What to watch for during CNN’s town hall with Kamala Harris

By Gregory Krieg and Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday night will deliver a final pitch to voters, less than two weeks out from the election and with early voting already underway, at a CNN town hall in Chester Township, Pennsylvania.

The event, which will start at 9 p.m. ET, comes on the date CNN proposed a second debate between Harris and former President Donald Trump, which Harris accepted but Trump turned down.

Harris, in the closing stretch of the race, has ratcheted up her attacks on Trump’s basic mental competence, increasingly describing the former president as incoherent and “unfit to be president of the United States.” She has also zeroed in more sharply on his role in the gutting of federal abortion rights, calling his often-callous discussion of the issue a mark of “cruelty.”

Trump, in turn, has continued to swing wildly at Harris and, over the past few weeks, seen fit to question – and sometimes assail – Jewish, Black and Latino voters who are supporting the Democrat.

But for all the rhetoric, organizing and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on campaign ads, the race is looking like a coin-toss – as both campaigns show signs of frustration with the relative stability of national and battleground state polling.

Here are five things to watch for during Harris’ town hall, moderated by CNN’s Anderson Cooper:

Trump talk

Harris’ campaign has over the past few weeks increasingly questioned whether Trump is mentally and physically fit for another four years in the White House.

“He’s becoming increasingly unstable and unhinged, and it requires that response,” Harris told reporters last weekend in Detroit. “I think the American people deserve better than someone who actually seems to be unstable.”

It is many ways a reversal of the strategy Trump and allied Republicans used for years to pillory  President Joe Biden, before the 81-year-old incumbent dropped out of the 2024 race in July. Harris, who just turned 60, has kept up a frenetic campaign schedule and derided Trump for dropping out of scheduled interviews – with one report citing “exhaustion” as the cause. She has also appeared more willing to reference bizarre behavior, like when the 78-year-old Republican stopped a recent town hall to sway and dance for 39 minutes in front of a confused-looking Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor meant to be moderating the event.

At the same time, surveys of undecided voters continue to signal that they want to know more about Harris and her policy plans. She has already pitched one of the most ambitious expansions of senior care in modern US history, though it rarely gets a thorough hearing.

Harris does not necessarily need to choose between pitching herself and deriding Trump, but town hall questions often give candidates the leeway to steer the conversation. Where she goes will provide new insight into how she and her campaign view the race.

The delicate Biden issue

Harris has treaded carefully around the topic of Biden, delicately balancing loyalty to the president she serves under with the political reality that Democrats pushed him out of the race.

Trump’s campaign pounced when, earlier this month on ABC’s “The View,” Harris was asked what she would have done differently than Biden and responded, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

A week ago, in an interview with Fox News where she was asked a similar question, Harris took advantage of the do-over and sought to show some distance from Biden by highlighting their differences in age (she is 60; he is 81) and political background (her resume was built in California; he spent 36 years in the Senate). She has also said she’d have a Republican in her Cabinet.

“My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” Harris told Fox News.

The economy poses perhaps the biggest challenge for Harris. Biden has been eager to tout his economic record, arguing that United States’ rebound from the coronavirus pandemic is a success story. But Harris must face the reality that many Americans continue to feel the pressure of inflation — something she’s sought to meet with policy proposals aimed at combatting price gouging, helping first-time home buyers and more.

Though polls showed Americans had deep concerns over Biden’s age, he can make one unique claim: He’s the only person who has ever defeated Trump. Harris is seeking to reassemble Biden’s 2020 coalition, which included strong support from Black voters and gains among suburban moderates. Needing those voters’ support could answer why she hasn’t put even more daylight between herself and Biden.

Confronting Trump’s attacks

Trump has unleashed a barrage of at times profane attacks on his Democratic rival and her allies in the race’s final stretch.

He said Harris has been a “sh*t” vice president. He called former Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who has campaigned with Harris, “dumb as a rock.”

Will Harris respond directly to those attacks, or will she brush them off?

The vice president has increasingly cited Trump’s own words on the campaign trail — sometimes even playing clips of Trump’s incendiary remarks, verbal stumbles and bizarre moments at her own rallies. She’s used those moments to cast Trump as unhinged.

Focus on abortion rights

Abortion rights has been perhaps the best issue for Democrats since the Supreme Court — with a majority consisting of three conservatives appointed by Trump — overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

It’s one Harris will emphasize in the race’s closing weeks, particularly with polls showing a historic gender gap, with a clear majority of women supporting the Democratic nominee and men backing Trump.

Harris could look for ways to emphasize her support for abortion rights while pointing out the practical issues caused by Trump’s call for states to decide their own policies. She has done so on the campaign trail in recent days, highlighting individual cases of women who were affected by states’ restrictive abortion laws.

On Saturday in Georgia, she cited the case of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who died after her medical care was delayed because of the state’s abortion laws.

Last month, a report by nonprofit news outlet ProPublica revealed Thurman died in 2022 from a treatable infection due to delays to her medical care stemming from the state’s restrictive abortion law. Thurman tried to schedule a surgical abortion four hours away in North Carolina, but due to traffic, she was late to the appointment. Instead, she had a medication abortion – two pills approved to end a pregnancy through 10 weeks’ gestation – but developed rare, ultimately fatal complications.

“Donald Trump still refuses to take accountability — to take any accountability for the pain and the suffering he has caused, or even to just acknowledge the pain and suffering that has actually happened,” Harris said.

Courting on-the-fence Republicans

On Monday alone, Harris was joined at three events in three different states – across the “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – by former Rep. Liz Cheney, a hardline conservative who, as she’s said repeatedly, has never voted for a Democratic presidential nominee but is backing the vice president, because of what she describes as the existential stakes of the coming election.

Harris has not backed off her own liberal inclinations, but she has sent a consistent message to Republican voters vexed by Trump, but unsure about breaking from the tribe, that she wants to be “a president for all Americans.” Harris is hardly the first candidate to use that line, or some version of it. But in sitting beside Cheney – the daughter of Iraq War architect and former Vice President Dick Cheney, who is also voting for Harris – the vice president is betting that there is a meaningful cohort of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who can be convinced to abandon Trump.

This is big-tent, coalition politics at its purest, the kind that is frequently found in European parliamentary elections, but rarely seen on the US presidential trail. If Harris fails, her campaign will be lambasted for wasting precious time and resources. If she wins, it could signal a potentially historic reordering of American politics.

First, though, she has to deliver a closing argument to meet the moment.

The-CNN-Wire
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