Twenty-two days since clinching the nomination, Harris has yet to sit for a solo media interview, answer more than a passing question from reporters traveling with her, or speak to voters without notes in a public forum. She has also failed to articulate her current stance on a range of issues on which she once took left-wing positions.

Like Biden, she has created a situation in which her performance at the debate will come under an artificially high level of scrutiny because of the relative silence preceding it. And like Biden, her campaign has engaged in unhelpful public bartering about the debate rules and hyped her preparation strategy in ways that could magnify any shortcomings on the stage.

Kamala’s curiosity gap

Harris has managed to arrive at the doorstep of the 2024 election without subjecting herself to even a fraction of the vetting a presidential nominee has typically undergone by the time he or she shows up for the first debate.

That has left two imperfect vehicles, the debates and media interviews, to accomplish what a yearlong primary campaign would have otherwise. 

“Harris is making herself highly vulnerable during the debate by failing to regularly do interviews now,” Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary for George W. Bush, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s like a baseball player who refused to take batting practice, coming off the bench having failed to play any games in the last month, stepping up to the plate in the seventh game of the World Series.”

“Without tough media interviews, she is raising the stakes on how important the debate will be,” Fleischer added.

Under growing pressure, Harris had said she would schedule a media interview before the end of the month. Her campaign announced on Tuesday that she would sit for a joint interview with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), with CNN this week, but she has yet to agree to a traditional, one-on-one interview — reflecting the exceedingly cautious approach that has placed so much weight on both the interview, if and when it materializes, and the Sept. 10 debate on ABC News.

Unlike Trump, whose ubiquity on the campaign trail and in the media has diluted the importance of any given appearance, Harris will have little room for error when she finally takes the stage because she has left voters few other ways to examine her.

“She does have to nail the debate since she hasn’t given the public anything beyond the teleprompter,” Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Examiner. 

That Harris’s campaign hasn’t sought to lower the stakes for the debate by soft-launching an unscripted Harris could be telling.

“You become more experienced in handling questions if you actually do handle them, but she and her team must think that the risk of mishandling them is so grave that they want to avoid it,” Lipson said. “That means that she has to prepare for the debate with handlers who can coach her, and she seems to be working with real media experts to polish her approach.”

Biden’s disastrous performance at the June 27 debate with Trump sparked demands that he submit for interviews and press conferences to allay voters’ fears about his fitness, which predated the debate but were left unaddressed beforehand. Every off-script performance that followed fell under a microscope, both because Biden had kept his weaknesses hidden and because so little time remained for him to bounce back.

Harris, too, will have little time to recover if the debate reveals shortcomings that she has concealed. Early voting in some states will begin just days later.

Voters have different concerns about the stylistic abilities of Biden and Harris, but those concerns are different in degree, not in kind.

For Biden, polls showed the public had reservations about his age and cognitive capabilities ahead of a debate that many viewers tuned into with the specific goal of seeing how Biden performed off the teleprompter. For Harris, some viewers may watch the next debate with a similar goal.

Doubts about Harris’s abilities stem from the few glimpses of her off-script acumen the public has caught over the last few years. A haughty answer during a 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt about visiting the border and a series of rambling statements that have made their way into social media memes have resurfaced as possible evidence of why the public had seen so little of Harris until she became her party’s standard-bearer.

The White House has carefully managed Harris’s appearances since long before she became the Democratic nominee, wary of her historic unpopularity as vice president. The same aides carefully managed Biden’s public appearances, too, long before his debate.

Such stagecraft created a curiosity factor heading into the June 27 faceoff between Biden and Trump that pushed the stakes of Biden’s performance well beyond what was typically expected of an incumbent president voters know well. Glimpsing hints of Biden’s weaknesses through the cracks of a tightly controlled schedule, voters had questions only the debate could answer.

Harris is leaving voters with the same kind of curiosity about her possible weaknesses and is setting up her first debate as the only opportunity to satisfy it.

Unlike Biden, however, Harris faces more than just the pressure to deliver a presidential-level performance on style alone. She has also left substantive questions about her policy positions to be answered for the first time on the debate stage, where her campaign agreed this week to rules that will prevent her from bringing notes.

The risk of overpreparing and underdelivering

Since the end of the Democratic convention in Chicago last week, Harris has kept a “light schedule” in part to prepare for the debate with Trump, Politico reported.

Biden also kept his calendar clear in the days before his debate, a fact that came back to haunt him after his performance. When aides attempted to blame his poor showing on jet lag from a recent international trip, even friendly media noted that Biden had, in fact, spent the week preceding the debate preparing for it behind closed doors, not traveling.

Like Biden, Harris could be closing off possible escape hatches if her performance falls short of expectations. A lack of opportunity to prepare could be the excuse of a candidate who spends the run-up to the debate barnstorming swing states and going on a media blitz. That candidate could argue connecting with voters was more important than studying for the test.

But a candidate who holes up before the debate, meticulously preparing with advisers, sets the expectation that what happens on the stage is the best he or she can deliver. Biden’s performance was made all the more jarring because it came after the White House made known he had spent six days at Camp David practicing for the occasion. If, after all of that, Biden could only manage to mumble sentence fragments, then there surely was no hope for his improvement as a candidate, Democrats quickly realized.

Harris risks similarly erasing any benefit of the doubt she might otherwise enjoy after a lackluster debate showing if her extensive preparations eat up a substantial chunk of the two weeks left before the event.

Trump has taken the opposite approach, broadcasting how little time he has spent preparing for the debate.

“I’m not, really, I’m not. I’m not spending a lot of time on it,” Trump said this week when asked about how he is getting ready to face Harris.

Trump’s lower bar

Trump will step onto the stage in Philadelphia on Sept. 10 with decidedly less pressure to perform well than his opponent.

“The bar is not as high for Trump because he’s a known quantity,” Lipson said. “Each time Kamala says a sentence in public, the public knows more about her. That’s simply not true for Trump.”

The former president may also benefit from debate rules that Biden demanded prior to dropping out and that Harris fought unsuccessfully to change.

Chief among them is the requirement that each candidate’s microphone be cut when his or her opponent is speaking, preventing one from talking over the other. The rule was seen as helpful to Trump in the June debate because it effectively protected him from himself, preventing the kinds of angry outbursts that led to his perceived loss to Biden during their first debate in 2020.

“The risk for Trump is that he looks like a bully and that he looks like a bully against a woman,” Lipson said. 

Harris’s campaign pushed to open the microphones for the entirety of the ABC News debate, arguing that ​​“Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.” 

Although the ABC debate rules will remain unchanged from the ones Biden’s team negotiated for the CNN faceoff, that Harris’s campaign fought to secure different terms after ridiculing Trump for waffling on the original agreement could hint at underlying worries about how the debate will unfold. Harris’s team could be hoping to put the focus on Trump’s performance rather than her own — but without a course correction from Harris that involves significant media exposure, all eyes will remain on the vice president. 

“My own sense, unless Trump completely screws the debate,” Lipson said, “is that she is currently peaking.”

Harris game tape

Although she remains relatively unknown to many voters, Harris is not a rookie when it comes to a national debate.

Still, her debate performances are remembered most for a pair of catchy lines she fired off against her opponents — not because of her overall prowess on the stage.

The high-water mark of her ill-fated 2020 presidential bid came after she had a viral moment during a Democratic primary debate in June 2019. Harris broke out a line about busing policies that landed a memorable blow against Biden, who still went on to select her as his running mate.

And during the vice presidential debate in 2020, Harris silenced then-Vice President Mike Pence by forcefully saying, “I’m speaking,” as he attempted to interject during one of her answers.

Catchphrases or talking points that give off a sense of premeditation could be less effective for Harris this time around, however. Her goal is entirely different than in a primary debate, in which candidates generally aim to stand out from a crowd with moments that stick.

Facing off against Trump, Harris will need much more than a flashy moment to be perceived as the victor. Her ability to land a line is one of the only skills she has established. The skill she needs to debut instead is the ability to speak substantively and at length without relying on notecard rhetoric.