What to watch for in Harris-Trump debate: Both will try this classic political move | Opinion
It’s one of the oldest tricks in modern presidential politics. Candidates run right or left to win their parties’ nominations, then tack to the middle to pick up the biggest general election support possible.
Watch for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to try to pull it off Tuesday night in what’s expected to be their only debate. But for these two, in a time of ideological shifts and an impossibly close contest, it will be more like they’re trying to sand down their roughest edges.
Look for signs of each calculating how far they can stray from their somewhat-toxic political bases to try to bring in independents.
They start in much different places. Trump is probably the most well-known presidential candidate in history, after decades as a celebrity and nearly 10 years as the dominant figure in American politics. Harris was thrust into the race just six weeks ago in place of a faltering Joe Biden and is still working on defining herself.
Neither will risk losing much core support in a time of strong negative polarization, which refers to the priority that voters place on casting a ballot against the other party even if lukewarm to their own. But how they try to reach out could tell us a lot about how each sees the race playing out.
DONALD TRUMP: AFTER ABORTION SHIFT, WHAT’S NEXT? GUNS? IMMIGRATION?
Trump has worked to calibrate on abortion. His instinct is clearly to moderate, but every time he goes too far, he has to backtrack to avoid turning off too many pro-life voters who appreciate his appointment of Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade but want more.
Trump has said he wants the issue to remain with the states. But he recently struggled even with that. As a Florida voter, he sent confusing signals about whether he would vote for a referendum to overturn the state’s six-week ban.
Some pro-lifers have become exasperated, but others figure they’ll get nothing better from Harris, a vigorous abortion-rights defender.
Other constituencies should take note. Might Trump move off of his gun rights bona fides if asked about the recent school shooting in Georgia?
Shrinking the size and cost of government was never a Trump passion. But his breathtaking statement that a new Trump administration would cover in-vitro fertilization or require insurers to do so — put another way, that he’d require you to pay for others’ fertility treatments, one way or another — is the promise of a huge new entitlement that the country can’t afford.
Even on his signature issue, illegal immigration, Trump floats ideas that could alarm his base voters. He recently said that non-citizens who graduate from American colleges should get green cards along with their diplomas. There’s a good policy idea in there somewhere, to keep promising workers, but a blanket policy would be as big an enticement for illegal immigration as anything Harris could offer.
KAMALA HARRIS: WHY HER POLICY FLIP-FLOPS MATTER
Harris presents the bigger concern because so much of what she stands for is so up in the air.
She has changed positions on several major issues from what she held as a senator and a presidential candidate in the 2020 cycle. Alex Thompson, a reporter for the news site Axios, has tracked at least nine so far.
Normally, voters don’t care all that much about flip-flops, especially if a politician flips in a direction they like. But most presidential candidates change their positions early, getting any blowback out of the way. By the time most voters tune in, they can dismiss it as “old news.”
Harris’ late entry to the race, though, has required her to quickly abandon several positions and try to craft images that don’t fit, such as a border-security warrior, with weeks to go. Her campaign just added a policy section to its website.
All of the switching and swapping is designed to portray Harris as something other than what she’s been her whole career: a California progressive. And it might work. But is it authentic? One clear sign is that other progressive politicians and issue-oriented groups aren’t squawking much at Harris’ sudden heresy on major environmental and economic issues. It’s almost as if they’re confident who she really is and how she’ll govern. Remember, Biden won the 2020 Democratic nomination by standing apart from the loony left part of the field that Harris and others occupied. Once in power, he immediately tried to be the next FDR.
Usually, candidates have to answer questions on moves such as these, and Harris simply hasn’t. We’ve heard almost no explanations from the candidate herself. That opens up several areas of attack in the debate, if Trump can take advantage.
This debate, and this race, is much less about specific policies and more about the mood of the country. Trump base voters will enjoy his punches at Harris and his usual airing of his grievances. Harris backers will relish that the “prosecutor” is finally getting a shot at Trump. Neither will get too worked up at a few deviances on policy.
But we’ll all walk away wondering exactly what either would actually do as president.
This story was originally published September 10, 2024 at 3:27 AM with the headline "What to watch for in Harris-Trump debate: Both will try this classic political move | Opinion."
