Unlike Donald Trump, who has given voters long if rambling speeches at rallies while also doing clickbait interviews with personalities like Dr. Phil and Elon Musk, Kamala Harris has run a controlled and tightly scripted Presidential campaign. At her events, where the opening bars of Beyoncé’s “Freedom” announce the arrival of the headliner, Harris’s speeches have been a mix of carefully chosen policy announcements and a stump repertoire of call-and-response phrases (“When we fight?” “We win!” and, of course, “We’re not going back”). Her public appearances rarely last much more than twenty minutes.
As the weeks have gone on, Harris’s slim list of on-the-record interviews and her failure to hold a formal press conference has become increasingly noticeable: a moment in August when she, before boarding Air Force 2, surprised a shouting press corps by walking up and asking “What you got?” was rare enough to generate headlines. Since the candidate switch-up, Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have given nearly forty interviews to the press, while Harris and Tim Walz have given just one with a major news network, plus a handful of radio interviews. That interview, which aired in late August on CNN, had its own staged quality, with a number of predictable questions drawn from the Trump campaign’s attack narratives—Walz’s misleading descriptions of his service in the National Guard, Harris’s shifting stance on fracking—which were answered by equally predictable assertions that mistakes were made. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris promised.
This apparent reluctance to improvise or to confront the unexpected on air has given an aura of fragility to what has otherwise been a well-executed campaign. Harris has reinvigorated and cohered her party’s base, but her carefully managed media presence betrays the story being told to voters about her fearlessness as a hard-hitting prosecutor and former attorney general of California. Harris is often portrayed as being at her sharpest when she is interrogating others—clips of her questioning Brett Kavanaugh played during the D.N.C.—but the public has little new footage of the candidate answering questions herself. The debate will be a chance to see Harris speak freely, and also to get a better sense of her attitude toward Trump. Her preferred way of talking about him has been wry and a little sarcastic, presenting Trump both as a would-be dictator but also as a fairy-tale monster one no longer believes in. (“Same old tired playbook,” she said during the CNN interview, dismissing a question about Trump’s comments about her race. “Next question, please.”) Whether this approach can hold up in person remains to be seen.