Tomorrow, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will take part in a debate that could shape the rest of the presidential race and perhaps the country’s future. It’s the first time they are so much as meeting in person, a fact that imbues the coming confrontation with a jolt of unpredictability.
We do, though, know a lot about how both candidates approach debates. My colleague Lisa Lerer dived into the combative debate style Harris honed over decades in the rough-and-tumble gauntlet that is San Francisco politics.
And I decided to consider what we learned about Trump’s debate skills the last time he took the stage with a woman who was standing between himself and the presidency — which meant spending my weekend rewatching every one of the 270 minutes Trump and Clinton spent onstage together in 2016.
Those debates gave Trump a reputation for being undisciplined and brutish onstage, a man whose hailstorm of interruptions and half-truths stood in stark contrast to Clinton’s focused calm. If there was any winner over the four and a half hours they spent fighting on television, it seemed at the time like it was her.
Watching it now, though, I see it differently. Trump was a more cunning debater than he got credit for at the time, one who wielded ugly sexist attacks to his benefit, turned Clinton’s perceived strengths into weaknesses, and used his time onstage to steady his campaign.
What is less clear is whether he can deploy the same strategy this time — and whether or not it will work.
