The Decibel - Bingo! What to expect in the U.S. presidential debate

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are set to face off in what will likely be the only debate between them on September 10th at 9 p.m. ET. And as far as debates go, the stakes are high after the last debate ultimately led to Joe Biden stepping down as the Democratic candidate.To help you follow along to the various points that Harris and Trump raise, Adrian Morrow, The Globe’s U.S. correspondent in Washington, wrote out bingo cards. He is on the show to play some debate bingo with Menaka Raman-Wilms. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

So have you ever actually played bingo yourself? Not since elementary school. I remember being introduced to the premise and a bunch of educational activities or things like that. But I don't think I've ever actually played it as an adult that I can remember. Adrienne Morrow is The Globe's U.S. correspondent based in Washington, D.C. And to prepare for tonight's presidential debate between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, Adrian decided to create actual, literal bingo cards. He wrote out 24 catchphrases and policy talking points for each candidate.

It's a great way for people to track a lot of the things that they're going to be hearing and think about a lot of the big issues and policies at stake, but in a way that's a little bit more novel and maybe easier to engage with than reading one of my usual long, boring news stories. Never boring, never boring. But if we were going to talk bingo with Adrienne, producer Madeline White made sure that we were well equipped to do so, meaning she bought a bingo cage. I'm both nervous and excited to see what Maddie has in store. No, this is amazing. I love that we're leaning into this so much. Hello. We're very excited. Okay, Maddie's here. What? Oh my god, it's so small. Maddie!

Yeah, I was definitely... It's a giant thing. I was like, where am I going to put my computer? I was expecting, like, a big, huge, like, game show television. Yeah, yeah, like... Okay, so let's load this sucker up. Oh my god. That's great. We're running, like, the world's saddest game show. Marbles are loose. Wow.

Okay, you want to give it a practice spin? Let's make sure it works before. Okay. Okay. So I spin it like that and something comes out. Wow. Perfect. Incredible.

What an exciting day on the Decibel. Today, we break down the likely points each candidate will bring up at the debate, one bingo square at a time. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is the Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Adrian, it's great to have you here today. Thanks for having me. So Adrian, for political junkies like myself and you, I think as well, debate night is obviously a big night in politics. But I guess for people who aren't like us, you know, why should they tune in? Why is this worth it? I think first and most importantly is that, you know, the U.S. is the world's wealthiest

country and arguably the most powerful. And what happens in the country affects, you know, affairs around the world's wealthiest country and arguably the most powerful. And what happens in the country affects affairs around the world, including in Canada. The amount of trade that Canada does with the US, that gets affected by who sits in the White House. And I think second of all, just the fact that you've got such a huge contrast generally between the two people running for office,

that this isn't a matter of two different sort of variations on very similar agendas. So whether you're interested in global affairs and the geopolitics, you know, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, probably very different approaches to that. If you care about global migration, they're both talking about all of that in very different terms. If you care about climate change, you know, that's something that they have very different views on, you know, so which of these two sits in the Oval Office next year is really going to matter around the world and not just in the U.S. You make a good case then for paying attention.

And you brought up a range of issues, which we are going to hit on a number of them today. I think one of the goals, the main goals of a debate like this really is for each candidate to introduce themselves, right? And establish their own story, not have the other person establish that for them. So this is particularly important for Kamala Harris. So I guess what can we expect on that front, Adrian? I think there are a couple of things that she's going to bring up. You know, she's definitely going to get into her professional history, the fact that she was a career prosecutor. She was the district attorney in San Francisco and then the attorney general in California. I think that's going to largely help her try to highlight the contrast that she's trying

to draw with Donald Trump. I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type. You know, Kamala Harris certainly comes off as a sort of liberal California intellectual. And so I think she's going to try to play up a lot of the things in her background

that probably make her relatable to a lot of average Americans the fact that she was raised primarily by a single mother for most of her childhood that they sometimes struggled to make ends meet and they lived in apartment buildings and things like that the fact that she's the daughter of two immigrants you know a very sort of American story you know a father from Jamaica and a mother from India who met in university in California and then had, you know, Harris and her sister. So, and also I'm a career prosecutor and just look at me compared to the other guy. Yeah. Okay. I'm noticing on my card here, I've got, did I mention I'm a former prosecutor under Harris? So I'm going to stamp that one. I've also got one here that she might bring up her part-time job at McDonald's when she was in university, Adrian.

So why does she like to bring up that? That's correct. That's something that makes her very relatable to most Americans. I mean, the vast majority of people in the U.S., as in Canada, have had to work in the service industry at some point in their lives. They've all been there. And she's also going to bring up some point of difference between herself and Donald Trump to say, you know, he grew up wealthy, he inherited a real estate business from his father. You know, she's gonna say, I didn't have those sorts of those sort of economic advantages. You know, I got myself the university by working at a fast food joint.

Let me ask you about Trump, then, Adrian, people know Donald Trump, he has been president before, of course, right? So how is he going to position himself in this debate? I think if he's going to use one point to try to define himself as a person or to define his character beyond the sort of things that he's promising ideologically, I think it will be referencing the attempt on his life in July. The way that he behaved in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, he looked very tough. We saw him coming down from the stage with the blood coming out of his ear, pumping his fist in the air and shouting at the crowd to fight. I mean, Donald Trump looked in that moment exactly the way that Donald Trump wants to present himself as this tough guy. And I think he's going to want to hold that up as an example of, I was so tough in the wake of, you know, the most traumatic experience of my life. Think of how tough I'm going to be when I'm in the Oval Office. You know, the things that may be more telling about Donald Trump's character and perhaps a little bit more, you know, prosaic to people are, you know, he very well might brag about the size of the crowds at his rallies. This

is something that Donald Trump really cares about. He cares a lot about public approbation. And he may complain about Kamala Harris's social media following because he's really shown, you know, over the summer, Harris had this surprising momentum on social media and all these people kind of organically creating TikToks and things like that about her. We saw him complain on True Social a couple of weeks ago in an all caps post about how he claimed that Kamala Harris's follower count was not real and she was inflating her numbers and all this. So I think we will probably see some variation of that, you know, that claim of public love that he likes to make. Yeah. Okay, so looking at the card,

we've got describes how close he came to being assassinated. Yep. Where is that one? Where is that? Here it is. There we go. And bragging about crowd size. Yep. Yep. And then complains that Harris's large social media following is not real. Okay. So that is how they're going to define their own character. But Adrian, what about attacks on each other's characters? I think if Donald Trump is, he's sticking to the sort of issues that his campaign, I think, has laid out as the contrast that they want to draw with Harris, we'll certainly see him try to paint Kamala Harris as being, you know, far to the left and being a radical. We've seen him in rallies referring to Kamala Harris as Comrade Kamala, you know, describing her as a communist. The other thing

to watch for on this, and this may be the most important thing to watch for, is whether Donald Trump brings race into it, likely by making fun of Kamala Harris's first name. We've seen him do this at some of his rallies where he, you know, he claims that Kamala is somehow an unpronounceable name. And this is the sort of thing that, you know, when he does this in front of his supporters, I think people are so in the mainstream in the US, people are sort of so used to Donald Trump being Donald Trump, a lot of people either tune it out, or they don't watch these kinds of rallies, or they don't really, you know, think about about what Donald Trump is saying. If he says that at a debate, you know, where he's got a much broader audience in front of him, you know, I think that I think that really raises the significance of him saying these things. He also questioned if she was black, right? He's done that in front of him. You know, I think that I think that really raises the significance of him

saying these things. He also questioned if she was black, right? He's done that in front of a room of black journalists before, actually. That's right. I mean, right after Kamala Harris became the Democratic presumptive nominee, you know, Donald Trump, you know, attacked her on race in front of a room of black journalists where he questioned whether she was, you know, whether she was really black, he sort of questioned what her race was. You know, it's the sort of thing that not only could obviously backfire on him, but would be bad for the country and maybe giving people, seemingly trying to give a certain type of bigoted person permission to, you know, to go there and to bring Kamala Harris's race up in a

negative way. Okay, so that's kind of how Trump, we expect Trump might attack Harris. How might Harris attack Trump's character? I think Kamala Harris is going to try to find as many ways as possible to call Donald Trump weird without actually using the word. The Democrats are kind of in an interesting place on this where Joe Biden, when he was running,

made these very sort of earnest exhortations about Donald Trump being bad for democracy and how people had to vote him out for that reason. Since Kamala Harris came in and Tim Walz, her running mate, you know, sort of burst onto the national stage, they've sort of tried to shift the conversation a little bit in the sense that, you know, yes, they try to still have these very serious warnings about the threat to democracy that they say Donald Trump represents, But they're also trying to sort of recast him as being out of touch and weird and strange, and maybe somebody that people should be uncomfortable with. And you saw a lot of this at the Democratic National Convention, where,

you know, the Obamas and Tim Walz were just sort of making fun of Donald Trump. We'll be right back. All right, Adrian, I think it's time to get into some of the issues that we might see at the debate. So that means it is time to spin the bingo cage. So just give me a second here. There we go. Okay, so I've got one here that says, recounts a violent crime perpetrated by an immigrant. So, Adrian, this is one of the Trump squares. So tell me, why did you include this?

Immigration is Donald Trump's foundational issue. In 2015, 2016, when he was first running for president, you know, the campaign defining promise for him was building a wall on the U.S.'s border with Mexico. And we can kind of guess from his rhetoric on the campaign that a lot of the people coming into the U.S., particularly via the southern border, are violent criminals. You know, we should fact check that by saying that there's no evidence that, you know, immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, are more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. And most of the academic research points that this is a complete set of falsehood. The other thing that I think we can expect him to bring up based on his rhetoric this year is that he started claiming, again, without evidence, that other countries are opening up prisons, that they're opening up what he calls insane asylums, releasing everybody from there and

then sending them to the southern border of the US.S. They're coming from prisons. They're coming from jails. They're coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. You know, the press is always on me because I say this. Even though all of that is undoubtedly untrue, or at the very least has no evidence behind it, we can definitely expect him to hit that theme over and over again, because he definitely sees it as central to his political identity. And it really excites a portion of the American electorate. And how will or how might Kamala Harris reply to these points then from Trump? I think there's a couple of ways to look at it. So number one, I think that the first thing that she's going to do is she's going to remind viewers that, you know, Joe Biden attempted to to pass an immigration bill to tighten the southern border, essentially, and to make it easier for immigration officers there to to turn people around and not allow them into the United States without even allowing them basically to launch an asylum claim and get into the into the system of adjudicating that. But that Republicans in Congress, under pressure from Donald Trump, refused to pass this bill. I think, though,

the second way of kind of looking at it is underlying all of that. Kamala Harris is going to be trying to separate out xenophobia from logistics, essentially, where I think she may not put it in these terms, but I think the way that she's going to frame the issue is to say, look, there are obviously a lot of very valid concerns. And I share those concerns about the logistics of managing migration. And so it's up to the federal government to figure out how you how you manage migration in a way that doesn't that doesn't break the bank. OK, I also want to ask about abortion, which is a huge issue in this election. Adrian, you've got a square here that reads, quote, reminds viewers that Trump has bragged about ending Roe v. Wade, end quote.

So this is obviously on the Harris card. So what is each candidate going to talk about around the issue of abortion? I mean, Kamala Harris is going to talk about it as much as possible. to bring up to viewers, you know, the fact that Donald Trump, you know, once said that he was proud of having ended Roe v. Wade because he appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices, you know, gave the anti-abortion, you know, block on the Supreme Court majority, and then they all voted together essentially to end Roe v. Wade. I think more of an open question is going to be to what extent Kamala Harris proposes new policies or things that she can do while in office that will allow for expanded abortion access or that on some of these other issues that have been intractable in the U.S on one hand, a large portion of his base or the Republican base generally is very anti-abortion and sees the end of Roe v. Wade as one of their proudest achievements

and in fact wants to go further than that and pass a nationwide abortion ban. Donald Trump, of course, is well aware that this is extremely unpopular and that most people want at least some abortion access. And so he's going to, I'm sure, try in some capacity to acknowledge that he ended Roe v. Wade, while at the same time trying to almost reject credit for having ended Roe v. Wade. The way he did it in June at a previous debate was that he claimed that Roe v. Wade was a problem, that nobody liked Roe v. Wade, which certainly isn't true, and that he wanted to get rid of it so that states could make up their own minds. Yeah. All right. I'm going to reset by spinning the cage again here.

Oh, there's a ball dropping out now. So we've talked about a whole bunch of issues here, Adrian. Next, I want to take this to some international issues here. There's a square on the card that reads, tries to thread the needle between supporting Israel and calling for a Gaza ceasefire. So whose square is this one on? Kamala Harris's. This may be the single hardest policy issue that she's going to have to navigate in the debate. We sort of saw her messaging at the Democratic National Convention. With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock because now is the time to get a hostage And let me be clear, and let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself. At the same time, there's a large constituency of Democrats that at the very least are deeply concerned,

if not outraged, over what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza. I think it's going to be a very, very difficult thing for her to do in the debate. Her convention speech was extremely carefully worded, and she may not have the opportunity to choose her words so carefully when she's in a more sort of spontaneous back and forth on the debate stage. Yeah. And while we're on this topic, Adrian, remind us, what has Trump said on this issue? Trump has talked about how he thinks that the Israeli invasion of Gaza is going on too long, and he thinks that Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, should finish things up,

essentially. He said that a few months back. But that said, I mean, his party and the majority of Republican voters are so pro-Israel that I think he sort of knows what he's going to say on that. Much harder for Trump, and I think an area that Kamala he's going to say on that. Much harder for Trump, and I think an area that Kamala Harris is going to press pretty hard on, is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You know, Trump has basically promised to immediately end the war in Ukraine, you know, if he won the election. He's not said how exactly he would do that. And the accusation from Harris and from most people that are pro-Ukraine, is that what Donald Trump is essentially saying is that he would put pressure on Kiev to surrender to Putin, or at the very least to make a very unfavorable deal for Ukraine and give up a bunch of territory or that sort of

thing. Okay. Adrian, we also have to get to issues of the economy, because this is huge right now in Canada, but also in the US, of course. There's a square here that says uses the price of bacon to exemplify post-pandemic inflation. So who might end up doing this in the debate? You know, they say you're going to vote with your stomach. I don't know if you've heard it, but it's a little bit true. And groceries, food has gone up at levels that nobody's ever seen before. We've never seen anything like it, 50, 60, 70 percent. You take a look at bacon and some of these products and some people don't eat bacon anymore.

And this is one area where where Trump might actually be able to reach the very small pool of swing voters that still exists. So I think I think Trump will will raise inflation. And I think this is probably something that his handlers are probably pushing him towards. OK, and how is Harris going to talk about the economy and inflation? Because she was part of the last administration, right? So how is she going to defend, I guess, against these attacks? So whenever Joe Biden tried to defend against these attacks, he would sort of point to these very big picture kind of macroeconomic things. I'm not sure how well that messaging worked, because a lot of people look at it as, well, things are more expensive than they were four years ago, as opposed to sort of looking at these larger

kind of economic trends. So you might see a little bit of Kamala Harris trying to reprise that rhetoric and maybe say, you know, we didn't cause the inflation, but we handled it as well as anyone could have. But I think you will also then see her pivot to making some specific promises on, you know, eliminating the tax on tips, which is an idea that she got from Donald Trump. The other thing that she will definitely bring up in this case is Donald Trump's trade policy, where he's talked about putting between 10 to 20% levy on all goods coming into the United States. You know, so I think Harris will bring that up, and she will

probably frame it, at least she does in the campaign trail, she calls it a Trump tax. And that idea is because Donald Trump always talks about tariffs in terms of the amount of revenue they bring in for government. But what he doesn't talk about is that most people end up paying for tariffs are consumers because big companies will import goods and then they will turn around and hike the cost of goods essentially to make up for the money that they're losing in paying the tariff to the government. Great. So Adrian, we've talked about a lot here. Some of these issues are definitely going to be talked about in the debate. But I guess I wonder, what are some of the wild cards on this thing? Like what may or may not actually be brought up tonight? Maybe the single biggest wild card, at least for me, is whether either of these candidates says anything about Canada. Kamala Harris spent most of her adolescence in Montreal, but she very much aligns references to Canada, to Montreal in her speeches.

I think during her convention speech, she named a couple of different places in the US that she had lived growing up. But then instead of naming Montreal, she said, you know, we lived wherever our parents' jobs took us, which is a very, very funny. The square you have here on the bingo card is it describes an episode from her life that happened in Canada, but avoids mentioning Canada. So that's exactly what you're talking about there.

Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, and so I think I think there's a very real possibility that she will reference something that happened in Canada. Well, she'll talk about, you know, moving around a lot as a kid, maybe, but then conveniently not mention where any of this took place. Most people running for high office in the United States do not emphasize their ties to other countries. You know, just ask Ted Cruz, what a good time he had over the fact that he was born in Calgary when he ran for president, you know, you had Donald Trump questioning his, his ability to serve as president over that, you know, certainly incorrect. But I think that gives you some indication of just how these kind of things tend to fly.

To round out here, Adrian, like, you know, what are you watching for? And if you and other people are trying to assess the debate tonight, what does a win look like for each candidate? I think the single biggest thing that a lot of us are gonna be watching for is which Donald Trump shows up tonight. You know, are we going to see the Donald Trump who showed up at the June debate, who was surprisingly effective by, yes, bringing all the same sort of over the top rhetoric that he usually does, but doing it in a relatively controlled and kind of tactical way. But fundamentally not be baited by Harris, not come across as crazy or shouting or just plain weird. And I think if he can do that, I think that will ultimately be for him will sort of be the best possible night to be able to come out with all the different things that he wants to say. But without sort of coming across as sort of screaming and bombastic.

I think for Kamala Harris, that the difficulty is going to be that she has not done a lot of these sort of spontaneous appearances. So I think there will be this question of whether, you know, for 90 minutes, she can come across as the sort of joyful, but competent, you know, person that she's trying to project herself to be, or whether she's going to come across as lackluster, I guess. And certainly for her, you know, she's already signaled that she's going to try to bait Donald Trump. And so, so I think, I think ultimately, you know, how Donald Trump behaves will be as central to how people see the debate, I think, as the actual policy issues that they discuss. Adrian, this has been so interesting and very fun as well. Thank you so much for taking the

time to be here today. Yeah, thanks for having me. And I'm happy to report that I have two bingos on my cards here. I've been laughing as we went along. And yeah, I got two wins. Amazing. Congratulations. And of course, if any of you listeners do want to play along with the bingo cards during the debate tonight, we have copies for you in the Globe and Mail.

You can get a copy of today's physical paper and get those bingo cards yourself, but they're also available on our website. So you can head to theglobeandmail.com and print them out and have your own debate bingo fun at home. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Today's episode was edited and mixed by Ali Graham. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy-McLaughlin, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.