Donald Trump has agreed to a presidential debate with Kamala Harris on September 10th in Philadelphia.
It will be highly-charged and highly-viewed, especially after a poor debate performance by Joe Biden in June resulted in his eventual withdrawal from the race.
Trump is the -140 favorite to win this debate, while Harris has +120 odds to pull the slight upset, according to our oddsmakers. Results from the Ipsos post-debate poll will determine the winner.
Virginia Tech political expert Dr. Cayce Myers has extensive experience analyzing debates, and our Kyle Odegard recently caught up with the esteemed professor for insight heading into the highly-anticipated showdown.
Kyle Odegard: How big of a deal are these potential debates, especially in the wake of Joe Biden’s struggles in the last one? Will there be a lot of attention knowing it’s Kamala Harris’ first time debating Trump?
Dr. Cayce Myers: “There is going to be a lot of attention on it. The impact of these debates varies, in terms of their results on elections. Obviously, the Biden-Trump debate is one of the best examples of how a debate can change a campaign. He had to get out as a candidate because of it, because donors demanded that he be replaced.
In the Harris-Trump debate, what we’re going to see is the first time those two are interacting. So it’s going to be a highly-charged event, a lot of viewership. But I don’t know if the debate itself is going to have an outsized result one way or another. I think that now the voters are coalesced either in the Trump or the Harris camp.
Whether or not they are going to impact voters to change their vote seems unlikely to me, simply because this campaign has candidates that everybody is very well-acquainted with. And there has been such an amount of news publicity around these campaigns that it seems unusual to me that a debate would change the nature of who wins and who loses.”
KO: You have a lot of expertise and background in this space. Can you explain the styles of both candidates, and how you think the debate will flow.
CM: “The Harris campaign is making their theme around new transition. Harris is going to talk about the newness of the passing of the torch to her, and how it represents a new direction forward for the country. It’s kind of unusual considering that she really is the incumbent. But she’s running as if she’s not an incumbent.
She’s also going to try to make this debate around the negatives or the unfavorables around Donald Trump. Specifically, you’re going to hear things about his tone, you’re going to hear things around January 6, you’re going to hear things about some of the statements he’s made about women, and you’re going to hear a lot about abortion, because that is an issue that had a lot of resonance for Democrats in 2022.
What Trump is going to do, more than likely, is a combination of tactics. One is that in 2020, Harris ran to the left of Joe Biden. So I think there will be a lot of commentary about the positions she took in 2020 that were very liberal, which could hurt her in swing states. In Pennsylvania, specifically, her comments about fracking.
You’re also going to hear a lot about her being tied to Joe Biden, and being a second Biden term. Even though it’s a different person, she was a part of the Biden team, and Biden has said she made these decisions with him. And Biden’s unfavorables are quite high.
Trump has traditionally attacked candidates personally, so I would expect some personal attacks on her. What those may be remains to be seen, but we’ve heard a little bit about that already. Sometimes those personal attacks kind of fall flat. For some voters it falls flat, but it does appeal to his base. That would be the strategy I’d expect in these debates.”
KO: Trump seems very unique in the way he will try to get zingers in, maybe go a little bit more personal. Do you think that stuff will matter, what he says and how she responds to it? Is this a unique challenge because of the way he debates?
CM: “Yes, it’s a unique challenge. There’s an old saying about, ‘Don’t debate a non-debater.’ Trump is a non-debater. He’s not going to adhere to the formalized rules of engagement.
Now, in that Biden debate, Biden was so bad that Trump didn’t have to do much, other than just sort of be there and answer the questions. In this Harris debate, she’s not going to be a weak debater. But there is this sense that Trump is highly unpredictable, and he also has a lot of instinctual decision-making that he does during a debate.
He can get resonance and then draw blood. One of the things that Harris may do is try to get under Trump’s skin and get off topic by rattling him with some type of comment, some type of insult that he then overreacts too, getting him off message. That may be part of their debate strategy as well, to counter Trump by doing something they know unnerves him as a candidate or a debater.
Some of these one-liners matter a lot, particularly on social, because they go viral. And that’s what everybody remembers about the debates: these one or two sentences, or even one- or two-word soundbites that get played over and over again.”
KO: Do you think debating is a strength of Harris’? How would you handicap how she does in debates?
CM: “She did not do very well against Biden in the debates in the primaries. She did OK against Mike Pence in 2020.
I would not classify Kamala Harris as a strong debater. She is someone who is going to have a very different kind of atmosphere in 2024, a different kind of opponent. It’s interesting. Harris has emerged as the Democratic nominee when just a year ago, there were serious discussions that Harris was going to be replaced as the vice-presidential pick.
Part of that was the perception of her as a candidate, not being a very strong candidate. So I don’t know what’s going to happen in terms of her debate prep, but she’s going to have to come in with a strategy to debate Trump, who is going to be an outsized personality on that stage, and someone who is unpredictable.”
KO: Do you think it’s fair to say that Trump will be the favorite to win the debate? And if so, even if Harris doesn’t win this debate and can kind of hang in there, would that be the chief goal, in your mind, for the Democrats?
CM: “I don’t know that I’d be able to say that this person is definitely going to win, or this person is definitely going to lose the debate. I think it’s a situation where the stakes are almost higher for Trump. Harris has pulled away from him in the polls, and even though it’s within the margin for error, she’s pulled ahead in these polls and doing quite well.
So I think it’s up to Harris to maintain the momentum without getting derailed by Trump. For Trump, what his goal in the debate is going to be, to try to regain some of the momentum he had before.
I would be surprised if there was a clear winner or a clear loser in the debate, simply because it’s going to be seen through the lens of partisanship by the people that are doing the analysis.
Now in the Biden-Trump debate, there was a clear loser, and it was Joe Biden. And we’ve had that in the past, with Reagan vs. Carter in 1980, Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960. Those were clear winners and losers, but a lot of these debates are more of a draw.
I think Harris’ goal will be to not be derailed by Trump, and not to say anything that provides fodder for criticisms and attack ads that would be then replayed. And for Trump, one of the things the Harris campaign will look for is comments they can try to repackage as negatives, or try to fact-check and show that he is lying.”
