By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) – In the 2016 presidential debates, Republican candidate Donald Trump loomed over Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, called her a “nasty woman” and said she didn’t have the “look” or “stamina” to serve as commander-in-chief.
Tuesday’s nationally televised debate, the first face-to-face meeting between Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, could be a critical juncture in a race that is essentially tied eight weeks before the Nov. 5 election.
Trump has already leveled a series of racist and sexist attacks against Harris. The former president has falsely claimed Harris, who is Black and South Asian, only recently “became a Black person.” He reposted a vulgar online message suggesting she used sex to advance her career. He fired off insults that play into tropes about women and Black people, calling her “weak,” “dumb as a rock” and “lazy.”
Deploying those attacks in front of tens of millions of viewers – and Harris’ response – would carry risks for both candidates, according to interviews with eight pollsters, debate and political experts, and Black activists. More than 51 million TV viewers tuned in to watch the debate between Trump and Democratic President Joe Biden in June.
Trump’s insults might alienate key voter groups, including women, Black voters and moderates, according to John Geer, a professor at Vanderbilt University and an expert on presidential politics. “They’re just going to get turned off by that kind of rhetoric,” he said.
But Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist, said the persistent tightness of the race showed that Trump’s attacks had not cost him support.
Harris, who would be the first woman, Black woman and South Asian American to serve as president, faces a complicated political calculus on Tuesday.
If she brushes off Trump’s attacks on the debate stage, as she has done on the campaign trail, she could be seen as unwilling to stand up for herself. If she engages with Trump’s rhetoric, she could be dragged into the mudslinging he thrives on and expose herself to accusations, fair or not, that she is exploiting her race and gender.
Too forceful a reaction also risks playing into the stereotype of an angry Black woman, said Kelly Dittmar, the director of research for Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics.
“If Kamala calls it out, will she be accused of playing the race card, the gender card?” Dittmar said.
‘I’M SPEAKING’
Harris has the additional challenge of fielding Trump’s attacks while also defining herself for voters who are still getting to know her after her surprise entry into the race seven weeks ago.
In a national poll released on Sunday by The New York Times and Siena College, 28% of likely voters said they needed more information about Harris, while opinions on Trump were largely set.
Harris will try to avoid getting pulled into personal exchanges while aiming to draw Trump into the sort of offensive comments likely to go viral, campaign sources said.
Harris, a former prosecutor, may be able to send a more subtle signal about Trump’s attacks without explicitly calling them out as racist or sexist. She managed that in her 2020 vice presidential debate against Mike Pence, when she responded to his interruptions by saying, “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” a moment that went viral.
“That was an effective way to acknowledge the gendered style of how men speak over women,” Dittmar said.
In a radio interview that aired on Monday, Harris said she was prepared for Trump’s tactics.
“[Trump] plays from this really old and tired playbook,” she told the “The Rickey Smiley Morning Show.” “There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go.”
In a call with reporters on Monday, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who has been advising Trump ahead of the debate, said the former president would focus on Harris’ record and speak to her the same way he did Biden.
“President Trump respects women and doesn’t feel the need to be patronizing or to speak to women in any other way than he would speak to a man,” Gabbard said.
Trump has previously dismissed calls from advisers and fellow Republicans to moderate his tone and stick to the issues, telling reporters, “I have to do it my way.”
PERSONAL ATTACKS
But the former president has labored to find an effective attack line against Harris, who unlike Clinton is not saddled with decades of political baggage, and who has unleashed a wave of energy among Democrats since she took over Biden’s flailing reelection campaign.
The Democratic research firm Blueprint polled various negative messages against Harris in late July and found that personal attacks based on her race, gender or family were “incredibly unproductive” across all voter groups, including independents, according to Evan Roth Smith, the firm’s pollster.
Criticisms that focus on immigration and economic policies or portray Harris as a California liberal tested better, Smith said.
The firm also examined possible rebuttals to attacks focused on Harris’ race and gender. Responding by calling Trump racist was far less effective than labeling the insults a distraction from Trump’s “extreme” agenda.
Some Trump attacks – such as questioning Harris’ Blackness – are so transparently false that Harris doesn’t need to respond directly, said Andra Gillespie, a professor at Emory University who researches African American politics.
“It was so unbelievably outrageous that everybody was like, ‘That’s ridiculous,'” she said. “She didn’t have to say anything.”
But Aaron Kall, a debate expert at the University of Michigan, said Trump should not be underestimated. Trump has proven to be a skilled debater, Kall said, dispatching more experienced opponents with sharp retorts and unpredictable segues and using his background as a reality television star to command the camera.
“He may be the best counter-punching debater of all time,” Kall said. “He gets people off their talking points. He has relatable language and talks like undecided voters. He’s got a pretty good pulse on what voters are concerned about.”
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Additional reporting by Nandita Bose, Helen Coster, Steve Holland and Gram Slattery; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Suzanne Goldenberg)
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