The debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in June changed the face of the American presidential election. Will the same be true for Tuesday’s confrontation between Kamala Harris and the former president, one of the most anticipated meetings of this extraordinary campaign?
The Democratic vice president and the Republican candidate have never spoken to each other. They will face off starting at 9 p.m. local time in front of millions of viewers but without an audience, without notes, for 90 minutes.
Both have agreed to strict rules designed to prevent untimely interruptions or direct calls.
Their debate, the first and possibly last before the November 5 election, will be moderated by two ABC journalists and will take place in Philadelphia, in the crucial northeastern state of Pennsylvania.
The Republican camp is approaching the evening with a flourish: “It’s impossible to prepare (to debate) with President Trump. […] “Imagine a boxer trying to prepare to fight Floyd Mayweather or Muhammad Ali,” Jason Miller, one of his close advisers, said Monday.
“No limits”
The Democrat warned in a radio interview broadcast Monday that her rival had “no limits in baseness and we have to be prepared for that.” Harris also said she expected “a lot of lies.”
Since the first televised debate in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, these duels had allowed one candidate or the other to distinguish himself with a salient sally or a striking retort, but they had never really shaken up the campaign.
Until June 27, 2024. That day on CNN, Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate already weakened by incessant questions about his age, lost his footing live on air against Donald Trump.
The poor performance led to the historic withdrawal of her candidacy on July 21. Since then, Kamala Harris has revived Democratic hopes.
Where the octogenarian president was left behind, she is neck and neck with Donald Trump in the polls, including in the “swing states”, those six or seven pivotal states that carry so much weight in the American system of indirect elections.
Age of Trump
Many Americans — 28 percent of voters who plan to go to the polls, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll — say they have trouble understanding the 59-year-old vice president, her personality, her ideas, her platform.
The Democrat’s first goal on Tuesday evening will therefore be to make a good impression on these undecided voters.
Donald Trump has no need to make himself known, neither to his extremely loyal supporters nor to his equally fervent detractors. The 78-year-old billionaire, surrounded by legal proceedings, is taking part in his seventh presidential debate on Tuesday.
The Republican, the target of an assassination attempt on July 13, will try to accuse his rival of all the failures, in his opinion, of Joe Biden’s mandate, particularly in terms of immigration and inflation.
And in a complete reversal from the June debate against the American president, this time it will be Donald Trump’s cognitive abilities that will be scrutinized, facing an opponent almost twenty years younger.