Analysis: Is Kamala Harris a good debater? This is what we know

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The world knows what kind of debater former President Donald Trump is: He doesn't handle the facts easily, is always ready with an insult, and is extremely boastful.

But what about Vice President Kamala Harris?

Although her 2020 presidential campaign received little attention – she ended it in December 2019, before the first votes were cast in the primaries – Harris still left her mark in one important respect.

In the primaries in June 2019, before she was his vice presidential candidate and he even came close to the White House, Harris defeated Joe Biden.

Policing and race played a central role in the 2020 Democratic primaries.

“I don't think you're a racist,” Harris told Biden, staring at him across the debate stage as Biden looked straight ahead or at his podium.

But it was hurtful, she said, that Biden was praising men like the late Senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Stennis of Mississippi, “who built their reputations and careers on racial segregation in this country.”

She noted that during his long career in the Senate, Biden worked with these men on bills opposing federally mandated school bus transportation in local school districts.

“There was a little girl in California who was in the second grade that integrated her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”

It was a powerful moment, a testament to what Harris can do on the debate stage – she had obviously rehearsed her words, she used them effectively, she was blunt, and she said them to the face of her opponent, who later made her his vice presidential candidate.

Harris has no doubt spent her prep time building material to use against her rival this year. She and Trump will meet for the first time on Tuesday night to debate in the crucial state of Pennsylvania. ABC News will broadcast the event.

Related: CNN's political team got this detailed look at Harris' prep work at a sort of debate camp in a Pittsburgh hotel and compared it to Trump's more informal approach.

Democrats have tried to portray this election as one between a former prosecutor (Harris) and a convicted felon (Trump). Harris will have to live up to her reputation as a tough prosecutor on Tuesday when she gets a rare chance to face Trump with her years of simmering anger.

Unlike Biden, Harris doesn't have to go back to the 1970s to develop lines of attack. She can draw on his criminal conviction in New York, his responsibility in a sexual abuse and defamation case, his nationalist politics, his baseless claims of election fraud – for which there is no evidence whatsoever – or his outrageous promise to throw election officials in jail.

While Harris will have plenty to say about Trump, she will not benefit from his interruptions. Candidates' microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak, so Trump cannot interrupt Harris with insults, as he did to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 debates, telling her, “You're the puppet!” or “You'd go to jail.”

It also means that Harris' memorable moment in the 2020 vice presidential debate – when she responded to an interruption by Mike Pence with, “Mr. Vice President, I am speaking” – will not happen.

Not all of Harris' planned attacks work as well as the busing attack on Biden. In another debate in 2019, Harris attacked Senator Elizabeth Warren over Warren's plan to break up technology companies.

Harris tried to boil down this larger issue to something more digestible by expressing her disappointment that Warren did not ask Twitter (it was a very different company in 2019!) to suspend Trump's account. Twitter later suspended Trump's account following the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, but the company was later purchased by Elon Musk and renamed X – and Trump is now active on the platform again.

The point Harris was trying to make seemed small to me and allowed Warren to make a much more important point.

“Look, I don't just want to get Donald Trump off Twitter, I want to get him out of the White House,” Warren said.

This exchange could be a warning to Harris not to get bogged down in details, because Trump won't do that – and if history is any guide, he will happily invent facts to support his arguments.

This brings us to a third telling exchange with Harris in the 2019 debate. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard criticized her for her record as a prosecutor who was to the right of the Democratic Party in 2019. Gabbard argued that Harris was too tough on marijuana offenders and also offered other criticisms of her time as a prosecutor.

“I'm proud of that work,” Harris replied, arguing that as attorney general she worked to make California a better place, opposed the death penalty and did not just “make nice speeches or serve on a legislative body.”

The irony is that Gabbard, now a former Democrat, supports Trump, who likes to say he would impose the death penalty for drug offenders.

Gabbard reportedly helped Trump with his own debate preparation, and Trump will want to portray Harris as left of the American mainstream – someone who changed her positions in 2019 for political expediency and has now changed them again for his presidential candidacy.

The importance of this debate may ultimately lie in how the few undecided or undecided voters perceive Harris, while perceptions of Trump seem to be set in stone.

A New York Times-Siena College poll released Sunday puts the race virtually tied within the margin of error. Few likely voters – fewer than 10% – said in the poll they felt they needed to know more about Trump. More than a quarter, 28%, said they needed to know more about Harris, perhaps suggesting she still has more room to grow or shrink after getting the chance to run against Trump.