| | | | |  | | By Brakkton Booker, Jesse Naranjo and Teresa Wiltz | What up, Recast fam. On today’s agenda:
- Democrats and Republicans alike are hoping their candidates won’t lean into race on the debate stage
- Where each campaign stands with voters of color in the polls right now
- A tribute to the legendary actor James Earl Jones
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Kamala Harris arrives at Pittsburgh International Airport on Sept. 5, 2024, where she was expected to prepare for the first debate. | POLITICO illustration/Photo by AP | What appears lost in the hype ahead of tonight’s must-see faceoff between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is just how momentous it will be. A Black and South Asian woman, who’s seen significant grassroots enthusiasm in no small part thanks to her identity, is going up against a white man who has attacked her multiracial upbringing. There’s just one glaring issue: Neither side believes their candidate should talk about race. The Recast spoke with half a dozen Republican and Democratic operatives, some of whom were granted anonymity to discuss how their nominee should approach tonight’s performance. Some of Harris’ allies say she should continue to lean into her record, rather than engage in a sparring match with her opponent over the litany of racialized attacks and musings he’s made over the years. Republican strategists suggest Trump do the same: steer clear of personal attacks about Harris’ gender and racial identity, acknowledge her historic candidacy, but target instead what she’s done in office — and what she will do. Focusing on the policy, they say, will help woo voters, many of whom had an unfavorable view of the vice president prior to her rise. It’ll still be a tricky strategy for both candidates. Harris is a far more capable opponent for Trump than President Joe Biden was during the June 27 debate. And Trump himself is an unconventional foe, arguably the most seasoned debater in modern history. This will be the former president’s seventh televised general election debate since 2016.
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Trump is known for his unpredictability, but strategists say it’s too risky for him to wield identity politics as a cudgel against his rival. It could backfire spectacularly — even if it may play well with his base.
It may also leave Trump vulnerable to Harris relitigating his history of racialized attacks. Trump gained notoriety as a political figure by fanning birtherism falsehoods about his predecessor. He called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, a group of Black and brown teens who were wrongly accused of assaulting a white woman in 1989. And he’s called Mexican migrants “rapists,” buddied up with white nationalists and suggested Harris only recently “turned Black.”
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Trump departs a Saturday campaign event in Mosinee, Wisconsin | Alex Brandon/AP | Still, Trump has shown remarkable resilience with the same voting blocs he’s criticized — ones Harris needs in her bid to win the White House. According to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist National Poll, Trump leads Harris among independents, has reversed his deficit among registered Latino voters and so far has nearly a quarter of Black respondents saying they’ll support him in the fall. Tonight, we’re watching for three ways the race issue might play out — and we asked the operatives from both parties just how their respective nominee should approach each situation. Here’s what they said. 1. Can Trump flip the issue of Harris’ historic candidacy? Harris, who has forged her piercing and aggressive debate style through years as a prosecutor, is vying to fulfill a lot of firsts should she win the presidency: the first woman, the first person of Black and Indian descent, the first graduate of a historically Black college and university, and the first member of the Divine Nine. While she rarely explicitly leans into this herself, electing to have supporters play up her barrier-breaking accomplishments for her, strategists say Trump can set the tone tonight by undercutting this narrative. “Take the wind out of her sails by talking about the historic nature of her candidacy, and how a daughter of immigrants … can reach the highest heights of American democracy, and that's a testament to our country,” said Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party. | 
Harris greets supporters at a campaign stop on Labor Day in Pittsburgh. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP | Then, after genuinely congratulating her, Trump needs to sharply pivot. “We don't elect presidents of the United States based on their background,” said Stroman, who worked on Trump's 2017 Presidential Inaugural Committee. “We should elect them on their policies and their ideas and their plans for the future. And we've seen what the last four years of the Biden administration have done.” This strategy will force Harris early on to debate policy, which her critics say is a glaring weakness. She can at times overexplain and meander when pressed for policy specifics, or for an explanation why she’s flip-flopped on a position, like fracking. 2. Will Harris give more air time to Trump's "turned Black" comment? Democrats laugh at the idea that Trump could be disciplined in a debate. They are betting on his inability to suppress his instincts to tear into an opponent, particularly one like Harris, who has stolen the spotlight from him and dominated headlines in the seven weeks she’s been atop the ticket. It’s why, they say, he resorted to purposely mispronouncing her name and asking a gathering of Black journalists: “Is she Indian or is she Black?” | 
Trump speaks on July 31 at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, where he questioned Harris' racial identity. | Charles Rex Arbogast/AP | In response, Harris emphatically told a packed arena in Atlanta this summer: “If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.” But now that she's going to be face-to-face with Trump, strategists don’t think it’s wise to engage him on any of that. “If he decides to go down that path, you let him go and stand there silent as he defiles himself,” said Ashley Etienne, who was a senior adviser to both Harris and Biden. With less than 60 days to go until Election Day, Etienne said, the theme of this debate is “do no harm.” And any sort of verbal counter about Harris' identity may scratch an itch, but it may also open her up to the “angry Black woman” trope. 3. What about those “Black jobs”? Former first lady Michelle Obama received a roaring response at the Democratic National Convention when she turned one of Trump’s June debate lines against him: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” Apparently, not the vice president. Gevin Reynolds, a former speechwriter for Harris, said she shouldn’t give this claim any more play. “Voters don't necessarily need Kamala Harris to go up there and remind them that she's Black,” he said. Etienne, the former Harris adviser, put it a bit differently: “The internet has worn that out, for the better!”
|  Harris speaks at a Sept. 2 campaign event at Northwestern High School in Detroit. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP | But we do expect to see some kind of exchange over just which party and which administration has better served Black Americans. Trump surrogate Harrison Fields wants the former president to lean into policy achievements like securing millions in funding for HBCUs (which the Biden-Harris administration has since increased) to passing his signature criminal justice reform law, the First Step Act. And he wants Trump to then contrast those wins with Democrats’ push for police reform and reparations — legislation that ultimately died in Congress. “Democrats are really good about telling the Black community what they're going to do,” Fields continued. “And when they have the power, they don't do anything.”
| | | SO WHO’S LEADING
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The broader polling shows the race tightening, but Harris leads Trump among some important demographics. | AP | Polling ahead of the debate shows a tight race as Harris and Trump enter the homestretch of the 2024 election. But a look at the breakdown for key demographic groups tells a more nuanced story. Harris is gaining with Black voters. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll out yesterday found that 82 percent of Black registered voters say they are definitely or probably supporting the Democratic nominee — an 8 percentage point jump from when they were surveyed in April, when Biden was the nominee. That’s still short of the support Biden saw in 2020, but the enthusiasm is clear, with the shift for Harris centered among young Black Americans. Meanwhile, 12 percent of Black voters said they support Trump, slightly down from April. Latino voters are a tougher sell. Harris still has an advantage with this group, but the gap is smaller. Fifty-seven percent of Hispanic registered voters support her, compared with 39 percent for Trump, according to yesterday’s survey from the Pew Research Center. An August Univision/YouGov poll put Harris’ support among Hispanic voters at 53 percent and Trump’s at 38 percent. The report noted that the vice president made some gains since becoming the new nominee, but she has yet to achieve the level of support Biden had in the 2020 election. Her lead over Trump among Hispanic men is within the margin of error: 49 percent to 44 percent. Women voters are Trump’s “weak spot.” Fifty-two percent of female registered voters support Harris and 46 percent support Trump in the Pew survey, an increase for both candidates from August. However, a 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll published this morning showed Harris with a much larger lead: 48 percent to Trump's 35 percent. Trump’s performance with female voters is “the weak spot in his campaign right now,” former Trump campaign adviser David Urban told our colleagues Meridith McGraw, Myah Ward, Christopher Cadelago and Elena Schneider. Read their story here.
| | | A REMEMBRANCE FOR A GREAT
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Iconic actor James Earl Jones died on Monday at age 93. | Rick Rycroft/AP | The late, great James Earl Jones — the voice of Darth Vader and the first Black actor to play the president on screen — insisted he wasn’t a creature of politics. He could never be an activist because, he said, “I don’t present myself in that arena. I know I’m not good at it. … I’m a stutterer.” And yet, his very presence in Hollywood, as a Black man with a broad chest and a booming bass voice, was profoundly political: In addition to playing a president in “The Man” in 1972, he played generals and garbagemen, boxers and baseball players. And he played royalty, including the King of Zamunda in the “Coming to America” franchise and the voice of Mufasa in “Lion King.” Off camera, despite his protestations that he wasn’t an activist, he petitioned President Richard Nixon in 1969 to end the war in Vietnam, and in 1981 he testified before Congress to protest President Ronald Reagan’s planned cuts in arts funding. Jones — who won Tonys, Emmys, Golden Globes, an honorary Oscar, a distinction from the Kennedy Center and the National Medal of Arts — was also a fixture in Barack Obama’s White House, reading “Othello” at a poetry jam. “My reaction to our new president,” he said after Obama was first elected, “well, it’s as it should be. I’m not jumping up and down about it, because it’s as it should be. Too much celebration to me is, ‘this is unusual.’ It’s not unusual.” RIP.
| | | IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
|  “I’m coming into this at a disadvantage — taking on Crooked Kamala AND the Fake News — but with you in my ear, I'm NOT SCARED OF ANYTHING!” Trump said of the debate. | Evan Vucci/AP | A “RIGGED” DEBATE: Trump has already laid the groundwork for discrediting the debate as unfair and skewed against him, POLITICO's Alex Isenstadt and Merdith McGraw report.
- It’s the F-word Harris can’t shake. POLITICO’s Ben Lefebvre tackles Harris’ and Trump’s ongoing feud over fracking and how the former president is using it to paint his opponent as anti-fossil fuel.
- An old ACLU questionnaire from Harris' 2019 presidential run shows her promising to "end" immigration detention and provide gender transition surgery for detained migrants, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reports. She’ll likely have to answer for that at tonight’s debate, as she seeks to put distance between her past policy positions and her current plans.
| | | | TODAY’S POP CULTURE RECS ART: Trump just published his third coffee table book since 2021. For a cool $99, you too, could get a copy of “Save America.” CONGRATULATIONS: Biden hosts 2024 NCAA basketball champions — the University of Connecticut men’s team and the University of South Carolina women’s team — at the White House today. COLLAB: If you haven’t heard Megan Thee Stallion’s new hit “Neva Play” with BTS’ RM ... what are you doing? Edited by Rishika Dugyala and Teresa Wiltz | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
