Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration and Harris campaign. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren As Vice President KAMALA HARRIS walked across the tarmac to board Air Force Two on Wednesday, she ignored shouted questions from reporters traveling with her about how her debate prep was going. But privately, the team of aides involved in what will be nearly a week of prep in Pittsburgh are somewhat flustered about having failed in their attempts to convince ABC News — which will host the Sept. 10 debate between Harris and DONALD TRUMP — to keep both microphones unmuted throughout the 90-minute debate, undoing one of the rules Trump and President JOE BIDEN’s team agreed to months earlier. Harris’ team made a public push on the matter last week, when senior adviser for communications BRIAN FALLON acknowledged their efforts to unmute the mics and 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 unmuting 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. Another person familiar with the group’s private conversations described KAREN DUNN, the long-time 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. On Wednesday, Fallon sent another letter to executives at ABC accepting the current rules, but still arguing that muted mics will disadvantage Harris, depriving her of the chance to cross-examine Trump, according to a third person familiar with the matter. The muted mics, 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, Fallon also laid out other debate protocols that he believed both campaigns and the network had verbally agreed on, including that moderators would admonish any candidate who interrupts and strive to convey anything said into a muted mic to the broader audience. Additionally, the network may keep both microphones open during a heated back-and-forth and, unlike in the June 27 debate, the press pool should be in the room and close enough to the stage to be able to hear any remarks that are muted for the wider television audience. Those agreements, the person familiar with the letter said, were important in getting Harris’ team to sign off on the final rules. The group 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,” had been 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 only be possible 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 expectations-setting, top campaign aides, including senior adviser DAVID PLOUFFE in this newsletter 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.’” MESSAGE US — Are you Karen Dunn? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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