Face-to-face for the first time less than two months before the election, Republicans and Democrats will have 90 minutes to confront and convince voters in an unpredictable election.
When Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump take the stand at the ABC News studio in Philadelphia this Tuesday (9/10) at 9 p.m. local time, it will be the first time the two have met in person as candidates for the presidency of the United States.
Armed only with pen, paper and water, both will be the protagonists of one of the most anticipated events of the 2024 election, the second televised debate of the campaign. Considering that the first of the clashes gave a boost to President Joe Biden’s re-election bid, some political analysts already see the current election season as the most affected by televised debates since the 1960 election.
That dispute, 64 years ago, went down in history not only because it inaugurated the genre of televised political battles in the United States.
It was the on-camera showdown between a jovial, smiling, and made-up John F. Kennedy and then-seasoned Vice President Richard Nixon — who showed up flu-ridden, unshaven, and staring down the camera line — that defined the tight race in the Democrat’s favor.
“By God, in 1960 I didn’t really understand (what was at stake). I hated doing television shows. And I was totally wrong,” Nixon acknowledged years later, when it was already common knowledge among Republicans that his unpreparedness was his telecast. The clash with Kennedy, whose father was a Hollywood producer, cost them the election.
“It is reasonable to say that this is an election comparable to the 1960s in terms of the importance of the debates. There we had a difference of one hundred thousand votes in favor of the winner (Kennedy won with 112,827 votes). Now, no one expects a difference of more than a few tens of thousands of votes, in an already very polarized situation and with a candidate who entered the game very late, and precisely because of the poor performance of the current president in a debate,” Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan, told BBC News Brasil.
Super Bowl of Politics
More than 51 million people — or one in six people — watched live in June as Biden became the first president in 56 years not to run for reelection in the United States. He hesitated, showed weakness, and struggled to articulate ideas and answer questions in his confrontation with Trump.
Her performance has led campaign donors and Democratic supporters to lobby hard for Biden to drop out of the race, which ended in late July. And while the party was relatively quick to rally behind Kamala Harris, she has just 107 days to convince voters she deserves to occupy the White House, the shortest campaign in recent American history.
“The established formula for getting votes is through personal engagement, one-on-one conversation, candidates and volunteers literally knocking on voters’ doors,” Michael Cornfield, a professor of political campaign strategy at George Washington University, told BBC News Brasil.
While he notes that debates historically tend to have “minimal” impact on winning new votes, Cornfield acknowledges that the Harris-Trump event is “unprecedented” precisely because of the Democrat’s limited travel schedule and because it is her first opportunity, given a bipartisan audience, to “introduce yourself to voters, formulate your message and try to increase your favor with them.”
For this reason, the Democratic candidate has renounced changing the debate rules already established between Trump and Biden and with which she did not agree, such as keeping the microphone off when the opponent speaks. Trump’s team has even suggested that she might withdraw from the fight if there were changes to the rules, something that the Harris campaign has said it wants to avoid.
The candidate used the slogan “Say it to his face,” in the original, when responding to Trump’s comments or criticisms of her directed at others, as a way to provoke him into participating in all three debates scheduled through November 5.
“With Election Day now less than 60 days away, some swing states have already started voting early, and there are no other major events that will draw the kind of audiences that the Super Bowl has. So this debate has become absolutely crucial for Kamala to explain what she’s up to. I wouldn’t be surprised if this debate has a record audience,” Kall says.
Lawyer x Expert Speaker
While political anecdotes suggest that a good performance in a televised debate is unlikely to win a wave of votes, the examples of Nixon in 1960 and Biden in 2024 show that there are many risks involved.
Election polls conducted after Trump and Biden’s last showdown in June, and before the president’s withdrawal, showed the Republican holding a 5-point advantage in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. “Harris and Trump have a lot to lose if they don’t perform well,” Cornfield says.
He says the debate’s effects will last much longer than the 90-minute program. “The cuts reverberate for days or weeks on social media and solidify votes or weaken candidates. So you see the two campaigns frantically trying to discuss the rules and define the issues and questioners, to ensure good post-debate material,” Cornfield says.
However, Harris’ campaign is banking heavily on programs, and not just because the candidate’s time is so limited. The message among Democrats is that the exchange of ideas is in her DNA, because of her career path. “Harris was a prosecutor, a prosecutor in the state of California. The debate stage is her natural arena, that’s what she did when she took defendants to court,” Thomas Whalen, a political analyst at Boston University, told BBC News Brasil.
In the United States, positions such as prosecutor or sheriff are filled by vote. In 2010, Harris won the district attorney position, which would catapult her into a Democratic star, by a margin of 0.85% of the vote.
Not a frontrunner in the election, according to the New York Times, which recently interviewed people involved in that dispute, Harris sealed her victory by responding with irony — and her trademark laugh — to her opponent’s claim that she intended to bankroll her lawyer’s salary with a public pension. “You deserve it,” she snapped. The excerpt of the debate, which was not televised, went viral. And Harris won. A repeat of that is exactly what Democrats want.
Harris, however, will be taking the stage of a presidential debate for the first time against an extremely experienced opponent. In addition to having been a television host, Trump will be holding a debate for the seventh time: a record in recent American politics. And he will have to deal with the unpopular aspects of the administration of which he is vice president: inflation and the immigration crisis at the border with Mexico are the Democrat’s flanks.
“It also remains to be seen how he will deal with an opponent who lies and insults,” Whalen says. Among other things, Trump has said that he has a “crazy” and “insane” laugh and suggested that he owed his success early in his political career to a romantic relationship.
And, according to BBC Verify, Trump made a series of false statements against Biden in the last debate: he said the Democrat was presiding over the largest deficit in history (when the worst figures came from the Trump administration), accused him of being behind the Republican’s criminal conviction in New York (a completely separate court from the federal government), and said he wanted to quadruple taxes in the country (something Biden has neither done nor promised).
To a lesser extent, Biden has also falsified reality or provided incorrect data. Kall says the worst-case scenario for Harris would be losing patience with the Republican. “She will have the opportunity to fact-check Trump, but she has to avoid giving the electorate an image of him as aggressive and out of control,” he says.
Trump now faces the challenge of upgrading his arsenal against a new opponent, after spending much of the past few months crafting a message to defeat Biden. Long before the televised debate revealed the Democratic nominee’s weakness, Trump had nicknamed him “Sleepy Joe,” a reference to his lack of energy due to his advanced age (81), and his Republican allies have been exhaustively sharing clips on social media of Biden stumbling, acting disjointed or making gaffes, suggesting he was showing signs of dementia.
At 78 and with Biden out of the running, it is Trump who now faces questions about his physical and intellectual fitness. At an event in New York last week, answering questions about how to make daycare more affordable and accessible for American families, Trump gave a lengthy explanation that was deemed “at best incomprehensible” by the host questioning him on stage. And images of Trump appearing to sleep during the Republican convention have gone viral, with his campaign claiming that it was during prayer.
“It also remains to be seen whether he will be disciplined, structuring a message around his policies that appeals to the electorate, or whether he will be carried away by jokes and negative characterizations of political enemies, which tend to scare undecided voters,” Kall says.
Source: Terra
Rose James is a Gossipify movie and series reviewer known for her in-depth analysis and unique perspective on the latest releases. With a background in film studies, she provides engaging and informative reviews, and keeps readers up to date with industry trends and emerging talents.
