Three Keys for Harris in Her Biggest Test Yet

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

83% : Harris should very much hope that Trump is the center of attention.
81% : The good news for Harris is that by a wide margin voters think she is of better character than Trump.
81% : In a perfect world for her, Trump would be the one talking well more than half the time.
66% : Rather than focusing on direct attacks to rattle Trump, she'd be better off to make sure she keeps her cool.
55% : Trump is fond of describing people as being out of "central casting," but lots of low-information voters will make up their minds in the same way.
55% : She's working against a double standard with Trump here.
49% : In the most recent Pew Research poll, Harris was 8 points ahead of Trump on the question of honesty.
39% : But she has never met Trump, let alone been on stage with him.
38% : Americans very nearly reelected Trump knowing that he was unserious about policy and serially dishonest because many liked-and still do-the way things went under his administration.
38% : Nothing rattles Trump more than being ignored.
37% : Little annoys Trump more than being ignored.
34% : For all of the more than a dozen times that Trump has debated as a presidential candidate in the past nine years, it's anybody's guess who will show up on stage with Harris.
32% : This is made even harder for Harris by the fact that Trump has only one job: to keep himself under control.
30% : The bad news is that she could disappoint them, while Trump is a known quantity.
24% : Harris has shown she understands the virtues of giving Trump the cold shoulder, and would be well advised to stay aloof rather than trying to "rattle" him.
22% : Lots of people who think Trump is a liar will vote for him anyway, either believing that he lies on their behalf or that they can accept the dishonesty as a price for policies they prefer.
21% : Americans generally dislike the direction of the country in the Biden era, so Harris has to get distance from her boss, but won't be afforded the same low expectations for integrity and coherence that voters have accepted for Trump.
21% : Her third task is to annoy Trump without being annoying to the rest of the country.
18% : If Cabinet secretaries and generals couldn't figure out how to deal with Trump's mercurial nature, what chance do Harris and her team have of accurately predicting which version of the former president they will get? Harris has reportedly been doing full 90-minute dress rehearsals with longtime Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines even dressing up like Trump to play the role of her adversary.
18% : Ugh. One of Clinton's suggestions was to "brush Trump back and not let him be the center of attention all the time" because "he can be rattled" by "substantive, direct attacks.
4% : But how would Reines know which Trump to impersonate? At least the Harris campaign isn't making the same mistake Clinton did in her debates with Trump, when she tried to dismiss him as unserious, and got a snoot full of Trump's most effective setting: the defiant one.

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