The Harris campaign has lost the battle over muted microphones at the debate with former President Donald Trump next week, and they're panicking about it.
According to Politico, Harris’s team has been hard at work preparing for the highly anticipated Sept. 10 debate with Trump. Yet the team was “somewhat flustered” over a significant setback: their failure to convince debate host ABC News to unmute both candidates’ microphones for the entire 90 minutes. This change would have undone an agreement that was made months ago between Trump, President Biden, and the network that the Harris campaign originally wanted to hold Trump to.
The Harris campaign has been pressuring ABC News to change the rules, but it has been unsuccessful.
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.
Brian Fallon, senior communications adviser for the Harris campaign, acknowledged the debate rules in a letter to ABC on Wednesday. However, he expressed his concerns that the muted microphones would put Harris at a disadvantage.
According to Fallon, the muted mics " 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.”
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“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," the letter continued. "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 problem is that Trump had initially wanted to renegotiate terms for the debates after Joe Biden dropped out, but Harris didn't want to. So, Harris essentially got exactly what she wanted, including not having a debate hosted by Fox News.
Now, it looks like the Harris campaign has to revamp their entire debate strategy.
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.
It's really sad that the Harris campaign was counting on optics to win the debate instead of policy, but it's hardly surprising. One thing is clear: They were counting on live mics, and now they are panicking because they won't have them.
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