I spoke to people who have debated Harris and Trump. This is what they told me

It all comes down to this. Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump will square off in Philadelphia tonight for what is so far their only scheduled debate.

Harris will be abiding by the rules put in place when President Joe Biden was still the nominee. That means microphones will be turned off when it’s the other candidate’s turn to speak. There will be no live audience and there will be no pre-written notes or sitting.

Even though she must abide by rules Biden set, Harris must, to borrow a phrase, be unburdened by what has been. As Susan Estrich, who ran Michael Dukakis’s campaign in 1988, told The Independent, “It can't be just Biden 2.0 — it's got to be Harris 1.0.”

So what does Harris 1.0 look like? She only had one major one-on-one debate on the national stage in 2020, when she squared off against the unflappable Mike Pence. Otherwise, she mostly participated in the television gameshow that was the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, though she famously got a good swipe in with Biden on busing.

Quite frankly, Trump has to prove himself too. He went through the ringer of Republican debates in 2016. But he largely avoided direct hits as his opponents attacked each other. He skipped all of the Republican prmary debates this year and very few people remember his performance against Biden thanks to the president’s meltdown (save for that infamous joke about “Black jobs.”)

The Independent spoke multiple Senators who have been in the ring with Harris and Trump about what that experience is like, and where their respective strengths and weaknesses lie.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Harris notably clashed onstage one time, specifically about whether to ban Trump from using Twitter as Warren’s