Kamala Harris doesn’t get to decide if Donald Trump debates her a second time. But she will attempt to extract a cost if he won’t.
Her campaign has hired a plane to trail the words “Trump’s Punting on 2nd Debate” over Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Saturday night, where Trump is expected to attend the much anticipated 7:30 p.m. Eastern time football matchup between the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama.
For the millions of football fans who tune in from home, she will also run a new ad nationally on ABC that hammers home her point.
“Winners never back down from a challenge. Champions know it’s anytime, anyplace. But losers, they whine and waffle and take their ball home,” the narrator says at the start of the spot, over images of a football game and washed-out footage of Trump missing a golf putt.
The 30-second ad ends with footage of Harris challenging him to another rally, with the words “When we fight, we win” hanging on a sign in the background.
“Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage. If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,” Harris says.
The new ad and flyover is just the latest step in a Harris campaign strategy to shift from encouraging Trump to attend another debate to mocking him with increasing ferocity if he will not. Harris advisers say their ultimate goal is to get him back onstage with Harris before a national audience. But if he continues to say no, they plan to use that fact to undercut his self-description as a strong leader who is best able to run the country.
The prime-time matchup between Georgia and Alabama — who have together won three of the past four college football national championships — is expected to be one of the biggest college games of the fall season, with significant viewership in the key battleground state of Georgia.
“No matter where Trump looks tonight — whether it’s up in the sky or at the TV in his luxury box — he won’t be able to escape the truth: Trump is running away from a second debate with Vice President Kamala Harris because he doesn’t want the American people to see just how weak and unpopular he and his Project 2025 agenda are,” Harris-Walz communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement, with a reference to a conservative policy plan that Trump says does not reflect his agenda. “But winners don’t back down from a challenge.”
The Harris campaign announced its desire for a second debate minutes after the first matchup between the two candidates concluded, a plan that the campaign had decided upon before the debate even began. Previously, Trump had proposed three matchups between the candidates, but Harris advisers said they would discuss subsequent meetings only after the first on Sept. 10.
Trump has argued that the only reason Harris wants to get back on the debate stage is that she performed so poorly the first time. He declared victory after their first meeting on ABC, falsely claiming “every poll” showed him as the winner, while citing unscientific web surveys that counted the opinions of visitors to conservative news sites.
“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” he wrote on social media following his debate with Harris and previously with President Joe Biden. “Kamala should focus on what she should have done during the last almost four year period. There will be no third debate!”
But independent polls showed Harris as the clear winner of the first matchup, measured both in the share of people who said she performed better and in the increase in her favorability rating among those who watched. National and battleground state election polling since then have shown slight movement in the race in favor of Harris. But the race remains within the margin of error in most states, with Trump in a much stronger position nationally than he was at this point in the 2020 contest.
Harris advisers, flush with cash from record late-summer fundraising, have made the staging of major events that get the attention of voters a top priority of their campaign. They have also targeted major sporting events for their advertising, with significant advertising around the Olympics and the Copa América soccer tournament and plans for professional sports advertising in the fall. The Democratic National Committee has purchased digital billboards outside two college football games this weekend in North Carolina.
While Trump is universally known, Harris entered the race this summer as an unknown quantity for many voters.
In recent weeks, the Harris campaign has been sending surrogates on cable news to mock Trump’s rejection of another meeting in increasingly blunt terms. David Plouffe, a top strategist for Harris, has called Trump “chicken man” on social media because of his decision to not agree to another debate.
“She took his lunch money last time,” Harris-Walz campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu said Thursday on MSNBC. “He lost and he knows it and he’s afraid of being humiliated again,” Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) said days earlier.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) went even further on Sept. 21. “If you remember the first debate, he would not even look at her once. He never even glanced at her because he is a coward,” he said. “He’s too scared to debate her.”
Trump previously ruled out attending the Sept. 10 debate before reversing course, and Harris advisers still think he may change his mind. They have accepted an Oct. 23 date on CNN, with the same moderators and rules that Trump agreed to for his first June debate with Biden. Trump subsequently praised CNN for how it conducted that matchup, which led to Biden abandoning the race in the wake of a widely panned performance.
The Harris campaign has not ruled out other possible networks, dates or moderators, including Fox News. This is a shift from the approach of Biden, who announced in the spring a list of networks where he would debate that did not include Fox News. At the time, Trump’s campaign expressed concern that Biden would not agree to any debates, and the Trump campaign quickly accepted two dates under the guidelines Biden laid out.
In recent weeks, Trump has privately asked others about whether he should reverse course and agree to another Harris debate. His 2016 campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, has been privately pushing him to agree to another meeting, while allies like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) have also said publicly that they think another debate is in Trump’s interest.
“I personally hope he debates again,” Graham said. “I think the narrative is she’s smart, she’s talented, and I think she’s a mile wide and an inch deep, and it’s mostly happy talk.”