Harris relents on muting debate microphones

Vice President Kamala Harris agreed to ABC News’ rules for next week’s debate with Donald Trump, relenting on her campaign’s demand that both candidates’ microphones be unmuted for all 90 minutes they are on stage.

In a letter to the network, Harris’ senior adviser for communications Brian Fallon wrote that he believed the format “fundamentally disadvantaged” the vice president, denying the former prosecutor the opportunity to fully cross-examine the GOP nominee, according to a person familiar with the missive.

The muted mic, Fallon wrote, “will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President. We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign's insistence on muted microphones.”

He continued: “We understand that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format. We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accept the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones.”

In the letter, portions of which were conveyed to POLITICO, Fallon also laid out other verbal agreements about the debate format that were important in getting Harris’ team to sign off on the final rules, the person familiar with the matter said.

Those agreed-to stipulations enable the moderators to admonish any candidate who interrupts and urge them to convey anything said into a muted mic to the broader audience. Additionally, the network will have the ability to keep both microphones open during crosstalk or any heated back-and-forth. And, unlike in the June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, the small pool of journalists traveling with Harris should be in the debate hall and close enough to the stage to be able to hear any remarks that are muted for the wider television audience.

But ABC News disputed that there were any new agreements beyond what they agreed to in May when Trump’s campaign and Biden’s team, who pushed for the muted mics, committed to the Sept. 10 debate. “Beyond the debate rules published today, which were mutually agreed upon by two campaigns on May 15, we have made no other agreements,” the network said in a statement. “We look forward to moderating the presidential debate next Tuesday.”

While Harris told reporters Wednesday that debate prep was “so far, so good” as she departed New Hampshire after a day of campaigning, the team of aides involved in what will be nearly a week of prep in Pittsburgh have been somewhat flustered about having failed to amend one of the rules Trump and Biden’s teams agreed to months earlier and ensure that Trump’s mic would not be muted.

When Harris’ team made its first public push on the matter last week, Fallon suggested that Trump’s team “[doesn’t] think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”

Trump, perhaps aware of the optics, said he was fine with un-muting the mics. But his team — namely senior adviser Jason Miller, who has been the campaign’s representative in meetings with ABC about the debate — has refused to agree to the rule change, according to a person familiar with the meetings.

That’s left Harris’ debate prep team in some upheaval as it decamps for Pittsburgh, where the vice president plans to hunker down until Tuesday night’s main event.

Another person familiar with the group’s private conversations described Karen Dunn, the longtime Democratic operative who is overseeing the prep sessions along with policy adviser Rohini Kosoglu, as “morose” over the network’s muting of Trump’s microphone while Harris is speaking. Dunn, not exactly a prolific tweeter, posted POLITICO’s coverage of the microphone negotiations last week. Twice.

Harris’ team has already held some mock debate sessions with longtime Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines playing Trump. But the second person familiar with the campaign’s conversations and thinking suggested that the final, more concentrated debate prep sessions may include an overhaul of Harris’ strategy.

The vice president, the person said, “can’t have her Kavanaugh moment without sound on [the] mic” — a reference to Harris’ interrogation of Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Harris, whose stump speech leans into her work as a prosecutor and her familiarity with Trump’s “type,” may be looking to reprise the kind of direct questioning that bruised Trump’s second Supreme Court pick about the special counsel investigation of the then-president and his stance on reproductive rights.

“Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” she asked in an exchange that went viral.

But directly questioning Trump — whether about his contradictory recent statements on abortion ; his familiarity with Project 2025, the hard-right policy template drawn up for a second term by conservative activists and veterans of his first administration; or anything else — may be possible only if ABC allows the candidates to engage in a dialogue that would require both of their microphones being open at the same time.

That’s a big if.

But for all the Harris team’s public and private focus on the microphones, they’re also aware that the pressure is largely on the vice president, a candidate many voters don’t know well, facing off against a former president whose personality and aggression on stage are well documented.

In some early expectation-setting, top campaign aides, including senior adviser David Plouffe on Tuesday, have described Harris as the “underdog” against an opponent who will be taking part in his seventh general election debate. But Jim Messina, an informal adviser to the Harris campaign, said a solid Harris performance could be decisive with voters trying to assess whether they can see her in the Oval Office — just as it was, Messina recalled, for Barack Obama in his first 2008 debate.

“That race was basically over after the first debate,” he said. “America saw Obama and said, ‘Okay, yes, he can be our president.’”