Kamala Harris’s task in Wednesday’s debate against Mike Pence is to deliver for her supporters who hope to see a sharp, offensive performance without falling into any sexist tropes or looking like a bully.
The California senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee is known for being a sharp questioner in Senate hearings. And she deployed one of the most brutal debate attacks in recent memory last year when she slammed her now-running mate former vice president Joe Biden for working with segregationist senators to oppose busing in the 1970s.
“Senator Harris needs to play offense and put the vice president on defense the entire debate,” Democratic strategist Moe Vela, who worked as a senior adviser for Biden during the Obama administration, told the Washington Examiner. “He’s got to defend Donald Trump’s ineptitude on the virus.”
“Now, she also has to strike a balance,” Vela added. “At the same time, she also has to share with the American people what her and Vice President Biden’s vision and plan is to get the country back on its feet.”
Going too hard on Pence, if he doesn’t match her tone of attack, could reflect negatively on Harris. She likely won’t have to worry about the vice president continuously interrupting her in Wednesday’s vice presidential debate, as President Trump did to Biden in last week’s first presidential debate.
Pence was cool and stern in his debate against Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine in 2016. He was skilled at turning any question back to a talking point designed to reach voters as Kaine kept his own focus on policy. Instant polls conducted immediately after the debate found that Pence had an edge in that debate.
And Harris’s historic stature as the first woman of color on a vice presidential debate stage also creates a challenge.
“She faces probably a different kind of scrutiny than she has faced in the past,” Debbie Walsh of Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics told the Washington Examiner. “It still is relatively unchartered territory for women, running at this level.”
If she is too aggressive, Harris risks falling into a trope of being an “angry black woman,” Walsh said, or as Trump has said, “nasty.”
Harris is only the fourth woman to participate in a presidential or vice-presidential debate, following Hillary Clinton in 2016, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin in 2008 and Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.
”There’s an assumption of qualifications that comes with two male candidates that the female candidates, and I think particularly female candidates of color, struggle with because there’s just this assumption that they’re not, and that they have to prove themselves,” Walsh said. “A lot of Democrats have watched her for a while now because of her presidential run, but for a lot of Americans, this is their first chance to sort of see her and hear her.”
Vela, though, thought that Harris’s favorable poll numbers and higher approval ratings than Clinton’s in 2016 will help her avoid falling into negative tropes.
The two candidates are set to sit 12 feet apart at a table for the debate, with plexiglass dividing them in order to prevent the potential spread of the coronavirus. Trump tested positive for the virus two weeks after last week’s debate, potentially exposing Biden to the disease.
That image of plexiglass diving the two candidates could look awkward to viewers, but could also play to Harris’s advantage as a reminder of the pandemic — a topic that Trump’s campaign would rather avoid.
“To me, the imagery is just furthering the division that we’re all feeling in the country right now,” Vela said.
