Greetings from the extremely air conditioned press filing center-slash-spin room in Philadelphia, where I just settled in after almost running straight into a very busy looking Marco Rubio at my hotel a few blocks away. (He must be here spinning for Donald Trump.)
I spent most of today checking in with Democrats inside of and close to Kamala Harris’s campaign to see how they’re feeling, what they expect, what they want to see, and what they’re nervous about. I got a lot of different answers, but one thing stuck out: basically all of them agreed that more pressure is on Harris tonight, if only because she’s the new character in the race, and the one voters are still interested in hearing more from. (The consensus: voters know exactly who Trump is, and don’t need any new information about him, thank you very much.)
Harris knows this, obviously. As I reported over the weekend, she hasn’t been prepping to deliver some sort of devastating knockout blow to Trump, but instead has been thinking about the best ways to present herself as representing a new political era. That’s probably going to mean talking plenty about Trump’s record, naturally — but just as much, if not more, about her vision for the economy.
Of course, we’ll see how this all goes to plan, or rather how quickly it veers into unexpected territory. As one Democratic pollster told me this afternoon, reliable research about debate audiences shows 70 percent of what matters to voters is the visual and the performance rather than the substance of what the candidates say.
So yes, Harris will be eager to let Trump be Trump, to put it mildly. Her campaign has been trolling Trump on the airwaves and with billboards about, uh, crowd size here in Philly. If he goes unhinged early, they’ll consider it a win. One top Democrat I talked to didn’t disagree that the pressure was on her, but said the bar was pretty low after Biden’s performance this summer. Instead, this person suggested, Harris’s job is just to be the normal adult on stage. Isn’t that what exhausted voters want?
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