Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and former Republican President Donald Trump are set to face off in what is expected to be a heated debate tonight, Tuesday (September 10) in the US. This event is considered a pivotal point in the election campaign and has the potential to “shape” or influence the outcome of the upcoming US presidential election on November 5.
Tens of millions of Americans are expected to watch the debate, which could be the only one between Mr Trump and Ms Harris before Election Day.
The momentous event comes eight weeks before Election Day but just days before early voting begins in some of the 50 states.
Polls across the United States show the race is tight, making it all the more important for both candidates to make their case for the few voters who are still undecided.
Therefore, right before the debate, VOA introduces some necessary information for readers and listeners to easily follow the event that the American media says will attract a large audience like a major world film event.
Things to know
Candidates Harris and Trump have never met or even spoken to each other on the phone, but on Tuesday night they will stand a short distance apart behind a podium at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia during a debate that begins at 9 p.m. ET, hosted by ABC News.
There will be no live audience and no opening statements, according to rules the network announced last week. The candidates will exchange views and debate each other while answering questions posed by ABC News hosts David Muir and Linsey Davis. The candidates will have less than two minutes to make their closing statements.
Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump will not be able to ask each other questions. Only the moderators will be allowed to ask questions.
The debate will last 90 minutes, with two commercial breaks. Candidates will have two minutes to answer questions, two minutes to respond, and an additional minute for follow-up and clarification. Harris’s campaign has now agreed to mute microphones when candidates are not speaking, according to CBS News.
Candidates are not allowed to bring pre-written notes or props onto the stage, and they will not receive topics or questions in advance.
Topics of abortion rights, immigration at the US-Mexico border, US crime rates and personal character are expected to be raised by ABC moderators during the debate.
VOA will broadcast the debate live on the VOA Vietnamese website and social media pages.
Promise to break records
According to USA Today, Mr. Biden’s mid-campaign departure and Ms. Harris’s entry into the race, combined with Mr. Trump’s showmanship, have given this year’s election campaign a “cinematic feel.” Add to that the real-life implications and changes, Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt, and both sides choosing running mates, and tonight’s event promises to be the most-watched presidential debate in U.S. history.
That title currently belongs to the 2016 debate between Mr Trump and Hillary Clinton, which attracted around 84 million viewers during their first debate.
The other most-watched debates with about 80 million viewers were the 1980 debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, and about 73 million people watched the first 2020 debate between Biden and Trump amid the pandemic, according to USA Today.
Efforts to “score points”
Between the two candidates, there is currently no clear leader in polls conducted by US media outlets in recent weeks.
The latest CNN poll shows Vice President Kamala Harris averaging 49% support while former President Donald Trump has 48%.
According to CNN, the numbers have not changed since the last update and are based on six recent national polls, all conducted after the Democratic National Convention in August. The polls, including the NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll of registered voters released this morning, show no clear leader in the race, with Harris at 49% to Trump at 48%. Five of the six polls included in the polling average show the margin between the two candidates at 1 point or less.
Meanwhile, in a USA TODAY/Suffolk poll released this month, about 90% of likely voters said they were “firmly decided,” about 8% said they might change their mind and about 1% said they were undecided.
So the two candidates are expected to make every effort to “score points” in tonight’s debate to win over these few undecided voters.
“Tuesday night was one of the most anticipated and consequential presidential debates of all time. Mr. Trump is a seasoned presidential debater but has a history of making controversial statements against his opponents on stage, which can distract from more important policy issues,” University of Michigan debate coach Aaron Kall told VOA.
“Harris just entered the race in July and is still being shaped by voters and the Trump campaign. She must prove that she can take on Trump’s first term and his recent actions,” Kall said. “Trump is a particularly effective puncher and can use the ‘debate-killing strategy’ if he feels unfairly maligned on stage.”
The two candidates “have to make voters comfortable with the idea that they will be president for the next four years and a regular presence on their television screens or in their living rooms,” the expert said.
Debate Strategy
Harris is intent on making the case that she is better able to advance the Democrats’ case against Trump than Biden, according to the AP. Trump, on the other hand, is trying to portray the vice president as a backward liberal while trying to win over voters who are skeptical that he should return to the White House.
The US news agency said that Mr. Trump, 78, has struggled to adapt to Ms. Harris, 59, the first woman, black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president. The former Republican president has sometimes invoked racial and gender stereotypes, frustrating allies who want Mr. Trump to focus on policy differences with Ms. Harris.
For her part, the vice president is expected to try to take some credit for the Biden administration’s accomplishments, while also accounting for the difficult times and explaining her shift away from the more liberal positions she has taken in the past.
Speaking of debate style, Tim Hogan, who directed Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s debate preparations in the 2020 Democratic primary, told the AP that Harris, a former California attorney general, would bring “the instincts of a prosecutor to the debate stage.”
“That’s a very powerful quality in this context: Having someone who knows how to throw a punch and knows how to deliver that punch,” Hogan said.
As for Mr. Trump, the former president plans to criticize Ms. Harris as too liberal, according to AP.
Mr. Trump and his campaign have highlighted the far-left positions Ms. Harris took during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign. He has been assisted in informal debate prep sessions by Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who criticized Ms. Harris during their primary debates, the AP added.
Harris, meanwhile, has sought to defend her shift away from liberal goals to a more moderate stance on shale oil and gas extraction, expanding Medicare for All and mandatory gun buyback programs — and even abandoning her position that plastic straws should be banned — as pragmatism, insisting that “her values remain the same.”
Former President Trump also argued that a Harris presidency would be a threat to the safety of the country, noting that Biden picked her to address the migrant influx as Republicans once again raised dire warnings about immigration, with illegal immigrants in the country a centerpiece of his campaign. Trump sought to portray a Harris presidency as a continuation of Biden’s still-unpopular administration, especially his economic record, as voters still feel the impact of inflation even as it has cooled in recent months.
Harris, in contrast, wants to argue that Trump is unstable and incompetent. The vice president, the Biden administration’s strongest advocate for abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, is expected to focus on criticizing Trump’s inconsistencies around women’s reproductive health care, including his statement that he would vote to preserve Florida’s six-week abortion ban in a statewide referendum this fall.
Harris will also try to present herself as a more stable person to lead the country and protect its alliances, as war rages in Ukraine more than two years after Russia’s invasion and Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza drags on with no end in sight.
She is also likely to warn that Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy, from his efforts in 2020 to overturn his presidential election defeat, which prompted angry supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, through comments he made as recently as last weekend. Mr. Trump has renewed his threat on social media that if he wins, he will jail “those who engage in unethical behavior,” including lawyers, political staff, donors, voters and election officials.
But debate experts also warn that Harris, who is still seen as a blank slate to voters compared to her Republican opponent, faces a bigger fallout if she makes a mistake that could halt the momentum her campaign has built over the past several weeks.
“The risk for her is that she is still unknown to many Americans, so she could have a weak performance that undermines the hope she has given Democrats,” Robert Rowland, a professor of media studies at the University of Kansas, told USA Today.
One thing that angered Democrats about the June 27 debate was that Biden missed the opportunity to make a coherent case against Trump on national television. So whether it was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic or the various lawsuits against Trump, Harris was expected by her supporters to enter Tuesday night’s debate with Trump’s political and personal record “on trial,” according to USA Today.
Harris’s campaign likes to frame the race as “prosecutors vs. criminals.” But, as USA Today points out, the debate stage is not a courtroom, and Trump, a former reality TV star, is a veteran of presidential debates, as this was his seventh debate, including his previous White House campaigns in 2016 and 2020.
(According to VOA)