Harris and Trump prepare to face off in tonight’s debate

Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump said that Donald Trump is well-prepared for tonight’s presidential debate versus Vice President Kamala Harris and is ready to talk about why voters’ lives were better during his administration.

“I think Donald Trump is very focused on this debate tonight … he has been preparing for this debate,” she told Kasie Hunt on?“CNN This Morning.”?

Donald Trump, who argued he doesn’t need formal preparation such as mock debates, has been meeting with senior advisers, policy experts and outside allies to ready himself for Tuesday.

The “policy discussions” — the Trump campaign’s version of debate prep — largely mirror those the former president held in the weeks leading up to his June 27 debate with President Joe Biden, sources familiar with the meetings told CNN.

The RNC co-chair continued that in “stark contrast” with Harris, Trump has done not only “traditional debate prep,” but has also spoken with the media in town halls, press conferences, podcasts and sit-down interviews because “he wants to engage more with the public, not less.” For this reason, she argued Harris is the candidate who has “upped the stakes” of tonight’s faceoff for herself.??

Lara Trump equivocated when pressed about her father-in-law citing an “election expert” who indicated “that 20% of the Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent”?in a recent Truth Social post.

She said that she “didn’t see that report” so she “can’t speak directly to that,” but explained that the Republican National Committee is working hard to ensure “your vote matters and your vote counts.”

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore declined to definitively say whether Vice President Kamala Harris is a progressive or centrist, despite?polling showing that voters?feel they need to learn more about the Democratic presidential candidate ahead of tonight’s debate in Philadelphia.

“I think Kamala Harris is someone who knows how to get things done,” the Democratic governor told Kasie Hunt on?“CNN This Morning.”

Moore continued that Harris is “talking about practical things,” and pointed specifically to her position on the child tax credit.

Moore added, “I don’t know how putting her into a classification or box is useful.”

The Harris campaign plans to use Tuesday night’s debate as a tool for organizing, hosting over 1,300 watch parties across the country.

More than 100 of those watch parties are aimed at young voters on college campuses, the campaign said, and more than 300 of the parties will be aimed at different key coalitions, including Republicans for Harris-Walz, Veterans for Harris-Walz, and Latino house parties.?

Harris’ team is hoping to turn the enthusiasm into action, with attendees set to “make calls to voters in battleground states and share debate content using the digital organizing tool Reach,” according to a press release. And as the campaign seeks to reach voters outside of major media outlets, it has invited digital creators to the watch parties, continuing its efforts to expand beyond a traditional media strategy.?

Harris’ running mate: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will attend a debate watch party in Phoenix, Arizona.?While Walz will be watching the debate in Arizona, his wife, Minnesota first lady Gwen Walz, will attend a watch party in La Crosse, Wisconsin.?

Paul Dans, the former group director behind conservative policy roadmap Project 2025, said Monday that he’d like to see Donald Trump implement the plan if elected.

Dans told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in his first TV interview since?stepping down?as director in July that Trump “had nothing to do with” the Heritage Foundation-backed playbook forged by dozens of organizations.

But Dans, the former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management under Trump, said he’s been to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on “several” occasions and has met with his campaign leadership “from time to time.” He said he’d “shaken hands” with Trump, most recently in February.

His comments come as Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies have sought to link Trump to Project 2025 to portray him as extreme. Democrats have repeatedly pointed to the set of conservative policies as the Republican Party’s roadmap if they return to the White House.

Dans also said he’s not worried about Harris invoking the proposal against Trump in today’s debate.

Trump has denied involvement with Project 2025, saying earlier this year that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” But at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,?a CNN review found.

Dans said Trump was not involved in crafting the proposal and said the number of former Trump administration employees contributing to the project was an example of “natural” coordination between former colleagues.

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Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has addressed former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, saying his party “traded Dick Cheney for Bobby Kennedy.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?dropped out of the presidential race?last month and endorsed former?President Donald Trump.

Vance said politicians like Cheney, Harris, and their donors have benefitted from “the last 30 years of the bipartisan consensus” and manufacturing policy that promoted offshoring jobs – at the expense of people like his constituents in Ohio.

Arguing Republicans are “increasingly the party of working and middle-class people,” Vance claimed, “wealthy people direct their money to Democrats,” and the working and middle class direct their money to Republicans.

Vance was asked about how he would approach his role as vice president.

“I want to be a second set of eyes and ears for the President’s agenda.”

Vance said if Trump earns a second term, his administration team must execute his agenda.

ABC News signage is installed in the media file center inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center one day before the presidential debate on September 9, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump take the stage tonight in?Philadelphia?in?their first?face-to-face?meeting,?the spotlight will also?shine?on the host?of the debate: ABC News.

Moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis will have a much different view in front of them than when ABC News first secured the high-stakes presidential debate in May. Since then, Harris has become the Democratic nominee, shaking up not just the race for the White House but also the negotiation process ahead of the televised faceoff.

It’s a big test for the Disney-owned network in the only scheduled debate between Harris and Trump in the 2024 race that could serve as a make-or-break moment for either campaign. Everything ABC News does, from the moderators’ questions to the lighting, will be heavily scrutinized by the candidates and the public during the 90-minute showdown.

In the weeks leading up to tonight’s debate, a behind the scenes drama has played out at ABC News as network executives sought to lock down?the ground rules and format?for the match up.

ABC had planned to mostly mirror the rules used by CNN in?its presidential debate in June?between President Joe Biden and Trump, eschewing a live audience and muting the candidates’ microphones while their rival is speaking — a rule initially requested by Biden’s team prior to the CNN debate.

But Harris’ team wanted the mics hot the entire night and demanded the network change the rule. Some of Harris’ most memorable moments in previous debates?and in Senate hearings have come during cross talk. Her campaign, according to people familiar with the matter, believed that muting the microphones will make Trump appear more disciplined, and expressed frustration that ABC was not willing to budge on the rule.

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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will attend a debate watch party in Phoenix, Arizona, on Tuesday, part of the Harris campaign’s nationwide organizing effort pegged to the most consequential evening of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign to date.?

The campaign is organizing more than 1,300 debate watch parties across the country, including some featuring prominent surrogates. While Walz will be watching the debate in Arizona, his wife, Minnesota first lady Gwen Walz, will attend a watch party in La Crosse, Wisconsin.?

Many of the events will be organized as coalition gathering events, with groups like Republicans for Harris-Walz, Veterans for Harris-Walz and Latinos Con Harris-Walz in battleground states in the south. Those events will be complemented by more than 100 campaign-organized watch parties on college campuses as part of the campaign’s effort to engage college-aged voters through on-campus advertising, social media advertising and virtual trainings in creating social content that aligns with the campaign’s message.?

The organizing push underscores the critical moment Tuesday’s debate presents as Harris’ campaign seeks in part to maintain the surge in grassroots enthusiasm the vice president has embraced since joining the top of the Democratic ticket. A New York Times/Siena College national poll of likely voters released on Sunday found that 91% of Democrats said they were enthusiastic about voting, slightly edging the 85% of Republicans who said the same.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has turned former President Barack Obama’s Democratic convention mockery of Donald Trump’s crowd-size fixation into a television ad — complete with the yes-he-went-there hand gesture.

The spot will air on cable news and in markets that appear intentionally selected to grab the Republican nominee’s attention: West Palm Beach, where he lives, and Philadelphia, where he’ll be Tuesday ahead of his debate with Harris. The campaign said channels airing the ad include Fox News.

The spot features Obama’s remarks from last month’s convention in Chicago questioning Trump’s temperament and fitness for office.?

“Here’s a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems,” Obama said in his speech.?

“This weird obsession with crowd sizes,” Obama continued, “it just goes on, and on, and on.”

At that point in his speech, Obama moved his hands together in a way that suggested Trump’s size concerns were not limited to crowds. The ad lingers on Obama’s hands, ensuring the innuendo isn’t lost.?

The ad appears in keeping with one aspect of Harris’ strategy heading into Tuesday’s debate: finding ways to get underneath Trump’s skin, in the hopes of provoking an angry reaction.??

Obama’s speech in the ad is spliced with footage of Trump discussing Harris’s crowds, along with footage of Trump events meant to show sparse audiences — though some video appears to have been shot before the events began.?

The Harris campaign also said it was using the crowd size attack line in local advertising in Philadelphia ahead of the debate, including on taxis, projections and sidewalk art.?

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at the Central Wisconsin Airport on September 7, in Mosinee, Wisconsin.

The Trump campaign on Monday previewed some of the lines of attack that former President Donald Trump is likely to deploy during ABC’s presidential debate tonight.

The campaign argued that Vice President Kamala Harris “owns everything from this administration.”

In a call with reporters ahead of Tuesday’s debate, Trump campaign spokesperson Jason Miller pointed to the handling of the US-Mexico border and illegal immigration, Harris casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate to pass stimulus bills and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as issues that the campaign believes Harris “owns.”?

Miller also said he expects “there’ll be some surprises during the debate tomorrow.”

Miller pointed to Harris’ interview with CNN in which she said her “values have not changed,” even as her positions on some issues have changed, and argued that answer, “really opens the door to talking about what are those values, what has Kamala Harris stood for over the years going all the way back to the beginning.”

Miller claimed Harris has been the one in charge of the country, not President Joe Biden, and at one point referred to the Biden administration as the “Harris-Biden” administration, though Harris is not the president.?

On Trump, Miller said that the former president is “going to be himself. I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind here.” Adding that Harris is “in this debate bootcamp being drilled by new advisers who worked for President Obama that she doesn’t know.”

Miller said, “All these new people, these strangers trying to put thoughts in her head. These binders of stats and details. She has no idea what any of this is. No idea whatsoever. And she’s trying to figure out what type of person she wants to be, because her positions are changing, though her values have stayed the same.”?

Asked how Trump has been preparing, Miller said Trump has been giving both longer interviews and shorter pull-aside interviews, news conferences, rally speeches and town halls.?

“Every possible style of question President Trump is prepared for because that’s what he’s been doing this entire campaign,” he said.

CNN chief national affairs correspondent Jeff Zeleny looks back at moments from Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump’s past debates to see what to expect in their encounter on Tuesday.

Watch below:

Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign stop at the Throwback Brewery, in North Hampton, on September 4.

Kamala Harris’ joyful campaign will be hit today by the blunt force of reality — a debate with Donald Trump — the most menacing political foe of modern times.

The vice president transformed the election after President Joe Biden’s abject debate showing against Trump on CNN led him to end his reelection bid. She restored several swing states to the electoral battlefield and has had Democrats dreaming of a stunning turnabout in a race most thought they were well on the way to losing.

Yet her success in unifying her party, branding herself as a fresh voice of generational change and closing into a dead heat with Trump in polling has not cemented a reliable path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. If the election were today, the ex-president, who has already defied an assassination attempt and scores of criminal charges, could still win.

Presidential debates usually don’t decide elections — notwithstanding the cataclysmic impact of Biden’s wipeout. But tonight is the best remaining chance for Harris to drive home a decisive argument that could thwart Trump’s historic comeback.

Her assignment in Philadelphia will require rhetorical skills that have often been questioned in an uneven vice presidency. While she has had her moments in debates and Senate hearings, Harris has sometimes struggled to articulate clear policies and answers under pressure in spontaneous situations.

While the former president has now taken part in presidential debates in three separate elections, this will be Harris’ first venture onto the debate stage since her meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence in 2020.

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