Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are entering the most important stretch of the presidential campaign with their first-ever meeting in Tuesday night’s debate. But the way each candidate has readied themselves to meet this moment couldn’t be more different — a night-and-day dichotomy that emphasizes how different they are from one another.
Harris, an often risk-averse politician, focuses heavily on doing her homework. Trump, a freewheeling celebrity, blusters, exaggerates and fabricates his way through basically anything.
And the debate is coming at what could be a pivotal moment for both campaigns. After weeks of Democrats riding a sugar high built off the switch-out of their unpopular candidate following the last debate, Harris’ momentum seems to have stalled. In swing states, polling suggests a stalemate.
That reality has muddied the theories of which candidate needs to do more or perform better on Tuesday night.
”Nothing’s harder than doing some of these debates because you never can fully figure it all out,” Sen. Mark Warner, a friend to the VP, told NOTUS.
For Trump, the debate is an opportunity to contrast his presidency with Joe Biden’s while avoiding the personal attacks many Republicans believe could turn voters off.
For Harris, the debate is a chance to rise above the chaos her team believes Trump is certain to bring while speaking clearly to voters about who she is and what her priorities are.
“If she’s going to be commander in chief, she’s going to have to be able to take on this madman who says crazy things,” said one Democratic operative close to the campaign.
Trump has spent the last several weeks hopping between rallies or public appearances and his private golf club in Bedminster or Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He’s been preparing for what could be the most consequential debate of his career in a way only he really would.
Senior advisers, Rep. Matt Gaetz and occasionally former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard have been enlisted to ask Trump questions he could expect during the debate in what the campaign dubs “policy sessions,” according to two sources familiar with the matter.
This is because Trump doesn’t like the traditional debate-prep model.
One Trump campaign official said the sessions have been focused on policy and preparing Trump to hit Harris on her record as district attorney of San Francisco. The campaign would also like to make voters see Harris as the incumbent, hoping to benefit from voters broadly wanting change.
On top of that, the Trump campaign views the former president’s frequent interactions with the media as debate prep in and of itself, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign, told reporters this week.
“Every possible style of question President Trump is prepared for because that’s what he’s been doing this entire campaign,” Miller said.
As for how they’re preparing to take on Harris, Gaetz told reporters Trump is solely focused on tying her to her record as vice president.
But Trump is Trump: He will often go off message, sometimes to make incendiary comments about his opponents. That’s something his advisers and allies have been urging him to stay away from during the debate. But when caught off guard or pushed during debates, Trump has historically resorted to personal attacks.
Miller likened Trump’s debate tactics to a “Floyd Mayweather or Muhammad Ali,” saying nobody knows “what angle they’re going to come at you with. You don’t know what style of contrast that they’re going to deliver. There’s an amazing mix of humor and charm, as well as very hard-hitting facts of why we’re doing this.”
Republicans in Congress are urging the former president to stay on message.
“I hope he sticks to the issues and highlights her radical positions and failures as VP,” one GOP member told NOTUS. “If he does that, he will be the next president.”
Another Republican member shared the same sentiment, saying that Trump should be “laser-focused” on the current administration’s policies.
Harris has spent much of the last week trying to figure out exactly how to train her own laser.
Two people close to the vice president say her weekend prep sessions in Pittsburgh went well. Holed up in a hotel, in a room configured to mirror the debate set, Harris practiced sparring with Philippe Reines, who the campaign hired to play Trump. Reines, who played the part for Hillary Clinton in 2016, sported an oversized tie and suit.
Harris has completed more than one full-on 90-minute mock debate, the Democratic operative with knowledge of the sessions told NOTUS. And she hasn’t been overloaded with information, like many Democrats suspected Biden was after his catastrophic performance, allowing her to be more nimble in her attacks, a Harris ally told NOTUS.
The vice president’s campaign did not respond for comment when asked.
In the sessions, Harris has practiced inserting parts of her personal story and policy platform into her answers, understanding that this debate may be the first time people really get to know the vice president and that whatever they take away could have a lasting effect.
“She’s not good at telling her story,” said the operative. “It’s not natural for her.”
Harris’ debate camp was co-led by Karen Dunn, a 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.
The two aides have different styles. Dunn has a much more militaristic style of prep, focused on whether Harris won each individual exchange, whereas Kosoglu has focused more on how Harris’ responses help tell her own story and weave in the policy, balancing the prep out.
“Karen Dunn, her main person, is phenomenal; she was my debate-prep person from my Senate and my presidential days,” Sen. Cory Booker, a Harris friend and former 2020 opponent, told NOTUS.
Harris, Booker added, “has a tremendous strength, confidence, poise, but more than anything, just a really practical, pragmatic way of letting voters know that she’s capable.”
The vice president has also practiced how to respond to what her team expects to be “outrageous lies” from Trump without “stooping down to his level,” said the operative. Some of that prep has focused on how to combat personal attacks, particularly on her gender, the person said.
“There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go,” said the vice president in a radio interview taped last week but released Monday. “We should be prepared for the fact that he is not burdened by telling the truth.”
People close to Harris have noted that it’s been a while since she has been faced with blatant in-person disrespect. And so she’s practiced taking on critiques without appearing dismissive or as if confronting Trump is beneath her.
“The thing about Kamala, if you call the play, she’s going to execute,” said the operative. “The problem then becomes whether the aides calling the play are right or wrong.”
The Harris campaign’s strategy had to shift after they effectively lost the muted-mics debate with the Trump campaign.
“She was literally planning on interrupting him when he lied,” said the ally. “So it’s not a big deal, but it was a part of the strategy.”
Instead, Harris will have to be able to call back to the lie in her own response, they said, before launching into her own vision for the future.
Asked what a Harris win would look like, people who NOTUS spoke with said it would look like Harris staying above the fray while also successfully making her case.
“Her not getting in the mud,” said one person close to the VP. “Making him look small, and at the end of the day, him being petty and her posing solutions, whether or not you agree with them or not, for the American people.”
Then, as ever, there’s the question of what will happen when they finish talking.
Some of Harris’ allies question the optics of a handshake — as the vice president is nearly a foot shorter than Trump.
“Oh, I said, I don’t like that imagery of her being too close to him, because she’s not tall and he kind of towers over her,” said the same ally.
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Jasmine Wright and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz contributed reporting.