President Joe Biden said that he spoke to Kamala Harris about tonight’s debate with Donald Trump, an event that he plans to watch this evening.
“She seems calm, cool and collected,” Joe Biden told reporters at the White House. “I think she’s going to do great. And I’m not going to tell you what advice I gave her.”
The stakes of the debate are enormous: Harris and Trump are neck and neck in the polls, and this event may be their only match up of the cycle.
Amazingly enough, Harris and Trump also have never met in person before. The most obvious place where they would have — during the transition from one administration to the next on January 20, 2021 — never happened because Trump refused to attend.
ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis are moderating the debate, their first time at the helm at such a general election event.
The ABC News set is surprisingly free of the network logo and instead features a backdrop of “We the People,” a nod to its location at the National Constitution Center. The set also reflects the more intimate setting, with no audience and limited media.
The network has located reporters several blocks away, at the Philadelphia Convention Center, in a massive and windowless exhibition hall where there are work stations for 960 journalists. There, the ABC News logo is on banners and walls, even the floor.
Connected to the media workspace is the spin room, where campaign spokespeople started arriving late in the afternoon.
Two of the first were Anthony Scaramucci and Olivia Troye, two former Trump administration officials now backing Harris. Scaramucci, who introduced himself by noting that he famously served in the Trump White House for just 11 days as his communications director, spoke of hope that “the fever will break” after a Harris victory and “we will see a center right coalition” that does not have the volatility of the Trump era.
The Harris campaign announced its lineup for the post-debate spin room, a list that includes California Governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA). Expected for the Trump campaign: Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance.