Kamala Harris Has a Lot to Get Done in One Debate

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

We are standing by for the most consequential 90 minutes of Kamala Harris’ political life.

With a to-do list unlike any she has stared down before and with a clock ticking as fast as any she has ever imagined, the Vice President heads into a crucible with Tuesday night’s debate against former President Donald Trump that may well dictate the final nine weeks of this race for the White House. Harris is chasing a promotion to the top job after a topsy-turvy summer that saw President Joe Biden decline the Democratic nomination and Trump is chasing redemption as he tries for a third time to seize the biggest brass ring in U.S. politics.

Tuesday night’s debate is the first time Harris and Trump will ever meet, let alone test their vastly divergent visions for the United States. Harris, a skilled top prosecutor in San Francisco and statewide in California, knows how to lay traps and trick her marks into saying their secrets aloud. Trump, meanwhile, has never been especially skilled at playing coy, preferring to feed the id of the Republican Party he has remade into his image. And neither pol has been exactly circumspect in their disdain for the other.

Presidential debates are typically exercises in finding the right shade of beige. Tuesday’s summit in Philadelphia is expected to be anything but that, as both parties have seen a jolt of adrenaline after Biden stood aside. The high-stakes competition of ideas, personalities, and personas arrives with little margin of error for either side. Harris, a generation younger and of Black and Indian heritage, is a compelling foil against Trump, who remade the GOP to his liking and helms a movement that has found no counterweight in conservative circles. But Harris has the added assignment of introducing herself to the many voters who feel they don’t know her and convincing them she is ready to lead.

While partisans of all varieties are energized, there could still be fickle flakes in the mix. Just ask Democrats how durable their support for Biden held after he had a real-time meltdown in front of 51 million people in June. It’s a small cohort, but somehow there are still voters who have not made up their minds.

Harris can often be a master class when it comes to laying the groundwork for rivals to back themselves into corners. She absolutely loved hearings during her days in the Senate because it gave her a chance to force those testifying before her committees to tell their truths. During Trump’s impeachment trials in the Senate, her questions stood out as exacting, but her time grilling his nominees for the bench were no less precise. Republicans on the Hill have plenty of negative things to say about Harris, but none of it betrays her as a lightweight.

Trump, meanwhile, is about as brash as any nominee in recent memory. Whereas John McCain paced the stage in 2008 looking a little listless, Trump stalked Hillary Clinton on stage in 2016 as a menace. Unmoored by facts or norms, Trump has turned his debate lecterns into props in his performance art piece. The entire act of debate for Trump is treated as a ritualized bullying session, but one that has often backfired when his M.O. of domination carries a veil of misogyny. 

Harris formally claimed the Democratic nomination just two weeks ago and has kept a frenzied pace on the campaign trail. Her rallies are packed, her fundraising is gangbusters, her polling ascendant. But her unscripted moments have been sparse and she has shown a vulnerability when she over-thinks these moments. That’s where Trump’s team is betting he might be able to fluster her in a forum that is her biggest chance for voters to size her up before Election Day. Left with no better option, there’s always his tried-and-true tactic of just being a jerk.

Meanwhile, Harris is heading into this debate set up as a veteran prosecutor meeting a felon who is awaiting sentencing. (No, literally.) Her time as Vice President has been by all marks uneven but her career leading her to this point has been one defined by meticulous preparation, often to the point of over-saturation. Her team is confident that she has her one-liners that can be meme’d and converted into fundraising pitches. Trump has never proven disciplined when tempted with the cheap shot and there is no reason to think that has changed.

Then there’s this reality both camps know: it would take divine intervention to replicate the disaster that was the last debate that was so calamitous that Biden ended a five-decade political career. Absent that meltdown, both candidates will leave the debate stage far better than that octogenarian. 

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.