U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate in the November election, and her Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, agreed Thursday to a high-stakes, prime-time television debate September 10 on ABC News.
NBC News is discussing a potential second debate with both campaigns.
Meanwhile, Trump said at a lengthy news conference that CBS News had agreed to host a vice presidential debate between his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, and Harris’ ticket mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Trump said he had also accepted a September 4 debate date on Fox News, where an array of conservative commentators favor his election, but the Harris campaign has not agreed.
The Harris-Trump face-off that was agreed to is likely to be one of the pivotal moments of the campaign leading to the November 5 election. It almost certainly will be watched by millions of voters, at least a small sliver of whom may not have already decided whom to vote for.
Pollsters show the contest is currently a virtual dead heat, with Harris perhaps edging ahead.
Biden-Trump debate
One debate — between Trump and President Joe Biden — has already played a key role in the election of a new president for a four-year term in the White House starting next January.
Biden, 81, stumbled badly in his June 27 debate with Trump, often losing his train of thought and unable to either sustain an attack on Trump or defend his own 3½ years in office.
With falling polling numbers and pressure from fellow Democrats to withdraw from the campaign, Biden ended his reelection effort July 21 and immediately endorsed Harris, 59. If elected, she would be the country’s first female chief executive, its second Black president after Barack Obama, and the first person of Indian descent to lead the country.
Biden trailed Trump in national surveys by 5 or 6 percentage points when he dropped out of the contest, but Democrats have quickly rallied to Harris’ side. She has edged ahead of Trump by a percentage point or two in numerous surveys across the country but still trails him in some political battleground states that are likely to determine the national outcome.
Trump answered 37 questions Thursday afternoon at a 65-minute news conference at his oceanside Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. It was a session intended as a put-down of Harris and her failure to hold a full-scale question-and-answer session with reporters in the 18 days since Biden ended his campaign.
Trump, 78, relentlessly disparaged Harris, attacked her as an intellectual lightweight, described her as “a radical left person” out of touch with mainstream voters and repeatedly mispronounced her first name as “Kuh-mahl-uh,” instead of the correct “Comma-la.”
“She can’t do an interview, she’s barely competent,” Trump claimed. “She’s not smart enough to do a news conference.”
He described her as “worse than Biden and not as smart,” but said later, “It’s not really about her. It’s her bad policies.”
Numerous falsehoods
Trump uttered numerous falsehoods during the news conference, including one instance when he claimed about 1,500 people had showed up at Harris rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday, when in fact the raucous crowds numbered in the thousands.
In another instance, he wrongly said no one was killed as about 2,000 of his supporters marched to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, trying to block Congress from certifying that he had lost his 2020 reelection bid to Biden. More than 1,000 were arrested, some of whom vandalized the U.S. seat of government and rampaged into congressional offices. Police shot to death one of Trump’s supporters, and others died in the trauma of the day.
He claimed, “The vast majority of the country does support me,” when he did not win the popular vote in either of his presidential campaigns, in 2016 and four years ago. He currently is viewed favorably by 43% of Americans.
In campaign events, Harris and Trump have each been reminding voters of the other’s perceived shortcomings.
Harris does not waste a moment of her campaign speeches before reminding voters, as she did Wednesday, that she was a longtime local and state prosecutor in California, the most populous U.S. state, who put convicted felons behind bars.
She knows Trump’s “type,” Harris likes to say, noting that he is a convicted felon who also has been found liable for millions of dollars in damages in civil business fraud and defamation cases.
On Thursday, it was Trump’s turn to zing Harris. Vance had attacked her the day before for not holding an open-ended news conference or sitting down for an interview with a media outlet since she became the likely Democratic presidential nominee.
Harris has had fleeting exchanges with reporters who have been tracking her campaign but has not engaged in a full question-and-answer session.
Trump has been looking for ways to regain the attention of voters as Harris has dominated the news since becoming the Democrats’ standard-bearer. This week, she kept the spotlight by announcing that Walz would become her running mate.
Democrats on road, Trump at home
The Harris-Walz ticket immediately embarked on a multistate visit to the half-dozen states that will play a pivotal role in determining who will take over the White House. Trump stayed in Florida this week to raise campaign funds.
Both campaigns canceled Thursday rallies in the mid-Atlantic state of North Carolina as Tropical Storm Debby raged across the region, leaving some towns and cities with significant flooding.
Harris and Walz spoke in Michigan at an event with Shawn Fain, president of the influential United Automobile Workers union, which endorsed Harris last week.
She answered a handful of questions from reporters after the rally, saying that at some point she would sit for an interview with a media outlet.
“I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month,” she said.
Both campaigns are heading to the western U.S. for events Friday evening.
