh’s iconic company, to a Japanese concern, Nippon Steel Corp.
But even as labor leadership opposed the deal, 400 steelworkers rallied Downtown last week in support of Nippon’s proposed purchase, and U.S. Steel’s CEO warned that local jobs — and possibly the company headquarters itself — could be lost if the merger failed.
That’s an issue that could affect the outcome of the election in Pennsylvania, and therefore nationally, whether or not U.S. Steel is brought up during Tuesday’s debate.
“With the intense media focus, and the social media and the 24/7, for both of these candidates this is make or break,” Berkovitz said, “Plus, we’re going into early voting. … There’s not a lot of time or events for them to recover. We’re on a tight time frame as it is.”
Vetting the VP
Harris was not vetted by voters in the presidential primaries, becoming the party’s nominee only after Biden decided not to seek reelection following a disastrous performance in the first debate. Though she has served as vice president for more than three years, her national debut as a presidential candidate came last month in Chicago when she delivered her acceptance speech to an enthusiastic crowd at the Democratic National Convention.
Her nomination has energized an electorate that was going through the motions and preparing for a rematch between Trump and Biden, meaning a larger audience on Tuesday.
The debate will be just one of her initial chances to command the attention of a nation as a candidate for the White House.
“She’s making a first impression this time around,” said Vince Galko, a Pennsylvania Republican strategist.
Harris is no stranger to debates, however. As Biden’s running mate, she faced off against then-Vice President Mike Pence four years ago. And during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, she enjoyed a short-lived burst of support after confronting Biden over his relationships with segregationist Democratic senators and his initial opposition to school busing.
In one response, she talked about a little girl who rode the bus to integrate the public schools. “That little girl was me,” she said.
Trump made the 2016 Republican debates must-watch TV as he gave his primary opponents unflattering nicknames. He skipped the primary debates in 2024, and was on stage during Biden’s dismal debate performance in June.
He’s already named his opponent “Comrade Kamala” as he falsely charged her with being a communist.
“His only hope is to drag Harris down,” said former U.S. Rep. Jim Greenwood, R-Pa., who is helping to lead a group of Pennsylvania Republicans backing Harris. “He’s going to use his usual absurd characterizations that she’s a communist, she’s a lunatic, she’s going to destroy the country. She’s probably a good enough debater that she can parry those criticisms back at him.”
Democratic consultant Glenn Totten said Harris also needs to empathize with those tuning in to the debate.
“The only hurdle she has to get over is to make people believe and make people understand that she’s on their side,” Totten said. “Almost everybody will acknowledge that Donald J. Trump is all about Donald J. Trump. As long as Vice President Harris can make people understand she’s there to protect their interests and move the country forward, she’ll walk away with all the roses.”
Still, Harris’ previous opposition to fracking and her deciding vote to spend billions of dollars for clean energy projects is a hurdle she must overcome in Western Pennsylvania, Galko said.
She’s backed off on opposing fracking, and those clean energy projects include two hubs to develop clean hydrogen in opposite ends of the state, but Galko said a lot of her positions are at odds with those of Pennsylvanians.
“Let her talk,” Galko said. “As more people get to know her, they see her positions are not within those of average Americans. … I’m curious to see how she moderates on issues that relate to Pennsylvania, whether it’s fracking or late-term abortions. Does she lead with that or wait for that to come up?”
Indeed, Trump, in a speech Thursday to the Economic Club of New York, hit hard on energy, insisting that Harris still opposed fracking and promising to ratchet up oil and gas production while ending funding for clean energy projects like the hydrogen hubs.
“We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country, including Russia and Saudi Arabia. We will be using it,” Trump said. “We will blast through every bureaucratic hurdle to issue rapid approvals for new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants and new electric plants and reactors of all types.”
Wooing Republicans
Still, many Republicans already oppose Trump, and a strong performance at the debate by Harris could encourage them to pull the lever for her in November, Greenwood said.
“What the vice president needs to do is first be herself, second be presidential,” Greenwood said. “She talked about putting a Republican in her Cabinet. I think she needs to contrast herself with Trump, who shows little interest in bipartisanship and more interest in appealing to his pretty far-right-of-center base.”
Harris’ presence atop the Democratic ticket is attracting more interest from those who previously had not been excited about this November, pollsters said.
“What the polling right now is showing is because of the enthusiasm about having a fresh face, you’re going to get significantly more voters who are not committed watching this debate who would not normally watch a debate,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “It could have more of an impact than a typical debate has when the only people paying close attention are real partisans.”
Those persuadable voters are more independent, more moderate, and less likely to show up at the polls, Yost said. He said Harris needs to address their issues, such as the economy, abortion, immigration and saving democracy.
“You’ve got to talk in a way that speaks to those people who are still truly making up their minds. You have to approach those questions in a way that is perceived as being more moderate than partisan,” he said. “Some of them are looking for credentials that you can do the job. It’s not just about these issues but it’s about talking about the issues in a way that not only appeals to these voters but gets them to vote.”
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