The Mike Pence Guide to Debating Kamala Harris

The phone rang as the vice president walked into his hotel room, and while the campaigns were still spinning and the pundits were making up their minds on cable, he listened intently to an early, positive review: “Melania says I’ve gotta be more like Mike.”

Mike Pence remembers his own debate with Kamala Harris, and its aftermath

Pence smiles when he tells that story about his debate with then-Sen. Kamala Harris. He is the only Republican who has met her on a national stage, and he certainly knows former President Donald Trump, the voice on the other side of the line that night. Four years later, he remembers someone else listening in to the call.

“I may have heard” former first lady Melania Trump “affirming in the background” that the then-president needed to follow the example of his vice president. It was October of 2020. They trailed in the polls after another earlier debate, the infamous and ugly one where Trump fought as much with Chris Wallace, the Fox News moderator, as with Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.

Perhaps not a little like now, Trump needed to change his approach ahead of the second debate.

“Candidly, I don’t take credit for his performance,” Pence told RealClearPolitics about how the next time Trump met Biden in primetime, the Republican was notably more understated and arguably more effective. Trump was, Melania might say, more like Mike.

The problem was that, the former vice president sighed, “a large number of Americans had already voted at that point.” Fast forward to today.

The debate approaches

Trump and Harris will share a stage for the first time on Tuesday in Philadelphia for a debate that promises to be definitive. She has surged, quickly making up the ground that Biden lost and pulling ahead of Trump by a point in the RealClearPolitics Average. He has struggled to define her, casting about for new nicknames and a message that will stick. The two have never met.

“I’m staying out of the presidential race on our side,” Pence said, referencing his public divorce with Trump that began with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and culminated with an unsuccessful primary challenge, “but I would never vote for Kamala Harris.” He would not underestimate her either.

Other Republicans may learn this lesson the hard way. They have not adopted a uniform message against Harris, describing her as a policy lightweight one moment and a conniving communist the next. Trump has publicly said he believes “she will be easier to beat” than Biden, referring to her as both a “radical” and a “lunatic.” While Pence does not disagree on the ideological front, as a pragmatic concern he takes the former prosecutor very seriously.

“We went into that debate with the expectation that she would be formidable, that she would be poised, and that she would make her case,” he said of his debate with her in Salt Lake City, noting the thick policy binders and the many hours that went into his preparation.

Pence remembers: Harris didn’t defend her record

“I think we were right about the first two things,” he said looking back, “and not really the third in this sense: She either can’t, or won’t, defend her record.” Pence pressed Harris on her support for a fracking ban, something that she had embraced while a candidate for the Democratic nomination, but also went back farther to challenge the former California attorney general for overseeing “disproportionate incarceration of blacks” in that state.

A robust back-and-forth never really followed in his estimation. Instead, Pence recalls that his opponent “would often meet my challenges with a dismissive statement.”

The Harris campaign certainly disputed that characterization then and rejects it now. What is undeniably different, however, is that she is the incumbent. While Republicans played defense last time around, Harris has an immediate record that Trump can attack in detail, even as the Democrat has tried to distance herself from the more unpopular parts of the Biden presidency and jettison some of her more progressive policy positions.

During an interview last month with Dana Bash of CNN, Harris walked back her support for a fracking ban but also abandoned her call for decriminalizing border crossings. Off camera, and often via statements from campaign aides, she has abandoned calls for a mandatory gun-buyback program and Medicare for All. Harris clarified that while her positions have evolved, “my values have not changed.”

No dramatic moves

The transformation is hardly definitive in Pence’s estimation. “I don’t think she’s making any dramatic moves,” he said of Harris. For instance, abandoning her previous call for a ban on plastic straws, the former vice president dead-panned, “is not earth-shattering.”

Because Harris has been a partner in a historically unpopular administration for the last four years, the Pence prescription is straightforward.

“My advice to my old running mate is that he should challenge her to defend her record,” he said in broad strokes before offering Trump specific stage instructions: “Answer the question as quickly as you can, but then I think he should attack.”

It is a simple game plan on paper, but Trump remains a wildcard if nothing else. Despite all the distance between them now, Pence still believes his old friend has the discipline necessary to deliver. “President Trump is perfectly capable of focusing the debate on the Biden-Harris record,” he said before adding, “I thought he acquitted himself very well in the last debate with Biden,” an achievement that has largely been eclipsed in retrospect “by Biden’s disastrous performance.”

Harris has hunkered down in Pennsylvania ahead of the debate, drawing up her own plans to knock Trump off his game, hoping to goad him into a mistake and another viral moment. Pence said that is to be expected and warns that Harris will “come in prepared with a soundbite.” He would know.

The Harris soundbite: I’m speaking

She delivered a stinging rebuke of Biden during the first Democratic primary debate, hitting the man who would become her running mate for his opposition to school bussing reform. That line won the evening. It still could not rescue her primary campaign; Harris dropped out before Iowa. Months later, though, her zinger against the sitting vice president was more effective.

When Pence interrupted to protest her characterization of the pandemic response, Harris shot back, “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.” Throughout the night, whenever the normal crosstalk would break out, she would roll out the line. By the end of the evening, it was a meme. Later, it was a T-shirt available for purchase.

Interrupting won’t be possible in Philadelphia. The microphones will be muted when Trump and Harris meet, per the terms both campaigns pre-negotiated. For 90 minutes, they will make their case directly to the public. A monster audience is expected after more than 51 million viewers tuned in for the Atlanta debate. As many, or more, voters will likely watch the Trump-Harris prize fight, and Pence predicted that it would be a singular event in American history.

“When I grew up, it was easy to talk around the water cooler because we were all watching three networks,” he said, reflecting on the fractured media landscape these days where the country can choose to consume news a la carte. “The moments where the American people gather in one place are few and far between.”

Forget the soundbites

Hence the reason that Pence downplays the emphasis on clips and soundbites after the fact. The raw and uncut broadcast, the old radio host insisted, remains the main thing. “They’re convening moments in the country,” he said of the debates, noting that his contest with Harris drew no less than 58 million Americans.

“I tend to think that when everybody returns to their respective corners, and commentators try and reduce the night to a particular moment or line, that it just pales in comparison to the enduring impression that could be made for the people that actually take time to tune in and listen,” Pence said of that increasingly rare thing in American life: live television.

It cannot be scripted. Again, Pence knows this better than most.

His debate with Harris was a serious event, and both candidates spoke in solemn tones as they argued over matters of state amidst a once-in-a-century pandemic. Pence only recently rewatched the exchange, but he was willing to discuss most anything that was said four years ago. Asked about one incident, however, the former vice president hesitated.

A fly in his hair?

“Gee, look at the time,” Pence joked when asked about the infamous fly that landed on his snow-white hair that night. He does recall seeing it buzz around the studio but said he had no idea that it made landfall on his head in a viral moment. Pence laughed when his family told him backstage about the unwelcome guest. He laughs now too. “Someday when I get to Glory,” Pence said, “I will probably take a moment to ask the Lord, ‘The fly?! Was that absolutely necessary?’”

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.