CNN
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Kamala Harris’s joyous campaign will be hit Tuesday by the harsh force of reality: a debate with Donald Trump, the most menacing political foe of modern times.

The vice president transformed the 2024 election after President Joe Biden’s abject debate with Trump on CNN in June led him to end his re-election bid, restoring several swing states to electoral battleground states and giving Democrats hope for a stunning turnaround in a race most thought they were on track to lose.

Yet her success in uniting her party, positioning herself as a fresh voice of generational change and closing a tight race with Trump in polls has so far failed to cement a reliable path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. If the election were held on Tuesday, the ex-president, who has already defied an assassination attempt and dozens of criminal charges, could still win.

Presidential debates don’t typically decide elections — despite the catastrophic impact of Biden’s elimination. But Tuesday night is Harris’ best remaining chance to make a decisive argument that could thwart Trump’s historic comeback.

Her assignment in Philadelphia will require the deployment of rhetorical skills that have often been questioned in an uneven vice presidency. Though she’s had her moments in debates and Senate hearings, Harris has at times struggled to formulate clear policies and answers under pressure in impromptu situations. Her willingness to submit to just one major media interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, on CNN last month, has only raised the bar for her performance in what is thus far the only scheduled debate with Trump. And while the former president has now participated in presidential debates in three separate elections, this will be Harris’ first attempt at the debate stage since her 2020 meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence.

As she seeks to become the first Black woman and South Asian president, Harris is for the first time coming into close contact with a rival who will do anything to win and who has a history of using racial and gendered tropes for political gain. Trump has questioned her intelligence and race as a Black woman and amplified a sexual innuendo about her on social media. But the vice president seems determined not to fall into his traps. She refused to address Trump’s race-based rhetoric in her CNN interview, dismissing it as the “old, tired textbook” and adding, “Next question, please.”

Harris has far less top-level political experience than 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or Biden did when they faced Trump in presidential debates. And even some in her own party didn’t believe she was the strongest potential Democratic leader for a post-Biden era.

But on Tuesday, Harris has a chance to change perceptions of her political acumen and set a starting point for the sprint to Nov. 5.

A campaign that hinges on avoiding mistakes and limiting the vice president’s unscripted public exposure faces a moment when there’s nowhere to hide on prime-time television. And the price of failure is enormous — because it could set a powerful ex-president who sought to undermine American democracy after the 2020 election on the path to a new presidency dedicated to “retaliation.” The stakes for Democrats were underscored Saturday when Trump vowed in a social media post to prosecute and jail election officials, political opponents, donors and others he says “cheated” in the election, while furthering false allegations that his 2020 loss was the result of voter fraud.

But if Harris can withstand the pressure and stand up to Trump’s onslaught, the debate offers her significant opportunities — possibly more than Trump, who is already well-known to the public, who either love or hate him, can get.

A successful performance on Tuesday night could create a platform for the vice president to convince undecided voters in crucial swing states that she has credible plans to improve their lives. A New York Times/Siena College poll released over the weekend hinted at her potential for growth, finding that 28% of likely voters wanted to know more about the vice president, while just 9% felt the same way about the Republican nominee.

Harris has clearly thought about how to win over those voters. For example, she has paid more attention to their economic challenges than Biden, whose defensive statements about the inequities of the pandemic recovery have become a burden. Harris has vowed to crack down on what she calls “exorbitant prices” for groceries, says she wants to help first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 in down payment assistance and wants to make rent more affordable.

And more broadly, it offers voters a chance to avoid the chaos, bitterness and political turmoil that raged during Trump’s first term and, given his increasingly wild pronouncements, could only worsen in a second.

But to make the debate a success, the vice president must perform three difficult tasks.

— She must strike a balance between countering what her campaign expects to be a barrage of attacks and lies from Trump and emphasizing her message. “I think he’s going to lie, and he has a playbook that he’s used in the past, whether it’s, you know, his attacks on President Obama or Hillary Clinton,” Harris said in a radio interview on “The Rickey Smiley Morning Show” that aired Monday. “What I want to emphasize is what we know — so many people know — and certainly as I’ve traveled the country in this campaign, he tends to fight for himself, not for the American people.”

— Harris must also neutralize the underlying contradiction of her campaign: that she is running as an agent of change and renewal despite being part of an unpopular administration that Trump blames for many of the problems she promises to fix, including high grocery and housing prices.

In a related challenge, Harris must try to make up ground on Biden on two issues that matter most to voters and where she typically trails Trump in the polls: managing the economy and immigration. Trump has struggled to come up with effective arguments against Harris since she entered the race, but in his searing campaign ads, his team has accused her and Biden of causing economic problems that are hurting the middle class. As Trump’s team put it in a memo on Monday, “As the chief cheerleader for Bidenomics, she must convince voters how Bidenomics works, despite everything being significantly more expensive than it was under President Trump.”

— Harris will also have to find a way to counter some of Trump’s accusations that she has pivoted on policies she supported during her short-lived 2019 Democratic primary, including fracking and the border. In an attempt to explain these shifts in the CNN interview, Harris told Dana Bash that while she may have adjusted her approaches, her “values ​​haven’t changed.” She argued, for example, that she now believed it was possible to address the climate crisis without banning the environmentally damaging practice of fracking, in an effort to refine her position on an issue that could hurt her in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The conceit, however, allowed the Trump campaign to argue that she would return to her original position if she were in office.

The former president’s team has made no attempt to hide its disdain for Harris’s political skills and clearly believes her performance will be closer to her early vice presidential missteps than her assured, but scripted, performance at the Democratic convention. Trump, for example, insisted last week, “I’m going to let her talk.”

That was among the milder rhetoric the former president has aimed at Harris as he has continued to ramp up pressure on his rival. But Anita Dunn, a former senior adviser to Biden who helped prepare the president for the June debate, said the new Democratic nominee would be ready for whatever Trump throws her way.

“He’ll say anything — that’s really the hurdle — to not go down those rabbit holes,” Dunn told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday. “He’ll say anything — it may not make sense; it may be completely incoherent, but he’ll say it with great authority. And so it’s important to know what your game plan is, what you want to say to the American people,” Dunn added.

“I believe the vice president will be fully prepared for that.”