(Headline USA) Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker warned Vice President Kamala Harris not to “underestimate” former President Donald Trump during next week’s presidential debate.
“I don’t think anybody should underestimate Donald Trump,” Pritzker told CNN’s Sara Sidner on Monday.
“He has a won a couple of debates that he did,” Pritzker continued. “Certainly, people would say that he won the debate against President Biden a couple of months ago.”
As Trump himself has pointed out, he won his debate against President Joe Biden in June so handily that Biden was forced to drop out of the 2024 race altogether just one month later.
Pritzker also cited Trump’s debate against failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, reiterating, “He’s not to be underestimated.”
While Harris is a “tremendous person with great capability,” Pritzker claimed, that might not be enough to beat Trump.
“We shouldn’t be thinking that somehow Kamala Harris has a greater ability to win a debate than Donald Trump,” Pritzker said.
“They’re going to come in as significant rivals with very, very different points of view,” he continued. “I think getting those points of view across and making sure you’re not getting flummoxed, frankly, by Donald Trump, will be an important thing for Kamala Harris.”
Pritzker’s comments could be part of an attempt by Democrats to preemptively lower the bar for Harris ahead of the Sept. 10 debate.
After hyping the upopular vice president to unsustainable levels in the first astroturfed leg of her abbreviated campaign, DNC operatives now face a dilemma in trying to explain their flawed candidate’s failure to live up to those expectations.
Harris’s first attempt at laying out a specific policy platform bombed last month over her support for communist-style price caps on groceries. Other policies have been criticized for plagiarizing Trump himself.
In her first sit-down interview since becoming the de-facto nominee, Harris again dropped the ball, failing to provide direct answers to many questions and admitting that her core values had not changed since the 2019 primary debates, when she expressed support for fringe-leftist positions on many issues.
Harris’s own team has expressed concern over the debate by trying to change the rules last minute, insisting that the candidates’ microphones should be left on for the entirety of the debate rather than being muted during their opponent’s speaking time.
ABC, the network hosting the debate, rejected Harris’s request and made clear the mics would be muted when candidates were not recognized as having the floor.
As of last Thursday, Harris’s campaign still had not signed on to ABC’s rules for the debate.
“The memo sent by ABC is a draft set of rules that both campaigns need to sign off on and indicate agreement,” Harris spokesperson Brian Fallon wrote in an X post on Thursday.
“We have not done so because we think both candidates have expressed a clear desire to have hot mics,” he added. “Not clear why Trump staff is overruling their principal, who should be capable of making up his own mind.”
Update: Our latest understanding is that even though Trump said Monday he would be fine with an unmuted mic, his handlers don’t trust him to spar live with VP Harris and are asking ABC to ignore Trump’s comments and keep the mics muted or else they will back out of the debate for…
— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) August 29, 2024
