Harris's Debate Gambit Declined
The Kamala Harris campaign released a statement on Friday stating that they had agreed to debate former President Trump on October 23 on CNN. Would he join?
On Sunday, Harris made the extra effort to come to the press line from her armored car, a rare move. [She usually quickly waves from a safe distance so that she can pretend that she didn't hear any questions that a reporter may have shouted out]. In response to a reporter's question - What's your message to Trump? - she said:
Join me on the debate stage. Let's have another debate. There's more to talk about. The voters deserve to hear conversations on substance, issues, and policies.
Aside from the fact that she referred to Trump as the "former Vice President," Harris's offer was fundamentally without merit and inherently dishonest. The ABC debate was anything but a discussion on substance, issues, and policies. It was a spectacle in which the moderators only fact-checked Trump and let Harris spew multiple lies on the war (the number of American soldiers on combat duty abroad), abortion (nine states, including Washington D.C., have no restrictions whatsoever), and the border (when she blamed Trump for her poor oversight that resulted in over 20 million illegal immigrants flocking to every part of America).
The 2024 election season has been unlike any other modern presidential election. It is the only time a major party nominee withdrew after winning the nomination but chose to remain in the White House as a lame-duck president. [On Friday, Jill Biden, the First Lady, chaired the first cabinet meeting in 11 months, in an unprecedented move]. 2024 is the only time that a major party nominee was installed rather than competitively winning the nomination. It was also the first time that an assassination attempt was made on a major party nominee, not once, but twice.
From a debate perspective, 2024 is also the first election season since 1987, when the candidates and the networks agreed to debates without the leadership of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The CPD's goal was to set the ground rules to ensure that debates are fair, impartial, and accessible to the public. Historically, the CPD used to select the moderators and determine the locations and formats.
The CPD was organizationally made up of members from the two major political parties and representatives from various organizations. But in the Trump era, many erstwhile members of the GOP have moved over to join the Democrats to create a Uniparty, robbing the CPD of its perceived brand of bi-partisanship. The 2020 presidential debates between Trump and Biden, one of which was hosted by Chris Wallace, an avowed Trump hater, showed that even CPD-sponsored debates could become overly partisan.
The CPD has not been involved in any presidential debates this year. The June 27 debate between Trump and Biden in Atlanta was the result of the campaigns directly negotiating with CNN regarding the rules and the format. The September 10 debate between Trump and Harris on ABC was similar.
Initially, Trump refused to participate, insisting that he had only agreed with the Biden campaign to debate him and not Harris. Perhaps Trump was moved by our TIPP poll ten days before the debate, which showed that 75% of Americans wanted to see three Trump-Harris debates, as has been the custom since 1984. When pressure mounted, Trump agreed and walked into a lion's den.
The ABC debate moderators were so pro-Harris that it was a travesty of American journalism. Linsey Davis, one of the moderators and a sorority sister of Harris, admitted in a Los Angeles Times article that she only fact-checked Trump and not Harris because she didn't want Trumpian statements to hang as it happened in the Trump-Biden debate in Atlanta.
People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators.
It never occurred to Davis that fact-checking only one side and not the other was equivalent to a referee in a football game taking sides. Rumors have surfaced, debunked by ABC News, that debate questions were circulated to Harris before the event. Whether the latter story is true or not is irrelevant. The world saw how a 1-1 debate between two presidential candidates turned into a 3-1 show.
Furthermore, the moderators failed to ask Harris why she had avoided addressing President Biden's frailties for many years, which half of Americans, including 49% of independents, saw as a major oversight of the moderators.
At a rally in North Carolina, Trump referred to the Harris campaign's offer of a second debate and refused it. We agree with Trump here. We also agree with Trump that CNN could be unfair and that a debate so late in the game when early voting has already begun is pointless. Even if it were to be held on Fox, Trump shouldn't do it.
Mainstream media outlets are releasing story after story, insisting that Harris is in the lead nationally and statistically tied in the battleground states. Media polls may have numerous motivations and be laden with bias and error; internal polls conducted by the campaigns are a far better indicator of the race's current state. These polls direct campaigns to send their candidates to where their time(the most scarce resource), is most optimally spent. If Harris is in the lead, why does she want to debate Trump?
The more Harris talks to the press, the more apparent it becomes that all she does is repeat canned lines no matter what the question. Americans know that she is an ultra-left-wing liberal who is trying to portray herself as a moderate and run out the clock with the help of friendly media outlets. A debate ten days before the election is intended to falsely reinforce to the public that Harris is a mainstream moderate. Trump should not be a part of this show.
He is right to refuse to debate Harris.