Ahead of the US presidential debate, how are Harris and Trump preparing?

On one side of the stage will be the prosecutor, seeking to dismiss her opponent as a danger to democracy and a vestige of the past.

And on the other will be the real estate magnate, blasting his rival as an ultra-liberal politician who will regulate the economy into stagnation.

Tuesday’s presidential debate will be the first opportunity for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump to meet face-to-face as they spar over the future of the United States.

And the two candidates have been sharpening their attacks and plotting a strategy to pull ahead in their neck-and-neck race.

The televised debate, hosted by ABC News, may well turn out to be the only opportunity for Harris and Trump to confront one another in person before the November 5 election.

And that means the stakes are high. Aaron Kall, a professor at the University of Michigan, studies presidential debates and warns not to dismiss their importance.

The shadow of June’s debate

The showdown in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the second presidential debate this election cycle.

But experts said the casualties of the first debate should serve as a warning for the participants this time around.

The first debate took place on June 27, and it was the lightning rod that took down President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.

The presumptive Democratic candidate at the time, Biden faltered as he faced Trump on the debate stage, trailing off mid-sentence and failing to articulate basic talking points.

His feeble performance led to a crescendo of concerns over the 81-year-old’s age and ability.

Less than a month later, Biden had dropped out of the race, and Harris soon replaced him as the Democratic nominee.

But experts say the events of the transformative June debate will loom large as Harris and her Republican rival Trump craft their strategies for Tuesday. Some predict Biden’s bellyflop may even bring more eyeballs to Tuesday’s debate.

“The Biden and Trump debate, you can say in a declarative sentence, was the most consequential presidential debate in American history,” Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia, told Al Jazeera. “So it shows the stakes are real and high.”

Kall, meanwhile, pointed to the June debate as evidence that a high-profile blunder can cost a candidate the election.

Harris’s strategy

Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have been mum about the tactics they plan to use for Tuesday’s debate. After all, airing their strategies in public could blunt their efficacy.

But Harris’s team appears to be hoping to give Trump a runway to crash his own plane.

Her campaign unsuccessfully called for Trump’s microphone to be unmuted between questions, to allow him to speak out of turn.

That was a reversal of what Biden’s campaign had pushed for in June. Biden’s team had hoped a muted microphone would stymy the outburst-prone Trump, particularly with no audience in attendance.

Instead, “it backfired”, according to Kall. He believes the silence gave Trump a more staid appearance, one that emphasised Biden’s stumbles.

Harris’s team appeared to be hoping for a repeat of an earlier Trump and Biden debate, in Cleveland in 2020, when Trump made numerous interjections that read as chaotic. In turn, Biden was seen to come out on top.

However, the Harris campaign’s request to keep Trump’s microphone unmuted was ultimately denied.

Matthew Levendusky, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said another Harris priority will be to use the debate stage to establish herself with the US public.

Harris only launched her presidential campaign seven weeks ago. She has therefore had far less time in the national spotlight than Trump.

But critics point to her past debate performances as a positive sign going into Tuesday’s event.

During the 2020 election cycle, for instance, Harris took part in Democratic presidential primary debates, and she generated buzz for landing successful punches on her future boss Biden.

She also excelled in a policy-heavy vice presidential debate against Mike Pence during the general election that same year.

Harris — the former district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California — has a prosecutorial style, something she exercised during her time in the Senate. Her hard-knuckle questions during Senate committee hearings gained her a national profile.