PHILADELPHIA — Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will meet for the first time face-to-face Tuesday night for perhaps their only debate, a high-pressure opportunity to showcase their starkly different visions for the country after a tumultuous campaign summer.
The event, at 8 p.m. Central in Philadelphia, will offer Americans their most detailed look at a campaign that’s dramatically changed since the last debate in June. In rapid fashion, President Joe Biden bowed out of the race after his disastrous performance, Trump survived an assassination attempt and both sides chose their running mates.
Harris is intent on demonstrating that she can press the Democratic case against Trump better than Biden did. Trump, in turn, is trying to paint the vice president as an out-of-touch liberal while trying to win over voters skeptical he should return to the White House.
Trump, 78, has struggled to adapt to Harris, 59, who is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president. The Republican former president has at times resorted to invoking racial and gender stereotypes, frustrating allies who want Trump to focus instead on policy differences with Harris.
The vice president, for her part, will try to claim a share of credit for the Biden administration’s accomplishments while also addressing its low moments and explaining her shifts away from more liberal positions she took in the past.
The debate will subject Harris, who has sat for only a single formal interview in the past six weeks, to a rare moment of sustained questioning.
Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, speaking Tuesday to donors in Las Vegas, highlighted Trump’s experience debating after three White House runs.
“No one in modern times has done more of these,” he said. “The good news is that this is his seventh debate, and we know exactly what to expect.”
The first early ballots of the presidential race will go out just hours after the debate, hosted by ABC News. Absentee ballots are set to be sent out beginning Wednesday in Alabama.
The set where the two candidates will be debating tonight is relatively small. The candidates’ lecterns are positioned about 6-8 feet apart in a small, blue-lit amphitheater with no live audience in the room. That means there will be no rowdy applause, no cheers or jeers.
The candidates will enter at the same time from opposite sides of the stage.
Trump and his campaign have spotlighted far-left positions Harris took during her failed 2020 presidential bid. He’s been assisted in his informal debate prep sessions by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who tore into Harris during their primary debates.
Harris has sought to defend her shifts away from liberal causes to more moderate stances on fracking, expanding Medicare for all and mandatory gun buyback programs — and even backing away from her position that plastic straws should be banned — as pragmatism, insisting that her “values remain the same.” Her campaign on Monday published a page on its website listing her positions on key issues.
Trump’s team insist his tone won’t be any different facing a female opponent.
“President Trump is going to be himself,” senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters during a phone call Monday.
Gabbard, who was also on the call, added that 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.”
The vice president, who has been the Biden administration’s most outspoken supporter of abortion access after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, is expected to focus on calling out Trump’s inconsistencies around women’s reproductive care, including his announcement that he will vote to protect Florida’s six-week abortion ban in a statewide referendum this fall.
She is likely to warn that Trump presents a threat to democracy, from his attempts in 2020 to overturn his loss in the presidential election, spurring his angry supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, through comments he made as recently as last weekend. Trump on social media issued yet another message of retribution, threatening that if he wins he will jail “those involved in unscrupulous behavior,” including lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials.
Price and Miller reported from Washington. AP Polling Editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington and Thomas Beaumont in Las Vegas, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Josh Boak in Philadelphia contributed to this report.