Yes, Kamala Harris Is, in Fact, Screwed by the Debate Rules

Now, for those of you concerned that the headline of this piece means I think Kamala Harris is being treated unfairly… hahaha no. I think Kamala Harris, who is the candidate despite not receiving a single vote in the 2024 primary, doesn’t get to complain about things being unfair. 

But, yes, the rules of Tuesday night’s debate are fair. They are good rules, in fact. They make it easier for the people watching to hear what the candidates actually have to say on policy without being derailed by interruptions. Frankly, it stops Donald Trump from being his most effective and forces him to sound off more on policy issues when he is far more comfortable interrupting and sowing chaos on a debate stage.

But Trump’s favorite strategy is also his biggest weakness. He is just as easily derailed as he is capable of derailing others, and the Harris campaign was planning to take advantage of that fact and argued that the mics should be left on.

Kamala Harris had planned to object, fact-check and directly question Donald Trump while he was speaking during their debate next week. But now, with rules just finalized to mute the candidates when their opponents speaks, campaign officials said Harris advisers are scrambling to rewrite their playbook.

Harris and her team — holed up in Pittsburgh for a multi-day debate camp — wanted unmuted microphones so that the vice president could lean on her prosecutorial background, confronting the former president in the same way she laced into some of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet members during Senate hearings.

Instead, four Harris campaign officials argued that she will be “handcuffed” by the rules, which were negotiated by President Joe Biden’s team earlier this summer.

It’s not the first time Harris has been handcuffed by a position Joe Biden has left her in. There is the fact that he left her with the shambles of a presidential campaign, poll numbers that resulted in her “big bump” managing to only bring the race back to a tie against Trump, and the entirety of the Biden-Harris administration’s policies as her record. She’s… kinda stuck.

But being able to throw Trump off was her strategy because her own policies and positions are either undefined or too progressive to be palpable to the general public. Forcing her to clearly define herself rather than allowing her to frustrate Trump and shine the spotlight on him makes for a much tougher debate for her.

If I were the Harris team, I would probably find Trump’s least conservative positions and mirror them, or come as close to them as possible, when asked questions on those subjects. She, like Biden in 2020, needs to pretend to be a responsible, middle-of-the-road adult.

And she certainly can’t win over the working class by saying things like “My values haven’t changed.” She needs to be a different person in front of America if she wants to win. But the thing is she’s just not quite clever enough to do so. Her go to is words salads that use 75 words to say zero things. 

That won’t fly on a debate stage. She’s going to open herself up to a lot more criticism if she doesn’t come up with a plan that adds the vaguest amount of substance to her candidacy.