The most important appearance of Kamala Harris’s political life will take place on Tuesday in the city known as the Birthplace of America.
The Democratic presidential candidate’s hotly-anticipated ABC televised debate with Donald Trump in Philadelphia (2am Irish time on Wednesday) coincides with a new poll placing a bitter election campaign as a virtual dead heat. After the euphoric summer gusts created by Harris’s late entry into the election campaign, when she replaced Joe Biden in July, the terse numbers reflect a division which, deep down, every American understands. All the signs point to an election that will be bitterly fought and claustrophobically close, likely defined by tiny margins in the battleground states.
In a radio interview broadcast on Monday, Harris anticipated what she expects from her rival when they meet face to face – for the very first time – on the debate stage in Philadelphia.
“He plays from this really old and tired playbook, right, where there’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go,” Harris said on the Rickey Smiley radio show.
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“And we should be prepared for that. We should be prepared for the fact that he is not burdened by telling the truth.”
Campaigning in Wisconsin over the weekend, Trump railed against the current administration, telling his crowd that the country is “run by stupid, stupid people” and took to social media to issue a threat to serve up jail time to election officials or lawyers deemed to have participated in “rampant cheating and skulduggery” comparable to the 2020 election.
That intimidating threat illustrates the choice Harris will have to make in how she responds to Trump. She is facing a politician who shape-shifts according to perspective: an unconscionable convicted felon to a considerable portion of the electorate; a crusading saviour who miraculously eluded an assassin’s bullet to his loyal Maga-Republican base. By and large, minds are made up about Trump. For Harris, persuading the undecided minority that she is the best choice for the United States is the most important element of the 90-minute debate.
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Unlike Biden, who spoke of a second Trump presidency in terms a diabolical threat to democracy itself, Harris has sought to disempower the Republican candidate through laughter. It was the consistent theme of the Democratic convention in Chicago. But summer is over. The late August poll which suggested Harris had opened up a six-point lead is a distant memory. Despite everything – even the announcement that prominent Republicans like former vice-president Dick Cheney will vote for Harris rather than see Trump return to office – the race remains perilously close. The most telling statistic in that New York Times/Siena poll is that 25 per cent of respondents see Harris as a candidate representing a major change from Biden, while 53 per cent see Trump as that.
Through an extraordinary succession of circumstances, it has fallen to Harris, the tenacious prosecutor and much maligned vice-president, to argue the Democratic case that those changes envisioned by Trump would wreak havoc on the US.
