PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will meet for the first time face-to-face Tuesday night for perhaps their only debate, a high-pressure opportunity to showcase their starkly different visions for the country after a tumultuous campaign summer.
Hours ahead of the 9 p.m. start, road closures have been put into effect and security has been beefed up around the National Constitution Center in Old City, which will host the highly anticipated event.
High fences have been erected around the perimeter of the venue from Arch to Market streets between 4th and 7th streets. Only those who work at the Constitution Center or within that perimeter are allowed in. They must go through a Secret Service checkpoint, which includes a car sweep.
When it comes to security coordination, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said the department has been in constant communication with the Secret Service, which has been under a spotlight ever since the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally in Butler, PA on July 13.
"We also add additional assets: our state police assets will be on the ground with us, to support us, but we are working with our federal partners," said Bethel. "It's a collective effort."
After the evening rush, things will get tougher when Philadelphia closes the eastbound off-ramp of I-676 to get to the Ben Franklin Bridge. There could also be rolling closures in the area, caused by motorcades as well as demonstrations expected later in the day.
Bethel said authorities do expect a few demonstrations, but not many.
"People get to express their opinion, and we would ask them to continue in that posture. We will allow them to exercise their 1st amendment rights," he said.
But if they were to turn violent, Bethel said police are prepared to respond.
"If that was to occur, our posture would shift into a much stronger approach," he said.
Bethel added that the increased security for the debate won’t affect other parts of the city — and that the other police districts will be fully staffed.
The debate is hosted by ABC News and will also be simulcast on KYW Newsradio. It offers Americans their most detailed look at a campaign that’s dramatically changed since the last debate in June. In rapid fashion, President Joe Biden bowed out of the race after his disastrous performance in a previous debate, Trump survived an assassination attempt and both sides selected their running mates.
Harris is intent on demonstrating that she can press the Democratic case against Trump better than Biden did. Trump, in turn, is trying to paint the vice president as an out-of-touch liberal while trying to win over voters skeptical he should return to the White House.
Trump, 78, has struggled to adapt to Harris, 59, who is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president. The Republican former president has at times resorted to invoking racial and gender stereotypes, frustrating allies who want Trump to focus instead on policy differences with Harris.
The vice president, for her part, will try to claim a share of credit for the Biden administration’s accomplishments while also addressing its low moments and explaining her shifts away from more liberal positions she took in the past.
The debate will subject Harris, who has sat for only a single formal interview in the past six weeks, to a rare moment of sustained questioning.
“If she performs great, it’s going to be a nice surprise for the Democrats and they’ll rejoice," said Ari Fleischer, a Republican communications strategist and former press secretary to President George W. Bush. "If she flops, like Joe Biden did, it could break this race wide open. So there’s more riding on it.”
Tim Hogan, who led Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s debate preparations in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, said Harris, a former California attorney general, would bring a “prosecutor's instincts to the debate stage.”
“That is a very strong quality in that setting: having someone who knows how to land a punch and how to translate it," Hogan said.
Dr. Ben Berger, a political science professor at Swarthmore University, told KYW Newsradio’s “The Week in Philly” podcast that both candidates are trying to reach undecided voters in swing states.
“That particular group is who's being targeted, and that group [has] seen Donald Trump as president for four years,” he said. “They've [heard] him talked about for four years after that. They know his shtick, basically, but they don't really know Kamala Harris.”
Berger called the debate a big opportunity for Harris to roll out some of her specific policy proposals.
The first early ballots of the presidential race will go out just hours after the debate. Absentee ballots are set to be sent out beginning Wednesday in Alabama.
Trump plans to hit Harris as too liberal
Trump and his campaign have spotlighted far-left positions she took during her failed 2020 presidential bid. He’s been assisted in his informal debate prep sessions by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who tore into Harris during their primary debates.
Harris has sought to defend her shifts away from liberal causes to more moderate stances on fracking, expanding Medicare for all and mandatory gun buyback programs — and even backing away from her position that plastic straws should be banned — as pragmatism, insisting that her “values remain the same.” Her campaign on Monday published a page on its website listing her positions on key issues.
The former president has argued a Harris presidency is a threat to the safety of the country, highlighting that Biden tapped her to address the influx of migrants as the Republican once again makes dark warnings about immigration and those in the country illegally central to his campaign. He has sought to portray a Harris presidency as the continuation of Biden’s administration, particularly his economic record, as voters still feel the bite of inflation even as it has cooled in recent months.
Trump’s team insists his tone won’t be any different facing a female opponent.
“President Trump is going to be himself,” senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters during a phone call Monday.
Gabbard, who was also on the call, added that Trump “respects women and doesn’t feel the need to be patronizing or to speak to women in any other way than he would speak to a man.”
His advisers suggest Harris has a tendency to express herself in a “word salad” of meaningless phrases, prompting Trump to say last week that his debate strategy was to “let her talk.”
The former president frequently plows into rambling remarks that detour from his policy points. He regularly makes false claims about the last election, attacks a lengthy list of enemies and opponents working against him, offers praise for foreign strongmen and comments about race, like his false claim in July that Harris recently “happened to turn Black.”
Harris wants to argue Trump is unstable and unfit
The vice president, who has been the Biden administration’s most outspoken supporter of abortion access after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, is expected to focus on calling out Trump’s inconsistencies around women’s reproductive care, including his announcement that he will vote to protect Florida’s six-week abortion ban in a statewide referendum this fall.
Harris was also set to try to portray herself as a steadier hand to lead the nation and safeguard its alliances, as war rages in Ukraine more than two years after Russia’s invasion and Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza drags on with no end in sight.
She is likely to warn that Trump presents a threat to democracy, from his attempts in 2020 to overturn his loss in the presidential election, spurring his angry supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, through comments he made as recently as last weekend. Trump on social media issued yet another message of retribution, threatening that if he wins he will jail “those involved in unscrupulous behavior,” including lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials.
Berger said those points make the Constitution Center a fitting venue for the televised showdown. “There has been quite a lot of discussion in the last several years about the Constitution being in peril because of things Donald Trump has done. Now, listeners can agree or disagree with that, but the place to be having this debate, a place that enshrines the Constitution,” he said.
Harris has spent the better part of the last five days ensconced in debate preparations in Pennsylvania, where she participated in hours-long mock sessions with a Trump stand-in. Ahead of the debate, she told radio host Rickey Smiley that she was workshopping how to respond if Trump lies.
“There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go,” she said.
Michelle L. Price and Zeke Miller reported for the Associated Press. AP Polling Editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington and Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Las Vegas, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Josh Boak in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.