(Daily Mail) Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in the most important political debate of her career on Tuesday evening, but she has a very mixed record on the stage.
Harris participated in multiple presidential debates with a gaggle of aspirational Democrats during her failed 2020 presidential campaign, as she struggled to break free of the pack and go viral.
Tuesday’s debate with Harris marks Trump’s seventh general election debate since 2016, while this is Harris’ first with a Republican presidential candidate.
Political strategists who have prepared Republican candidates spoke to the DailyMail about her strengths and weaknesses in debates.
Harris is very good about preparing, rehearsing, and deploying prepared lines, even though her attempts to go viral do not always come off with a hit.
Democratic vice presidential nominee Senator Kamala Harris (L) and US Vice President Mike Pence (R) during the vice presidential debate
‘She’s going to have any number of lines prepared,’ Republican strategist Kevin Spillane, who was an advisor to Harris’ rival Steve Cooley in the 2010 California Attorney General’s race.
Spillane warned that candidates deploying prepared lines risked coming off as phony and calculated. Harris’ weakness, he said, was her reluctance to dive into the details of public policy.
‘She’s not someone who is really interested in policy, she is more interested in power,’ he said.
Marc Short, a political advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence agreed that Harris was good at deploying rehearsed debate lines and attacks.
‘I think she is good at sort of setting up and trying to capture that viral moment,’ Short said to DailyMail.com
He described Harris’ famous ‘I’m speaking’ episode as a moment clearly prepared by the Harris campaign to create a ‘man slaying moment’ against Pence.
Short said that any male Republican would have difficulties while debating a black woman Democrat.
‘In today’s media world I think it is a challenge, frankly to be debating a minority female,’ he said.
But Short said Harris came up short in her debate with Pence when it came to policy details. When Pence focused on her and Biden’s radical left record, he said, Harris struggled to explain her approach.
‘We came away feeling like afterwards, we sort of thought she would’ve been better prepared,’ he recalled.
Short recalled that it was unfortunate the media focused the majority of their debate commentary on a fly that landed on Pence’s head and remained on his white hair for more than two minutes because he believed the vice president had scored a few points against Harris.
’That’s too bad. I actually thought it was a substantive debate’ he said.
Harris tends to get tangled up in policy details, typically avoiding it entirely as her descriptions frequently spiral into word salads.
Trump, himself, has pointed to Harris’ sometimes spiral arguments as un-presidential.
‘She speaks in rhyme, it’s weird, the way she talks,’ he said in an interview in 2023. ‘It’s weird, the whole thing is weird, this is not a president of the United States.’
Spillane said Harris’ biggest weakness was her laugh, describing it as a revelation to the audience that she was not prepared.
‘My theory on that ridiculous laugh of hers, that drives so many people crazy is that she is inauthentic and she knows it and tries to be more likable and more human,’ he said.
Here are some of Harris’ best and worst debate moments throughout her career:
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard famously called out Harris for campaigning as a ‘progressive prosecutor,’ despite having a less than impressive record on progressive issues
Tulsi Gabbard’s attack on her record that devastated her 2020 presidential run
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard famously called out Harris for campaigning as a ‘progressive prosecutor,’ despite having a less than impressive record on progressive issues.
‘I want to bring the conversation back to the broken criminal justice system that is disproportionately negatively impacting black and brown people all across this country today. Now Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president,’ she said. ‘But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite.’
Gabbard attacked Harris for putting over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations but laughing about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She also attacked Harris for blocking evidence in a case over freeing an ‘innocent’ man from death row and keeping prisoners in prison longer to serve as cheap labor for California and backed cash bail reforms.
The debate audience exploded with applause but Harris could only respond weakly, decrying ‘fancy speeches’ while she was actually ‘doing the work’ of criminal justice.
After the debate, Harris shrugged off the attack, suggesting she was only catching heat because of her political success.
‘This is going to sound immodest, but I’m obviously a top-tier candidate,’ she said. ‘And so, I did expect that I would be on the stage and take hits tonight, because there are a lot of people who are trying to make the stage for the next debate.’
Kamala Harris on the Democratic primary debate stage in Westerville, Ohio, in 2019
Stopping the food fight
At the beginning of the debate, Harris interrupted a squabbling group of her colleagues by trying to play a peacemaker on the stage.
‘Hey guys, you know what?’ she asked. ‘America does not want to witness a food fight. They want to know how we are going to put food on their table.’
The line was applauded by the Democratic audience and even Biden applauded her while the rest of her opponents reacted stoically to the obviously rehearsed line.
But Harris was not completely opposed to personal attacks as she revealed that same night she had something bigger planned.
