The upcoming debate is a crucial test for Harris

Carl P. Leubsdorf, Tribune News Service

Like Joe Biden last June, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is the candidate with the most at stake when the two general election nominees appear together next week for the first time in the 2024 presidential race. Unlike Biden, Harris can come out ahead — but only if she keeps her cool and her focus against the onslaught of rival Donald Trump’s inevitable diatribes, distortions and distractions in their September 10 encounter. Harris and Trump are scheduled to meet on ABC just 75 days after Biden’s raspy-voice, semi-coherent performance undermined his strategists’ hopes the debate would jump start his re-election candidacy and overcome Trump’s small but persistent lead. Instead, his performance so diminished his prospects that it set off a post-debate Democratic panic that forced the 81-year-old president to abandon his re-election bid, opening the way for his 59-year-old vice president to assume his place at the head of the party’s ticket.

She has done so in such a sure-footed and dramatic manner that, in just more than a month, she has pulled slightly ahead of Trump in both national polls and enough swing states to have a reasonable chance of victory. But she remains a lesser-known figure than the former president, who is leading the Republican ticket for the third straight election. Anecdotal evidence from interviews and some focus groups indicates some potential Harris supporters are hesitant to back her until they know more about what she would do as president. In a sense, the vice president’s situation resembles those faced in the past by promising candidates about whom many voters were uncertain before their initial debates against better known foes — notably John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

When Kennedy met Richard Nixon in the first ever television presidential debate in 1960, the 43-year-old Massachusetts senator was less well known than his Republican rival, who had become a familiar figure during his eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. In his opening statement of an encounter that was supposed to be confined to domestic issues, Kennedy invoked the country’s Cold War competition against the Soviet Union, cited statistics on how the US was lagging in producing engineers and scientists and concluded with his campaign theme that “It’s time America started moving again.” He seemed more vigorous than Nixon, who looked pale after a recent bout of illness and a poor makeup job, and he set a tone his rival never matched. Though analysts rated their four encounters as roughly even, that opening statement gave Kennedy the momentum that narrowly propelled him into the presidency.

In 1980, Reagan and President Jimmy Carter held their only debate a week before the election. Carter had consistently held a narrow lead in the polls, though the interviews many of us conducted with voters that year indicated the former California governor was gaining among the president’s 1976 voters. Still, the burden was on Reagan to counter the contentions from the Carter campaign that his hardline views might lead to war. He succeeded with humorous rejoinders and a dynamite closing line in which he urged voters to ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Voters answered that with a resounding “No.” In the closing week, Reagan overcame Carter’s lead and wound up winning by 10 points. In 2008, Obama, though a relatively new national figure, was the favorite as retiring two-term Republican incumbent George W. Bush struggled to manage an unsuccessful foreign war in Iraq and a domestic financial crisis. But the 47-year-old Democrat had been a senator for less than four years, and his prospects seemed shaky when his Republican rival, Arizona Sen. John McCain, took the lead after the conventions. But Obama looked more surefooted in his approach to the economic crisis, and his strong first debate performance put him ahead to stay. In all three cases, the lesser-known candidate from the non-incumbent party won. By contrast, a poor first debate killed the 1988 chances of Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis against Vice President George Bush.

Harris’ situation is different because she is the lesser-known nominee of the incumbent party. But because Trump has been so dominant a political figure in recent years, the campaign is as much about him as about her. She needs to convince voters she would be a steady hand at the nation’s tiller and remind them why they sent Trump packing after just four years. In Trump, she is facing an experienced debate performer. The former president’s June clash with Biden was his sixth general election debate over the last three campaigns, and he participated in a dozen GOP encounters in 2016 though he avoided his Republican primary rivals this year.

But though this will be her first general election presidential debate, Harris is no novice. Debates played an important role in her two elections as California’s attorney general, and she gained attention in challenging Biden in a 2020 Democratic primary debate. She had a strong performance in the 2020 vice-presidential debate with incumbent Republican Mike Pence. In a possible preview of how she might react to Trump, she stopped Pence at one point from interrupting her by declaring, “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.” The way she handles Trump — and the resulting impression on the small number of uncertain voters – will likely go a long way toward determining if Harris can prevent the former president’s return to the Oval Office.