Harris team worried she’ll be ‘handcuffed’ by debate rules set by Biden

Kamala Harris had planned to object, fact-check and directly question Donald Trump while he was speaking during their debate next week. But now, with rules just finalized to mute the candidates when their opponents speaks, campaign officials said Harris advisers are scrambling to rewrite their playbook.

Harris and her team — holed up in Pittsburgh for a multi-day debate camp — wanted unmuted microphones so that the vice president could lean on her prosecutorial background, confronting the former president in the same way she laced into some of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet members during Senate hearings.

Instead, four Harris campaign officials argued that she will be “handcuffed” by the rules, which were negotiated by President Joe Biden’s team earlier this summer.

“Trump's worst moments in the debates are when he gets upset and snaps,” said an aide to Harris in her 2020 presidential campaign, granted anonymity to speak freely. “And they have neutered that.”

Some Democrats privately dismiss the Harris campaign’s frustration as largely gamesmanship and expectation-setting around Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia. But others say the rule change and her limited experience in national general election debates and interviews since becoming her party’s nominee could affect Harris’ debate performance.

“She could get thrown off by [the muted mics], so putting [their frustration] about the mics out there, they’re preparing for that possibility,” said one national Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Or they’ve also got a set piece ready to go, where Harris could turn to the camera and say, ‘For those who can’t hear it, Donald Trump is trying to yell over me. How many of you have been in a meeting where you get talked over?’”

David Axelrod, who advised Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, was one of several Democratic operatives who noted that Harris’ complaints about the muted microphones also could serve to “get into Trump’s head.”

“What the [Harris] team is saying is that Trump’s campaign does not trust him to control himself,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think Trump likes to be depicted as someone being handled, so I do think there’s an element of trying to psych-out their side, too.”

Trump senior adviser Jason Miller said the campaign is glad that Harris’ team has “finally accepted the already agreed-upon rules of the debate that they wrote in the first place,” adding, “Americans want to hear both candidates present their competing visions to the voters, unburdened by what has been. No notes, no sitting down, no advance copies of the questions.”

Even as the Harris campaign looks to reorient their candidate to debate rules agreed to when Biden was the nominee, there’s ongoing frustration among some of her aides that the vice president is inheriting them, according to one person familiar with the Harris team’s thinking. That’s because they view her as a stronger debater than Biden, whose debacle on stage in June ultimately led to his withdrawal from the race.

“It was a bad set of rules for someone who needed to be protected, who never should’ve been on the debate stage,” the national Democratic strategist added. “And now they’re stuck with it.”

In many ways, Harris has benefited from Biden’s political inheritance. Largely undefined herself, the vice president has mostly adopted the administration’s record and legislative achievements as her own. Anointed as the Democratic nominee in late July, she took over the president’s sprawling campaign, a turnkey operation that quickly adjusted to a new candidate, as did the organizers of last month’s convention in Chicago. But in the run-up to the debate next Tuesday, Harris’ team fought hard — publicly and privately — to change the muted microphones rule that Biden’s top aides demanded months ago.

Ultimately, to no avail.

Brian Fallon, Harris’ senior communications adviser who led the campaign’s negotiations with ABC News about the debate rules, informed the network in a letter on Wednesday that the vice president would begrudgingly accept the original rules including the muted microphones, which he said “fundamentally disadvantaged” the former prosecutor.

The rule, he wrote in a letter, “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.”

Although Trump himself said publicly he’d be fine with Harris’ request to keep the microphones unmuted for the entire debate, his team negotiating with ABC was adamant about keeping one candidate’s mic muted when the other is speaking, as was the case in the first debate between Biden and Trump.

“If I was [on] her campaign team, I would go to her, exactly like they probably did, and say, ‘Look, these rules suck. But in the end, the country wants a debate. Let’s give them a debate,’” said Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, who also noted that the Harris campaign wants “Trump to show up,” so “when he threatened to not do this, I think they believed him.”

But some Democrats think the muted microphones won’t have much of an impact on the debate.

Democratic strategist James Carville said that the rules mean that, while Harris won’t be able to interrupt Trump, he also won’t be able to needle her while she’s speaking. Overall, he said, his expectations for Harris are high.

“He won't be able to do his shenanigans either,” he said. “So it seems kind of like a wash to me.”

Another person who is close to Harris, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, said that any outbursts by Trump will still hurt him: “I think you’ll still hear him in the background whining.”

Earlier this summer, Harris had already begun to prepare for what was an expected vice presidential debate, before Biden withdrew from the race. But the stakes are now dramatically higher for Harris, who has surged in public and private polling but is still lesser-known to many voters.

Karen Dunn, an attorney who coached Harris ahead of her 2020 debate, and Rohini Kosoglu, her longtime policy expert and former Senate chief of staff, are co-leading the vice president’s debate preparations. She’ll also be joined by several other top advisers and aides.

Several Democrats said that since Harris is known for meticulously preparing, sometimes over-preparing, for major events, “I’d expect they’re structuring these sessions so she doesn’t get stuck in the weeds or the minutiae of an issue,” said Karen Finney, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton.

“The mock debates are a way to cut that out, practicing what it really means to have just two minutes to talk about something,” she said.

Harris is expected to participate in several 90-minute mock debates over the next several days. Philippe Reines, a former Clinton aide, will reprise his role as Trump in those practice sessions. Harris will also take breaks for off-the-record campaign stops in Pennsylvania over the weekend, said one person familiar with the vice president’s schedule.