At their first, and possibly only, debate, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump will have a chance to paint the picture of their opponent that they want voters to see.
Ms. Harris has signaled that she will portray Mr. Trump as a billionaire out for only himself who will strip Americans of fundamental rights. Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees Ms. Harris as a lightweight who is too liberal to lead America and who is inextricably tied to the policies of President Biden.
Here is how the two candidates may go after each other at the ABC News debate on Tuesday evening in Philadelphia.
Harris’s main potential lines of attack at the debate
Ms. Harris, 59, casts herself as representing the future of American government and Mr. Trump, 78, as a relic of the past. She will press her advantage on favorable issues, most obviously abortion, while seeking to counter Mr. Trump’s attacks on topics where she is weaker, like the economy and immigration.
She has also sought to use ridicule to her advantage, calling Mr. Trump “an unserious man” and suggesting he and his allies are “out of their minds.” That is a contrast from the approach taken by Mr. Biden, who made more solemn and lofty arguments about how Mr. Trump posed a threat to American democracy.
Saying her rival wants ‘a national sales tax’
Poll after poll has shown that the economy remains the top issue for voters. That’s a problem for Ms. Harris as Americans express more trust in Mr. Trump to handle the economy.
In a line of attack she may repeat at the debate, Ms. Harris has accused Mr. Trump of wanting to lower taxes on billionaires and big corporations while raising them on the middle class. She has especially focused on his proposal to impose tariffs on all imported goods, which she has described as a tax increase for workers.
“Now he also wants to impose what, in effect, is a national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities, which will skyrocket the cost for families and small businesses,” Ms. Harris said in New Hampshire last week. She has said that the tariffs would cost families nearly $4,000 a year, a figure in line with some economic estimates of their potential impact.
At her rallies, she has outlined her own plans for reducing prices on food, housing, prescription drugs, medical care and other necessities, arguing that Mr. Trump’s policies would raise them, especially if he seeks to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“He doesn’t actually fight for the middle class,” Ms. Harris said during her address at the Democratic National Convention.
Accusing Trump of being an extremist out for himself
Ms. Harris often tells her audiences, “If you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for.”
As a former prosecutor, she says, her answer is clear: She fights for the people. She has characterized Mr. Trump as serving only himself.
“He tends to fight for himself, not for the American people,” Ms. Harris said in a radio interview broadcast on Monday.
She has warned that the consequences of that approach could be grave if Mr. Trump and his right-wing allies regain control of the federal government. She often highlights the proposals outlined in Project 2025, a conservative governing blueprint drawn up in part by officials from the first Trump administration.
While Mr. Trump has tried to distance himself from the document, polling suggests Ms. Harris’s approach may be working. Three-quarters of likely voters said they had heard about Project 2025, and of those, 63 percent said they opposed it, a New York Times/Siena College poll found this month.
The debate stage could give her a national platform to drive that message home.
One big question for Harris: How will she stand out from Biden?
Despite serving as vice president, Ms. Harris is trying to run as an agent of change. She is aided in that argument by the fact that Mr. Trump has dominated American politics for the last eight years.
But casting herself as a fresh face requires some distancing from Mr. Biden, her boss, who is widely unpopular with voters. Many say the country needs a new direction.
So far, Ms. Harris has barely broken with Mr. Biden on policy. When she has sought some daylight, as she did with her proposal regarding the capital-gains tax, it has been widely noticed. At the debate, she may feel the need to show voters how a Harris administration would look different from what they have experienced since early 2021.
Trump’s main potential lines of attack at the debate
Mr. Trump has pointed to Ms. Harris’s role as vice president to directly link her to Mr. Biden’s policies, particularly on immigration and the economy. And seizing on Ms. Harris’s need to define herself to voters, he has portrayed her as more liberal than her boss and too far to the left for moderate voters.
On immigration, calling Harris the ‘border czar’
Expect to hear Mr. Trump say the phrase “border czar” at some point during the debate, as he tries to pin the rise in border crossings during the Biden administration on Ms. Harris.
Ms. Harris was never formally given such a title, though Mr. Biden deputized her with addressing the root causes of migration from Latin America. But Mr. Trump has repeatedly used the phrase to try to hold her chiefly responsible for the presence in the country of millions of undocumented immigrants whom he broadly depicts as an invading force that is a drain on government resources.
Mr. Trump, who often tries to stoke fear about immigration, is likely to argue that an increase in violent crime has been fueled by migrants, pointing anecdotally to several high-profile crimes that the authorities say were committed by immigrants in the country illegally. Broader statistics do not bear out Mr. Trump’s assertion of a “migrant crime” wave.
Mr. Trump also may repeat his attacks on Ms. Harris for suggesting in 2019 that she believed people who had immigrated to the United States illegally should qualify for public health care.
More recently, Mr. Trump has argued that immigration is putting a strain on the economy. He has claimed that migrants are driving up housing costs and that they are taking jobs from Black and Hispanic Americans, groups whose support he is eager to chip away from Democrats.
Zeroing in on Harris’s liberal positions from the 2020 race
Almost immediately after Ms. Harris replaced Mr. Biden on the Democratic ticket, Mr. Trump began to depict her as more liberal than the president and out of touch with what most Americans wanted.
He has particularly pointed to a number of liberal policies that Ms. Harris supported during the 2020 presidential campaign, when she tacked left during her failed primary bid in 2019. The next summer, she embraced progressive ideas on criminal justice as protests over policing spread across the nation.
Mr. Trump frequently argues that Ms. Harris wants to “defund the police,” a slogan that encompasses a broad umbrella of proposals to overhaul policing. She never called for abolishing police departments, but she supported re-examining whether law enforcement budgets could be redirected to other social services that might help address the root causes of crime.
Mr. Trump also attacks Ms. Harris over her support for ending cash bail in her 2020 campaign, though he does not acknowledge that she proposed replacing it with other measures and misleadingly suggests she wanted a blanket release of all defendants.
Given the debate’s location in Pennsylvania, a large producer of natural gas, Mr. Trump is likely to bring up Ms. Harris’s past call for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the process of extracting gas or oil from underground shale.
Mr. Trump also often attacks Ms. Harris’s cosponsoring of the Green New Deal, a resolution backing expansive clean-energy programs to address climate change. Mr. Trump often refers to the resolution as the “Green New Scam,” and he argues that the inclusion of connected provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act — which Ms. Harris backed — increased government spending that spurred inflation.
And he may criticize Ms. Harris for saying in her 2020 campaign that she would eliminate private health insurance in favor of a single-payer health care program.
One big question for Trump: How personal might he get?
Mr. Trump’s advisers and allies have urged him to focus on policy in speeches and in this debate. But he has made clear that he does not wish to stick to an issues-focused script, even if personal attacks carry political risks.
During rallies, he has called Ms. Harris unintelligent and “lazy.” He questioned her racial identity and has mockingly invoked her past romantic relationship with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco. Online, he has reposted crass personal attacks against her.
Mr. Trump has never met Ms. Harris in person, and they have never debated before. His attitude and demeanor toward her will be closely watched, as will his discipline as he tries to resist the Trumpian urge to do what he so often does.
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