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Alright folks, the U.S. Presidential debate is coming up tomorrow night. I'm invested because I've got friends from both sides of the aisle coming, so we'll see what's going to happen...
What do you think will be the major issues discussed? Strengths for Trump? Strengths for Harris?
Outside of just 'debating skills' what do you think the policy strengths/weaknesses will be? My guesses:
I doubt these will come up, but my personal dream is that nuclear and crypto become talking points, and Trump very publicly comes out for both. We'll have to wait and see.
So - what are you predictions my fellow Mottizens?
Ok let's play some fantasy football here in the comments:
YOU are the wizard of oz behind the Kamalarama. You need to come up with a line of argument, a plan of attack, to coach her on that will win the debate for your candidate. What do you do? Litigate Project 2025? Bring up Hannibal Lecter in your own answers (seriously what's the deal with that)? Ask him when he last spoke to Mike Pence? Ask him when he stopped cheating on Melania?
What's the attack she can launch here?
The best outcome for Harris, and also the most likely outcome where the debate makes a large difference (I agree with other commentators that the debate is unlikely to change anything and that the most likely outcome is that both candidates have been effectively sedated by their teams and we get a mediocre snoozefest where nobody takes risks), is that she manages to put Trump on tilt and he spends a large part of the debate rambling incoherently. Double points if he rambles incoherently about the 2020 election because that makes him look like a bad loser.
I don't know what are the best attacks to put Trump on tilt, but I assume Harris has people on her team who do have an idea. The critical point is that the target audience is Trump, not the people watching on TV. The cliche one is to talk about how small his hands are.
prescient! as was parent's hannibal lecter mention.
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I think emulating Obama's 2012 "the 1980s called. They want their foreign policy back" debate performance is probably a good call. Especially with how effective the "Republicans are weird" attacks have been recently. Be confident and even a little dismissive, while constantly jabbing at how weird/conspiratorial Trump and his allies are. Try to bait Trump into coming across as a loony old man while presenting herself as the boring, safe option that's not going to slip into senility two years in.
This could backfire and come across as bitchy if Trump manages to remain disciplined and statesmanlike, but Trump historically has about half an hour in him before discipline breaks down and he starts free associating.
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I think something like Trumps tax cuts and tariffs are going to blow up the economy at a precarious time when you want the adults in charge, could work.
Maybe a "too online" jab as a variation of the "weird" jab now that he's getting Elon Musk to cut down the government, which intrigues me but could come off as alienating or reckless to the average voter? Basically emphasize that she cares about what people in the real world think instead of being obsessed with the internet.
Abortion should be an obvious win especially with the recent Trump Florida flip flop.
I think laying out a succinct case for what Trump's recent criminal cases are about, and push the fake electors story hard, saying something like two terms won't be enough, and after Trump it'll be Trump Jr. or something.
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I think the best line of attack would be portraying Trump as a buffoon who lacks the work ethic or principles to accomplish anything or even do his job. Not a neo-Hitler or American ayatollah, but a huckster whose entire vision is driven by whatever talking head he last saw on Fox said. Mention how many games of golf he played while President (ideally, claim he has a terrible handicap and draw him into a prolonged argument about how good he really is). Have a long list of his broken promises and, if possible, at least some plausible sketch of a story of how the Biden/Harris administration actually fulfilled them. I'd encourage her to heavily embellish those stories; if there's even a remote kernel of reality to them, she won't get any flak for it, and even if it's an outright fabrication it doesn't matter too much. At the same time, represent herself as a competent workhorse who's capable of handling the job of President. Have defenses at the ready for attacks around her being too liberal, and feel free to jettison or reject any policies that are inconvenient.
The problem with playing exclusively the man and not the ball is that you only discredit Trump and not any of the things he wants to do. If you beat Trump by effectively saying that tariffs, immigration control, free speech etc. are great then people will expect you to implement those things in office. So you’ve won the battle but lost the war.
Ideally, you want to discredit your enemy and his ideas at the same time:
‘Orange Man’s ideas must be stupid, listen to him ramble on!’ And simultaneously, ‘only an idiot could think that cutting off free trade will improve the economy’.
Winning is winning. I think people here overstate the level of committed ideology among practicing politicians. They mostly want to win and be celebrated by culture.
There's the time honored strategy of campaigning one way and then governing another. You'll have less public support to implement your maximalist goals, but you'll also have won an election (and helped more downballot Democrats win their elections). That leaves you in a better position to achieve maximalist goals than losing and being the minority party. When you wield power is when you try to shift public opinion: you have more tools at your disposal.
All true.
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Seems like a pretty good strategy; I guess the obvious problem is the conflict with previous messaging, and trump appealing to his actual record in office versus kamala's record in office. still, a better suggestion than I think most of the strategists are offering.
Well, the previous messaging is baked in already. But although the best time to have good messaging is yesterday, the second best time is today.
There's a nice side benefit: Republicans will then say "she's a weather vane who's abandoned all her previous policies!" That does some damage to her, of course, but it's mitigated because voters hear "she abandoned a bunch of failed policies and is more moderate nowadays."
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The smart attack is to outflank him from the populist side by out-promising him in a vague way. Whatever Trump says he'll do (on the economy, immigration, whatever) she'll do even more and better. "I'll do even more and give you more free stuff."
This approach doesn't appeal to me personally at all, and probably doesn't appeal to the type of person who is coaching Kamala for the debate, but it appeals to the average voter and Trump would have a hard time rebutting it.
I think the rebuttal would be to point out that she's been VP for 4 years, and neither she nor Biden nor the other Democrats have done or tried to do most of those things, and it's off-brand for them to even try. If Kamala promises to build a wall and it will be "uge! bigger and better than any wall ever built before. The best wall!" Trump will call her a liar. Now granted, Trump also didn't build a wall, but he tried, and can blame the Democrats for not letting him.
Kamala is restricted to promises that are consistent with Democrat positions, at least if she doesn't want to get called out as a blatant liar. And avoid alienating the Democrat voters.
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I think her strongest line of attack would be the people who have worked with him before who either disavow him or are endorsing Harris. The nonpolitical normies are most likely to defer to people whose names they know and that they remember as competent bureaucrats.
Trump's best retort to that would be "Like Dick Cheney!" Maybe pantomiming a shotgun.
Yeah hammer home they are people like Cheney and it was a regret you (ie Trump) had in first admin. Then note the turnover Harris has in her office but note it wasn’t political but personal. Recount the story about how she made the intern stand when she walked into the office whilst being California AG.
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What do you mean what's with it? It's a joke in a laugh line Trump has given in a few speeches. It's not esoteric.
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I honestly don't know, because I cannot possibly craft an argument she could make at this late stage which could possibly win me over. Her proposals to raise capital gains tax, a new unrealized gains tax, her talk about how Trump has lost his "privilege" of free speech, this woman will utterly ruin this country. At best the deep state runs her like a puppet, same as they did Biden, to prosecute pointless foreign wars while a feckless DEI cabinet lets the country burn as they give speeches about how bridges are racist and sexist.
As for what she can do to win over that extra 1% of the electorate to clinch a close election, I'm not sure that's on her. That's going to be on the media to craft her legend, and social media to censor anything that puts holes in it. I mean, already, with virtually nothing that's changed about her, she's still the same abject failure of a presidential candidate she was in 2020. But the media has turned her into the second coming of Obama based on nothing.
All she really needs to do is get a few canned lines out that the media spin masters can work with, regardless of context. That'll be clipped out. If she can get out a single "I'm talking now", whether it lands or not during the debate, SNL this Saturday will have a long hagiographic cold open dedicated to it. More people will see that than the debate, and that's how they'll actually remember it. And everyone will clap.
It doesn't work that way anymore because the very concept of a 'mainstream media' was shattered into a hundred thousand screaming fragments by the bale curse of social media. 'respectable' media like NYC and ABC may capture the lib normies but that audience is growing smaller by the year and more out of touch by the moment.
No one even remotely in our reality would think Kamala is a strong candidate.
Someone reported this as "Building consensus," and it does come awfully close to saying "Nobody could possibly disagree with me." I'm gonna call this a borderline statement of opinion, but do avoid making statements like this no matter how strongly you think they are true, because there certainly are people "in our reality" (though maybe not on the Motte) who think this.
I apologize. I've got a bad habit of making hot takes.
To expand on that pithy statement, I can't see her as anything but a worse version of Hillary Clinton. She, at the very least, had experience in government and political wrangling. What does Kamala have in comparison?
Harris is a better candidate than Hillary Clinton. Clinton treated voters with apathy at best and unveiled contempt at worst. Kamala, whatever someone thinks of her substance, is actually trying to appeal to voters.
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Mainstream media proved it still existed and was stronger than ever during COVID and the Summer of Floyd.
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All this could be, and I feel the same way. And yet, the fact remains, lots of voters are not "even remotely in our reality". The mainstream media might be shattered, but Kamala only needs to nudge things fractions of a percent, and those shards are fully capable of that.
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