Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to head to her very own debate camp on Thursday, three sources familiar with the plans told NOTUS. She and her team will hunker down in Pennsylvania, the state where her debate with former President Donald Trump will take place next Tuesday, set to fully focus on preparing for prime time.
In conversations with nearly a dozen people involved with or aware of the preparations, a set of goals emerged for the next week. The campaign is planning to tune out as much of the outside noise as possible to lock her in, aware of Harris’ relative rust as a debater and her tendency to overprepare and fixate on the details.
The camp is co-led by Karen Dunn, a well-known D.C. lawyer who helped Harris prepare for her 2020 debate, and Rohini Kosoglu, Harris’ longtime policy guru who has been with Harris off and on since her Senate days. Other influential policy and informal advisers include Minyon Moore, fresh off a successful role chairing the Democratic National Convention; Brian Nelson, another longtime aide who now helps lead the campaign’s domestic policy shop; Tony West, her brother-in-law; Sheila Nix, her campaign chief of staff; campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond; and Sean Clegg, a strategist from California who has worked on multiple Harris campaigns.
While people familiar with planning caution that plans can still change, as the Biden administration is in what they hope to be the last stretch of a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that might require Harris’ presence in the Situation Room, the current intention is for Harris to join her tight group of formal and informal advisers for extensive prep after a campaign event in New Hampshire.
“It’s smart to go where you’re going to be, feel in the zone,” said a Democratic operative who has previously prepared candidates for debates.
Harris has been preparing for some form of a debate for months, but Thursday marks a new step in her process, tuning out the noise of the campaign trail to focus on thwarting her rival.
One person familiar with the process told NOTUS that in her downtime, Harris has been pouring over briefing books and other reading material, including in between campaign stops.
“That’s not really new for her,” the person said, acknowledging that Harris has always done her homework to heavily prepare for big moments — even walking the line of overpreparetion. And she’s once again using notecards as part of her prep, a second person familiar with the preparations told NOTUS, a habit they believe she picked up during her law school days.
In D.C., sessions have taken place at her alma mater, Howard University, with Philippe Reines, who played Trump during Hillary Clinton’s prep sessions in 2016. But come Thursday, akin to Biden’s weeklong session at Camp David back in June, the focus will be on full-out mock debates, one person said. But they’ll start earlier than Biden’s, a different person familiar with the plans joked, with fewer naps.
The benefit of a camp-style environment is that Harris will be able to do back-to-back 90-minute mock sessions with no interruptions, allowing the vice president the chance to reacquaint herself with the drudge of a real debate.
“It creates muscle memory,” said the operative. “You can’t always anticipate the questions, but you can pretty much anticipate topics.”
At times, according to two people familiar with the process, strategy sessions have careened sideways when the vice president focused too narrowly on minute details, effectively derailing the sessions.
“It’s how she processes,” said a close friend of the vice president. “She really does deal much more in a fact-based universe than most Democratic candidates.”
Another source familiar with prep details told NOTUS that part of the focus on mock debates has been to eliminate the need for policy discussions during the sessions themselves, instead of working that out ahead of time.
“A way that they’re trying to work through those sorts of challenges of the past is to change the process, right?” one source said. “Not sitting down, talking through every single policy issue, [but] giving her the reading work to do ahead of time, making sure that her books are prepared and organized. And then every session is, let’s come in … and go through the mock debate.”
Allies say Harris has had to defend her ideas inside the White House over the last three years, preparing her in some ways for this moment. But Harris is, for all intents and purposes, an out-of-practice debater with people who aren’t her colleagues. Next week’s debate will come just a month shy of four years since she debated Vice President Mike Pence in Utah. For that, aides holed up in a hotel in Salt Lake City days before the debate, as she used index cards to work through talking points — including the now-famous “I’m speaking” line, which one person involved in the session said was a crowdsourced suggestion.
Trump will enter the debate hall having just gone through a presidential debate two months ago.
In a public memo, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said Trump would be a “formidable opponent” in the debate.
But aides believe Harris will be able to lean on her prosecutorial experience.
“It’s like putting a trial lawyer in a big case in a courtroom before you try it,” said her friend. “I’m very excited she’s doing it, but I’m not surprised she’s taking all of this incredibly seriously.”
Multiple people said the debate prep sessions have many goals.
First, it’s been about finding the right language for Harris to go on the offensive — articulating her forward-looking “opportunity economy” and taking what could be her last chance to reach tens of millions of Americans in one sitting to explain how she would act as president.
A second goal has been to prepare Harris to shut down potential inaccuracies and outright lies they believe Trump will deploy in real time on vulnerable issues like inflation or the economy. Harris’ team does not want to rely on the ABC moderators to fact-check for her, and they want her to be prepared in a way that Biden was not.
The underlying goal though, two people told NOTUS, is to prepare Harris for confrontation — and have her ready to blunt Trump’s attacks that they expect will become personal. “Temperament. Temperament. Temperament,” said one person, describing the training to help Harris remain calm and appear presidential.
“It is a demonstration of strength and fortitude, because Trump is going to try her,” said another person. “What she wants to be able to do is to continue to draw the contrast right between her vision of the future and his living in the past.”
A third person put it more bluntly: “There won’t be no walking behind her,” referencing the free-moving and tense second 2016 Clinton-Trump debate.
Others noted that it’s been a while since Harris has been faced with blatant in-person disrespect, particularly from somebody across the aisle.
“The only concern is the unknown,” said one source. Harris has never engaged with Trump directly, they have never met nor spoken and they have been in the same room once, for his State of the Union address.
As Harris is preparing for the debate, other parts of her campaign will focus on amplifying her message on the airwaves, including lining up surrogates to set expectations in the hours before and spin the debate in the hours after.
One point of contention among Harris’ allies has been how much weight they should give the role of Tulsi Gabbard, Harris’ former rival in the 2020 presidential primary who was the only contender to land major blows against her in a debate. Gabbard has now endorsed Trump and is helping him prepare for the debate.
“I think Kamala Harris has a lot of experience. She is not to be underestimated,” Gabbard said in an interview on CNN.
For some, Gabbard’s presence is comforting, as it signals the type of attacks Trump may launch.
“It’s clear they’ll go for the jugular,” one person told NOTUS. Gabbard’s 2019 attack against Harris on her criminal justice record shook the campaign at the time and mystified Harris’ allies and critics who couldn’t understand why Harris wasn’t better prepared to defend herself.
“We had not done a good job having her prepared to take that punch,” said one person who worked with Harris in 2019. “Tulsi’s effectiveness in 2019 was a lack of preparation on our side … I think there are very few new blind spots now.”
Harris herself views it as an “isolated event,” someone close to her said. And not one likely to be repeated.
“I don’t see her as a big problem,” a second person said of Gabbard. “I think that Kamala is a very different person. … You’re not fighting for a sound bite with nine people onstage.”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.