Title: Previewing the Harris vs. Trump Presidential Debate

Matt Katz: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Matt Katz from the WNYC in Gothamist newsroom, filling in for Brian today while he preps for tonight's WNYC centennial birthday party at Central Park SummerStage, which is free, by the way, and you're all welcome. There is no RSVP required. Starts at 7:00 PM. Brian will be there along with many of our WNYC colleagues, including Alison Stewart, Brooke Gladstone, and others. Ira Glass will make an appearance. There will be a musical performance by Freestyle Love Supreme, plus Nada Surf, and Laurie Anderson.

That's all happening tonight. Anyone can attend. It's free. Just head to SummerStage in Central park for the 7:00 PM show. I hope I'll see you there. Come say hi. Coming up on today's show, we'll talk about this wild week in investigations into to city and state officials here in New York. We'll talk about that with my colleague John Campbell. Plus, our centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, continues with the history of music here on WNYC with another colleague, John Schaefer.

We'll wrap the show today with a conversation about loneliness and friendship. How often do you see your friends in person? Is it enough? We'll want to hear your experiences on this. It's all inspired by an article about it from Olga Khazan, a writer at The Atlantic headlined The Friendship Paradox. We all want more friends, but we're spending more time alone. First, let's get inside the prep rooms of our presidential candidates as they gear up for the make or break debate tomorrow night.

Former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris will meet for the very first time, and perhaps the only time on a debate stage. It'll be in Philadelphia. It comes less than a week before early voting is set to begin in Pennsylvania, which is being dubbed the swingiest of swing states. According to both campaigns, the candidates see this debate as a crucial moment to define Harris right before voters start to hit the polls.

After all, she just joined the race to become the next president about seven weeks ago. Despite her role as vice president over the last four years, many undecided voters say they still see Harris as someone who's famous but unknown. Let's not forget how she became the Democratic nominee so late in the game. Here's Donald Trump recalling the event, although rather crudely, at a campaign in Mosinee, Wisconsin, on Saturday.

Donald Trump: We're run by stupid people, stupid, stupid people. We found that out at the debate with Joe. How did that work out? We're going to find it out again on Tuesday night.

Matt Katz: Unlike the last matchup between Trump and Biden, tomorrow night's debate will center around policy apparently. According to the Trump aides who spoke with the New York Times, his preparation sessions aren't even referred to as debate prep, but rather policy time. Voters want to know where the candidates stand on crucial issues like the economy, abortion, immigration, and the war in Gaza. Joining me now to cover the current state of the race as we head into tomorrow's big debate, how the candidates are preparing, which issues may rise to the top of the conversation, is Molly Ball, senior political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and host of the new podcast series Red, White and Who? Hi, Molly. Welcome back to WNYC.

Molly Ball: Hi, Matt. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Matt Katz: Our pleasure. I want to dig in here. Let's start by taking a look at where we currently stand when it comes to these polls. Over the weekend, there was this New York Times Siena poll found Trump leads Kamala Harris nationally 48% to 47%. That's within the polls three percentage margin of error. It's basically a not statistically significant contrast to a poll in your own publication.

The Wall Street Journal last week had Harris leading Trump by the exact same margin. During the course of the last month, we've seen Harris's campaign surging, that's what we've been told, in support due to voters' excitement over this fresh face, while Trump struggled to find his footing against this new opponent. Where are we at now, Molly? Are we in a different place? Are these two polls indicating a sign of a plateau for the Harris campaign? What do you think?

Molly Ball: I think we are where we've always been, which is that this is a very, very, very, very close race in a very, very closely divided country. Yes, Harris surged relative to where Biden was, but even that was only a surge of a few points because this country is just so closely divided that nobody is going to bust out to a 10 point lead. It's really almost inconceivable that any candidate could do that just because of how divided the population is, how divided the electorate is along partisan lines, and how deeply baked in perceptions are, at least of Trump.

That was really what was creating space for Harris to move up in the polls, was that she does not face the same kind of calcified perceptions that he does. There was room for her to improve, particularly relative to Biden, because so many even Democratic voters had soured on him after that last consequential presidential debate back in June. What we've seen her do is consolidate the Democratic base, consolidate a lot of the 2020 Biden base, but she hasn't really moved beyond that.

These candidates are neck and neck. I think so much is riding on this debate this week because what we see in all of these polls is that there's a significant portion of the electorate that's waiting to make up their mind specifically because they want more information about Kamala Harris.

Matt Katz: You said calcified perceptions. It's a great phrase. It's also in the positive sense for Trump. There's a calcified, positive perception about him by a significant piece of the electorate. It seems like he has maintained this steady support throughout his time, basically on the national stage. Is he gaining any support, or is he basically where he's always been in terms of the people in this country who want to see him as president?

Molly Ball: He's close to where he's always been. Now he is more popular now than he ever was as president. We've seen his favorability increase as people look back on his presidency, in some cases, as a better time economically, and as, of course, has been a major message from his campaign as well, that people were better off when he was president, at least before the pandemic hit in 2020. We see that a fair amount of voters are persuaded by that. He has gone up a bit, and a lot of this has to do with the unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration and the way that voters have soured on a lot of their decisions and policies.

That has caused a lot of people, again, a small number of people. I don't want to exaggerate this, because, again, it's such a closely divided electorate that we're talking about a gain or loss of just a point or two here and there. The conventional wisdom about Trump, I think, is still correct, which is that he has a high floor and a low ceiling. He's never gotten 50% of the vote, and that spot in the mid-40s where he tends to pretty consistently be in a lot of polls.

The Harris surge that we were talking about was her overtaking him while he basically held steady. He wasn't really gaining or losing a lot, but she was able to sort of leapfrog him into a small national lead in some polls and in the polling average, but that was not really a function of her taking his voters. It was a function of her consolidating the Trump skeptical majority of the electorate. Again, it's just still a really tight race. I do think people's perceptions of Trump are largely baked in, but it's going to be on Kamala Harris to try to remind those voters who are skeptical or who dislike Trump of why that is.

Matt Katz: His favorability rating is at 46%. After such a controversial presidency with some pretty dark moments, this really amazed me. It's not just that half of America likes his policies and supports some of the things that he did as president, from a policy perspective. It's that almost half of the country just views him favorably. It's the same favorability rating, exact same in that last time Siena poll, as Kamala Harris. Do people look at his presidency more positively now than maybe they did four years ago? What do you make of the favorability ratings?

Molly Ball: They seem to. Again, I think it's partly a function of that nostalgia or that comparative, that comparison that voters are making when they look back on four years ago and recall feeling better off, feeling like the country was in a better place. Then you've got to remember, there's a lot of new voters coming into the electorate. Every four years, a new cohort turns 18 and becomes eligible to vote.

I've spent some time this cycle with young voters, with college students trying to understand how they're viewing this election. If you're a college student right now, you were in middle school when Trump began his 2016 campaign. He's really been a sort of fact of life in a political sense as long as you have been conscious of politics. For a lot of these younger voters, Trump doesn't register as quite as shocking as he might to some people who remember what politics was like before he came along and became such a chaotic and destabilizing presence. For a lot of young voters, that's all they've ever known.

Matt Katz: The Trump voters who say things were better four years ago. I mean, we were in the midst of COVID. It seems to be similar economic pressures. What is it that they're feeling worse about now than they might have four years ago, and what might they blame the Biden-Harris administration over?

Molly Ball: Well, the single most unpopular thing that Biden did over the course of his presidency was the Afghanistan pullout. He was relatively well regarded by the electorate. You can say that that was the early honeymoon of 2021 of him coming into the presidency, but that was when we really saw his numbers plummet and never recover. Harris's numbers have mostly moved in tandem with Biden's.

We also see in polls that voters are unhappy with the way that this administration has handled the economy and the border. Those are, unfortunately for the Democrats, the two top issues of most voters as they think about or as they tell pollsters what they're thinking about with regard to this election. Again, not talking about all voters, this is still less than half, but a large number of American voters just see this administration as not having fulfilled its promises on some of the most important policy issues.

Matt Katz: This is the Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Brian today. My guest is Molly Ball, senior political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, host of the new podcast series Red, White and Who? Listeners, do you have any questions about the debate for our guests? We also want to know what's top of mind for you in tomorrow's face off between Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump. Are you currently undecided?

Are you waiting to hear what the candidates have to say about the economy or immigration or the war in Gaza? Do you have any advice for your preferred candidate regarding their conduct or style or delivery or how they might argue a particular policy position? Give us a call, send us a text. We're at 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Molly, it looks like the polls in these swing states, basically every swing state, I think, is statistically tied. Is that right?

Molly Ball: Pretty much. I mean, again, this is a close race, and it's close in the battlegrounds. That's what I think we're really keeping our eye on because given that the battleground states are slightly more Republican-leaning than the country as a whole, for a Democrat to win the electoral college means they have to win the popular vote by a pretty significant margin. Joe Biden won by four and a half points in 2020, and as we all, I'm sure, remember, barely squeaked by, by five digit numbers of votes in a lot of the swing states.

That's probably the case for Kamala Harris as well. It means that Trump, who, of course, did not win the popular vote in 2016, either, can do slightly worse in that national polling than Harris can and still have a chance of winning through the electoral college.

Matt Katz: What can, let's say, Harris do? I'm looking at, like, the Sun Belt states, southern states, Georgia, North Carolina. Is there something that Harris is trying to do or her team thinks she can do in order to surge ahead in some of those states?

Molly Ball: Sure. I mean, it's such a nationalized campaign that there's not that much that candidates will do that is specific to one state or another, just because the states all tend to move in tandem. There is definitely a sense that because Harris, the historic nature of her candidacy may make her poised to make gains with portions of the Democratic base that Biden was less able to speak to, particularly Black and Latino voters and women.

We see her trying to increase her share of those, again, generally Democratic blocs of the electorate. That could help her much more in those Sun Belt states, in Georgia and North Carolina, potentially Arizona and Nevada as well. If she's able to consolidate those Democratic base groups and potentially bring more of them into the electorate, she could bring those states back onto the map in a way that the Biden campaign was contemplating having to give up on those states and only focus on the Rust Belt, the upper midwest.

Pennsylvania, where we're all going to be for the debate tomorrow, is still really the pivotal swing state, I think, for both campaigns. We do see both campaigns focusing a lot of attention, a lot of resources on Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, of course, is very demographically similar to Michigan and Wisconsin, the other two Rust Belt swing states. I think we can expect both campaigns to be spending a lot of time and resources there. You're not going to be able to turn on a television in any of these states in October without seeing a lot of political ads.

Matt Katz: Your mailboxes will be stuffed. Molly, let's see what our callers might have to say or might have some questions. Paula Whitney, you're in Crown Heights. Hi, Paula Whitney. Thanks for calling in.

Paula Whitney: Good morning, Mr. Matt Katz. I admire your work, particularly in your genealogy.

Matt Katz: Oh, thank you.

Paula Whitney: It's my first time talking with you. You're an amazing reporter.

Matt Katz: Oh, that's so kind. I really appreciate it.

Paula Whitney: Amazing.

Matt Katz: Thank you very much.

Paula Whitney: My point is very quick. Nobody is talking about the poor. We're they invisible now? All we hear about is the middle class. Not a soul is talking about the poor.

Matt Katz: That's a very fair point. Molly, what do you make of that? How common is that in our modern presidential campaigns to just talk about this middle class, middle class, middle class, and ignore the other parts of the economic spectrum?

Molly Ball: It is pretty common, unfortunately. I think the caller is correct, that it is a blind spot for most campaigns in this and a lot of elections. I mean, a cynic would say, well, poor people don't vote as much as middle class people do, or they are just not as large a portion of the electorate. It's generally the case that campaigns tend to talk about the middle class because there's a feeling that that is what resonates with the most voters. When you actually ask people, do you consider yourself poor, working class, middle class, upper class, what have you, a large number of voters who an economist might not call middle class still mentally see themselves that way. For a lot of people, even people more on the poverty edge of the spectrum, it's a sort of aspirational label of feeling like so many of us in America are spiritually part of the middle class, even if our incomes don't put us there.

I do think the campaigns would probably say that they have various proposals that they argue would improve the lives of the poor or would affect poverty rates, things like the child tax credit, that both candidates have embraced in some ways, Harris more specifically and more aggressively than Trump, but they've both said that that's something that they would consider. There are proposals on the table that would address poverty, but it is not a major rhetorical emphasis of either campaign or of most campaigns. I think that's just the political calculus that candidates tend to make.

Matt Katz: In terms of the political calculus, is it also fair that maybe political consultants tell candidates that proposals focusing on poverty, which might involve a lot of government intervention and government support, appeal too much to the liberal left, and therefore don't get those swath of centrist voters that candidates are thought to need to target in order to win elections?

Molly Ball: Sure. I mean, the Harris campaign especially is working very hard to try to position her in the center as an attempt to rebut the main attack on her from the Trump campaign, which is that she is a radical left San Francisco Democrat who wants to take money from rich people and give it all to poor people. This is a pretty traditional attack on Democratic candidates. The way that they tend to answer it is to say that they're focused on the middle class and improving the lives of those people in the center who are following the rules and trying to get by.

Matt Katz: The idea is that middle class people work and poor people don't is the implication. There's some problems sometimes in that messaging, I think, in terms of how it's framed, but it's considered to be the politically expedient path forward. We had a policy question from a listener via text. I don't understand why Harris is not focusing on climate change, given all the young new voters this year. Any thoughts on that, Molly?

Molly Ball: It's a great question. I think the reason is because even for young voters, climate change is not a top priority. The top priority of most voters, in all parts of the age spectrum, including young voters, is the economy. Most young people are focused on inflation, the cost of living, housing prices, that kind of thing. While we see a lot of climate activists, for example, on college campuses, and we should remember, the majority of young people do not go to college.

We see climate activists on campus. We see activists protesting Israel on campuses. Those are a loud minority of that young cohort, but they do not represent the primary concerns of most, again, even most young people. Climate is something that divides the Democratic party in some ways. While certainly all, I think, Democrats would say they want to-- they believe that climate change is real and caused by people, and they want to do something about it. There are different approaches to it.

The more centrist Democrats want to focus on the Biden-Harris administration's success in expanding oil production and bringing down the cost of gas. They don't necessarily want the message to the center of the electorate to be, we're going to make your energy more expensive. That's one of the Trump campaign's major attacks on the Democrats, in fact. There's a feeling that I think they want to de-emphasize some of the things that climate activists want out of political expediency at the same time as the Inflation Reduction Act that the administration is quite proud of and feels that they don't get enough credit for has been called one of the most significant pieces of climate legislation of all time. We may hear Democrats talk more about that than about other proposals to tackle climate change.

Matt Katz: Let's go back to the phones. Alan in Brooklyn, good morning. You're on the Brian Lehrer Show.

Alan: Good morning, [unintelligible 00:22:11]. I'm not faulting anybody, but I think we should be able to walk and chew gum in terms of informing people of elephants in a room. It's not a Republican, but it's the electoral college. If people were more informed about how unjust it is, they would vote Democratic in larger numbers this year to have a possibility of reforming it. I did a little research on AI the other day. My first attempt to use it for something useful. It came up with the numbers that the ratio of voting power per capita in the lowest and highest population states in the country, based on the tilted advantage of two senators per state in the electoral college, is 37:1.

Matt Katz: Wow.

Alan: In revolutionary times, when the country was founded, the ratio was closer to 4:1. We've become 10 times more polarized in terms of the relative power of small states over large states in electing presidents since 1790.

Matt Katz: Are you suggesting a candidate should endorse getting rid of the electoral college in order to try to--

Alan: I'm saying that people at least have to know about if the media should be doing a better job instead of talking about swing states, which suggest merely that particular states are closer in their polls as between one side or the other, but that's not really what's happening. They're swing states because only they have the electoral clout per capita to swing an election out of proportion to their numbers. People understood that. They get out in greater numbers to change the system, not obviously before this November. Right now they're operating into the assumption that most people don't know how it works. Even most college graduates don't know how it works. I was shocked by those numbers.

Matt Katz: Thank you, Alan. Thanks very much. Molly, I mean, the electoral college does really-- it's determined at least, I guess, two elections in my lifetime. How many elections do you know off the top of your head, how many elections have been won by a candidate who did not win the popular vote?

Molly Ball: I realize I should know that, and I don't. I think it has been relatively rare until the modern era. It is because of the increasing geographic polarization, the country, that we have gotten to this point where the electoral college may be increasingly out of sync with the popular vote. It's true that most people don't like it, and also that I think it is not a front burner issue that we're going to hear the candidates talking about as a matter of strategy.

The Democrats have just accepted it as a fact of life. I think that both candidates have various gripes with the electoral system. We hear Trump talking a lot about his obsession with what he falsely calls the rigged and stolen election in 2020, and his push for Republicans to address that and to aggressively monitor the potential for cheating, which, again, did not occur in 2020, but which he is claiming that they need to be vigilant about this time around.

In my experience covering politics, it just is not the biggest motivator, these kinds of procedural concerns. When voters go to the polls, they're thinking about what affects me, what affects my life, what is getting in the way of my ability to do an honest day's work and put dinner on the table for my family and have a roof over my head. Whenever politicians try to make arguments about these more abstract concerns, it tends not to resonate quite as much, even if, in the abstract, when you actually ask people what they think about the electoral college, I think most people would like to get rid of it.

Matt Katz: We need to take a short break, but when we come back, we'll take more of your calls. We'll listen to some tape from the candidates. More with Molly Ball right after this. It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Brian. Let's hear from these two presidential candidates in advance of tomorrow's debate. Both candidates see this debate as an opportunity to define Kamala Harris, someone who voters recognize but say they don't necessarily know. Of course, they're painting very different pictures of who Kamala Harris is. Let's take a listen.

Kamala Harris: As a young prosecutor, when I was in the Alameda County District Attorney's Office in California, I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse. Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse. As attorney general of California, I took on one of our country's largest for-profit colleges and put it out of business. Trump ran a for-profit college, Trump University, that was forced to pay $25 million to the students it scammed.

As district attorney to go after polluters, I created one of the first environmental justice units in our nation. Donald Trump stood in Mar-a-Lago and told big oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for a $1 billion campaign contribution. During the foreclosure crisis, I took on the big Wall street banks and won $20 billion for California families, holding those banks accountable for fraud. Donald Trump was just found guilty of 34 counts of fraud.

Matt Katz: We have also a montage of clips of Donald Trump attacking Kamala Harris.

Donald Trump: She was a bum three weeks ago. She was a bum. She's dumb. That's the laugh of a person with some big problems. I don't have a lot of respect for her intelligence. I'm a better looking person than Kamala. She's a nasty person.

Matt Katz: Molly, Kamala Harris, been vice president for three and a half years. She's been campaigning for president over the last month. We saw her on the campaign trail back in 2019. In her comments that we just listened to, close political watchers probably heard some new things about her work history and what she's done. In Trump's comments, we might have heard some new criticism of her that maybe people didn't know that he says he's a better looking person than her. Maybe that's new.

Is this criticism that I've heard about her that we don't know what her policy positions are, that she's been vague about what she stands for? Is that fair, and is there going to be an attempt to clarify that tomorrow night on her behalf?

Molly Ball: I think so. I think it's somewhat fair in the sense that she just put a policy page on her website over the weekend. She has been rolling out policy proposals. They're in her ads. They're part of her stump speech. At the same time, we saw in the one television interview, national television interview that she's done, her CNN interview, she didn't really offer an explanation for some of the notable changes she's made to her policy positions since she ran for president in 2020.

I expect that that is going to be something she'll be pressed on in the debate, whether by the moderators or by Trump. I think she does owe people an explanation and people do want to hear her vision. People do want to know what it is that she proposes to do if elected. I think it's fair to say that Trump also has not been particularly clear about that. The Democrats have worked very hard to tie him to the unpopular ideas in the Project 2025 Heritage Foundation document, which he has distanced himself from, says he rejects it and has nothing to do with it.

He hasn't been all that clear about where he stands on various things. He tends to not tell the truth about things, like crime rates or what the probable effects of new tariffs would be. Both of these candidates could be a lot more clear on where they stand and what they plan to do. I hope that the debate is an opportunity for both of them to be pressed on that.

Matt Katz: I mean, he has been clear about wanting to deport millions of people. There are certain issues that he's been extremely clear about that seem to be his answer for questions that might seem unrelated. I mean, mass deportation is a common refrain when he's asked about various policy things.

Molly Ball: He says that he would end the war in Ukraine before he even takes office just by having a conversation with Putin. Yes, he does have some things that he consistently says he plans to do. It's not necessarily clear in many of these cases how he would accomplish them or, again, what the consequences would be.

Matt Katz: I want to hear from Peter in Great Neck. Hi, Peter. Thanks for calling in.

Peter: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. You can call me an undecided voter. I could possibly vote for Chase Oliver, the libertarian candidate, as a principal vote, but I could also vote for Trump in what would essentially be an emotional vote at this point. For the debate tomorrow, the candidate who makes a strong appeal to any of my libertarian ideals is a candidate who could win my vote. Harris could come off as better on immigration or our national debt or freedom/liberty, which they paid some lip service to in the convention, and that would be important for me.

If Trump can moderate his worst inclinations and dislodge my concerns for his authoritarian tendencies or speak to shrinking the size and scope of the federal government, then he can win me over. The candidate who speaks to me tomorrow, if either one does, can wrestle my vote from being just a principled third-party vote.

Matt Katz: Peter, two quick questions. First, were you a Biden or Trump voter four years ago?

Peter: I have voted for the libertarian candidate every year since 2012.

Matt Katz: My second question--

Peter: I was a registered Democrat and a registered Republican during that time.

Matt Katz: Abortion as an issue, does that play to any of your libertarian ideology in terms of a candidate who does not want the government to regulate or stop people from getting abortions?

Peter: Great question. Probably one of the toughest things that I grapple with all the time. In my heart of hearts, I personally would be a pro-lifer, but I respect a person's individual authority over their own body, so you could put me in the pro-choice category. It's a kind of Mario Cuomo esque type of answer. Unfortunately, it doesn't probably get to where you want to be.

Matt Katz: No. Fair enough. Thank you, Peter. I hope the debate tomorrow is clarifying for you. Appreciate you calling in. Want to go back to the phones real quick. How about Maggie in Park Slope? Hi, Maggie. You're on with Molly Ball.

Maggie: Hi. How are you, guys?

Matt Katz: Good.

Maggie: I am just really curious about the people who will be able to vote for the first time, for the youngest generation of voters and how or if they're even polled. If they've just registered but have never voted, can they be considered likely voters? Are they surveyed at all? Do we know what kind of impact they might have? I'm really not clear on that.

Matt Katz: Good question. Molly, do you know?

Molly Ball: Yes, it's a great question. The answer is that pollsters do try to get those young voters and first-time voters. Pollsters are generally not only using a voter registration list. Not all states have a voter registration in advance of the election, so not all states require everyone to register. Most pollsters are attempting to get a random sample of people with phones or online who live in a particular geographic area. Those youngest voters, the ones who are just turning 18, they may come into the sample in that way.

Again, pollsters will be trying heroically to get them on the phone. We don't really know what their turnout will be. That is a significant question mark with every presidential election is there are these buckets of what we call low propensity voters. You do have a lot of voters, probably everyone listening to this show, who vote like clockwork every four years and believe it's their civic duty, and probably vote every two years in congressional elections, probably vote in the off years and city elections as well, but the presidential election attracts a lot of those infrequent voters for whom politics is much more like the Olympics.

You pay attention to it every four years, you make a decision, maybe at the last minute. You don't really tune into politics or see it as part of your identity at other times. Those are the hardest people for pollsters to calibrate because they may not make up their minds whether or how they're going to vote until relatively close to the election. It really depends on just the atmospherics.

Whether turnout is going to be historically high because so many people are galvanized and think it's important, or historically low because a lot of those infrequent voters just look at the presidential context and go, "I don't think it matters," or, "It's not for me," or, "I'm not interested," or, "I'm too pessimistic," "I don't think anything is going to change." When you hear elections are all about turnout, it sounds like a dumb thing to observe. Of course they are.

Whether people decide to go to the polls is probably the biggest X factor in any pollster's calculations. It's the biggest thing that we can't know in advance of the election. Those young voters that you're talking about are some of the hardest for pollsters to understand whether they're actually going to vote.

Matt Katz: I was thinking about those Gen Z voters when it comes to Trump's new nickname for Harris, Comrade Kamala. I'm just wondering if that terminology, which feels a little bit old fashioned to me, if that resonates with a Gen Z voter. Will they know that reference, that it's some sort of allusion to communism or whatnot? Is that nickname working? Is that something he's mentioning all the time? Are we going to hear it tomorrow night? What do you make of the nickname, and then more generally, the name calling and the effectiveness this time around?

Molly Ball: Well, look, a lot of Republican strategists who want Trump to win the election have been saying privately and publicly that they would like him to spend less time on these personal attacks. They look at the polls that show that voters don't like this administration's policies on the issues that they see as most important. They say Trump would be doing better if he would just focus on that. Trump, whenever he's asked about this, tends to say that he finds it kind of boring to just talk about the issues all the time. He feels that if he's being attacked, he has a right to punch back. Of course, the other side has certainly been attacking him plenty.

He said at one point recently that he feels entitled to personal attacks. I think is a larger statement. Trump believes that he wins when he fights. He thinks the people want to see a fighter, that voters don't really care if it's dirty. They think that's just how politics is. I feel like I've spent the last decade listening to these worried Republicans urge Trump to be disciplined and calm down and rein it in and stop with the personal attacks. We have a pretty long track record now of Trump not taking that advice. I would be pretty surprised if he suddenly changes his tune now.

Matt Katz: Sure. Then does the comrade resonate? Is that something that's--

Molly Ball: Oh, I don't know.

Matt Katz: Or saying he's better?

Molly Ball: I think it's a good question. I think we don't know the answer. I think we've seen him bounce around to different nicknames because-- and it's a good proxy for this larger struggle to define her. I had sort of the same thought. When a young person sees comrade, are they thinking back to soviet communism in the 1950s, or do they just think he's calling her a colleague? I really don't know.

Matt Katz: What do we know about her so-called Comrade Kamala's goals for tomorrow's debate? What's she trying to accomplish? Are there any distinct messages she's trying to convey through her performance on the debate stage? Does she have a particular tact stylistically in terms of how she might handle any insults or any policy attack? What are we expecting from her?

Molly Ball: I mean, the main thing that we've heard from her camp is more about tone, that she wants to present a stylistic contrast to Trump. This is part of why her campaign was trying to get the rules changed to allow the microphones to be on. She is hoping to portray him as erratic and unhinged and therefore dangerous. She wants to present herself as calm and cool headed and "presidential" by comparison.

I think the main thing that we're expecting from her is similar to what I think she was trying to achieve in her convention speech, is to present herself as serious and sober and engaged with the issues and as someone that voters can see being president, because unlike Trump, she has not been president before. She's trying to convince a skeptical portion of the electorate that she's ready to do the job, that she's prepared to do the job, that she knows the issues, that she has a vision for how she would handle the job. While I think there will be plenty of attacks by both candidates on each other, I think the larger goal for Kamala Harris is to get voters to see her as a potential president.

Matt Katz: What is she like as a debater? I don't remember the 2020 debate between Harris and Mike Pence, the vice presidential debate. She also debated other Democrats in 2019 during the primary. What are her strengths, weaknesses? What does the scouting report say about her history as a debater?

Molly Ball: Isn't it interesting how forgettable that debate, the vice presidential debate, was four years ago? I think most people probably remember the fly that landed on Mike Pence's hair.

Matt Katz: That was so strange. Yes.

Molly Ball: Those airless, I guess, mid-COVID times when all kinds of weird things were happening in the air. Then there was the one viral-ish moment where Pence was interrupting her, and she interrupted him back and said, "I'm speaking." That, I think, goes to the sort of tonal idea. This idea that she's got this prosecutorial demeanor. We saw that when she was in the Senate. We frequently had these viral moments where she was questioning Trump's nominees, Jeff Sessions, Brett Kavanaugh, that prosecutor's instinct to badger a defendant and try to pin them down on a specific substantive point.

We also see that whether it's in interviews or debates, she can be a little bit cautious and mealy-mouthed. She can get on these tangents where she says a lot of words, but doesn't really say anything, or she's vague and doesn't answer the question. I think her advisors are probably working to rein in some of those tendencies as well and try to encourage her to give crisp clear answers.

In the primary debates in 2020, of course, her big moment was when she went after Joe Biden, which got her a lot of attention, and then the bounce deflated when she couldn't follow that up by contrasting her policies with his. It turned out that there wasn't really a substantive point that she was making beyond showcasing her personal story in contrast to his, which did move a lot of people, but again, then she wasn't able to follow through on it.

Matt Katz: I'm curious, who's doing debate prep? Who's acting as the opposing candidate? I'm always fascinated by who pretends to be the opposition candidate in debate prep.

Molly Ball: It is fun. I always wish that we could be behind the scenes and watch these sessions because they must be fascinating. Trump's team has said that he's not doing typical debate prep where they actually rehearse with a stand in. Although he is doing some Q&As with advisors, including the Florida Congressman Matt Gates, and just, I guess, chit chatting about policy with his aides, with people around him.

Harris is doing a much more traditional debate rehearsal where someone pretends to be Trump, and I believe it's Philippe Reines, a former Hillary Clinton aide, who also played that role with the Clinton campaign in 2016 and later posted some video from it where he really did try to inhabit the role, dressing as Trump and imitating him and trying to do some of the physical maneuvers that Trump would sometimes get up to on the stage with Clinton, where he would move around and seem to be looming over her at times. Her advisors are trying to acclimate her to what it's actually going to be like to be on that stage in hopes that that will put her more at ease in the moment.

Matt Katz: I want to play one more clip about policy before I let you go. This is Donald Trump at the Economic Club of New York last week, talking about the cost of childcare.

Donald Trump: Look, childcare is childcare. It is something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. When you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to, but they'll get used to it very quickly. It's not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including childcare, that it's going to take care. I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country because I have to stay with childcare. I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I'm talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We're going to be getting trillions of dollars. As much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it's, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we'll be taking in.

Matt Katz: Molly, what was he talking about there?

Molly Ball: Tariffs. He was talking about tariffs. I think this is something that we can expect to hear from Kamala Harris on the debate stage, which is that the Trump campaign has really opened the door to this because they have been so aggressive about saying, where are her policies? What are her policies? Isn't she going to talk about policy? She can turn that back around on him and say, well, where are his policies? What on earth is he talking about?

Is he saying that the tariffs would bring in government revenue that would allow the government to create some sort of new subsidy for childcare? Or is he saying that because of the tariffs and the growth that they would hypothetically create, everyone would be so rich that they would be able to pay for childcare, and it just wouldn't be an issue? How does he answer the vast majority of economists who say that is not what the tariffs would do, that, in fact, they would make inflation much worse and would have a negative effect on economic growth, and that that deficits are likely to blow up, as they did on Trump's watch the first time.

He also got a question, I believe it was in that same appearance, about the deficit. Instead of talking about the fiscal deficit, he started talking about the trade deficit, which is not the same thing. He's not someone who's ever been someone I would consider a policy wonk. I think that because they have been so aggressive about attacking Harris as not having well-formulated policies, it gives her an opportunity to turn that around and say, all right, explain to me exactly how your policies work and what you would do, because it's not something that you hear in an answer like that.

Matt Katz: Molly, thank you for that interpretation. Thank you for this analysis. We're going to leave it there today. Listeners, as we've been discussing, presidential debate is tomorrow night. You can hear live coverage of the ABC News presidential debate simulcast from NPR right here on WNYC, followed by analysis starting at 9:00 on 93.9 FM, AM 820, or livestream@wnyc.org. my guest has been Molly Ball, senior political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, host of the new podcast series Red, White and Who? Molly, thanks so much for coming on the show. Enjoy this debate tomorrow night. No matter what, it'll be interesting, right?

Molly Ball: It's going to be a doozy. Thanks so much for having me.

 

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