Harris Will Defeat Herself During Debate

ABC News has now published the final rules for Tuesday night’s presidential debate, and they are essentially identical to those which governed the June 27 encounter between former President Trump and President Biden on CNN. They contain nothing that should worry anyone who can stand on stage for 90 minutes and provide coherent two-minute answers to questions involving the major issues of the day. Yet Vice President Harris will be on the stage with Trump Tuesday night precisely because her boss couldn’t get over that low bar. Nor is it obvious that she can clear it either.

The Harris campaign is well aware of her rhetorical limitations, of course. Consequently, after insisting that Trump was somehow obligated to debate her on Tuesday because he had agreed to face off with Biden that night, the Harris team promptly attempted to change the rules. Specifically, they began pressuring ABC to drop the “muted microphone” precondition originally put in place pursuant to a demand made by the Biden campaign. This rule was meant to protect the President, but it actually worked in Trump’s favor by forcing him to remain quiet while Biden imploded. According to a report in Politico, however, the Harris campaign contended that this rule unfairly constrains her:

Harris and her team — holed up in Pittsburgh for a multi-day debate camp — wanted unmuted microphones so that the vice president could lean on her prosecutorial background, confronting the former president in the same way she laced into some of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet members during Senate hearings … Harris campaign officials argued that she will be “handcuffed” by the rules, which were negotiated by President Joe Biden’s team earlier this summer.

The claim that Harris wanted to “lean on her prosecutorial background” in the debate is nonsense. It would violate several debate rules, including this stipulation: “Candidates will not be permitted to ask questions of each other.” A more plausible explanation for their objection to the muted microphone rule involves their fear of what she might say if permitted to speak extemporaneously for even a couple of minutes. They are afraid she might revert to factory settings and start churning out word salads. The Harris campaign wants Trump to interrupt her before she says something that permanently damages her campaign.

Is the Harris Campaign Losing Steam?

The campaign is already losing steam. Her razor thin lead in the national polls is evaporating according to the RCP average, having declined from 1.9 to 1.4 points in a single week. Likewise, not one of her microscopic leads in the battleground states exceeds the margin of error. This is particularly deadly in Pennsylvania, a state that is a must win for her in the Electoral College. RCP shows her tied with Trump in the Keystone State. And it gets worse. According to statistician Nate Silver, the probability of Harris winning the electoral college has declined to 36 percent. Silver writes that this is largely due to the NYT/Siena survey:

A new New York Times/Siena College poll this morning contained excellent news for Donald Trump, showing him 1 point ahead in a head-to-head matchup against Kamala Harris and 2 points up with minor candidates included. This is one of our highest-rated pollsters, so it has a fair amount of influence on the numbers … The good news for Harris is that there’s a debate on Tuesday, and if she turns in a strong performance, nobody is going to care so much about the Times poll.

This obviously brings us back to Harris’ ability to turn in a “strong performance” against Trump — or anyone else for that matter. In 2020, you will recall, a single exchange with then-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard essentially destroyed the Harris presidential campaign.

She will no doubt have some help from the ABC moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, but the format of the debate will force her to do something she has been avoiding since she was elevated to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket. Tuesday night she will need to coherently answer a lot of questions on live television under the eye of millions of real voters.

It really doesn’t matter if she gets softball questions or serious policy questions. She has demonstrated over and over again that she can’t handle either without drifting off into the rhetorical ether like a lost balloon from a child’s birthday party.

Moreover, it’s likely that the five days of debate camp during which her campaign staff and outside consultants will attempt to teach her to communicate clearly will actually achieve the opposite result. For readers old enough to remember the Reagan years, a similar process caused “the great communicator” to crash and burn during his first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984.

Reagan recovered from that debacle in the following debate because he had a real gift for public speaking and his most trusted advisors insisted that his coaches “let Reagan be Reagan.” It worked and he later won the 1984 election by a stupendous popular and Electoral College landslide.

In the case of our VP, this would never work. Why not? Because there is no authentic Kamala Harris to unleash. Like the lost balloon from the birthday party, she is empty inside and the lighter than air gas that has kept her aloft is escaping. Will there be enough left get her over the rhetorical bar that balked President Biden? It isn’t likely.

READ MORE from David Catron:

Hiding Candidates Is Now SOP for Democrats

Harris Will Lose Unless Her Polls Rise Sharply

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