WASHINGTON — On Tuesday night, Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will go head-to-head in their only scheduled debate. Both have traveled to Wisconsin in recent weeks in an attempt to gain an advantage in the battleground state.
“Donald Trump's going to be Donald Trump. I mean, that's just who he is,” Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Minocqua, said when asked if he thinks Trump should stick to the issues instead of attacking Harris during the debate.
“But it's important to highlight the policies,” Tiffany went on to say, “and I think he's going to be able to lay out the contracts between Vice President Harris and himself.”
Tiffany said Trump needs to argue that life was better four years ago when he was president than it is now under President Joe Biden.
“Americans know we're headed in the wrong direction,” Tiffany said. “And you look back to four years ago, the border was largely secure, we did not have this ruinous inflation, and we had a strong America abroad. That all went away under the Biden-Harris administration.”
Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, said the debate is a chance for Harris to introduce herself.
“I just want Kamala Harris to let people know that she is that competent professional who's ready to be president, who has the right values, that share the values of the average person in Wisconsin, and isn't this conspiratorial person that Donald Trump is,” Pocan said. “[She] was an attorney general, was a U.S. Senator, [is] the Vice President. [She’s] clearly ready for office. But do people really know her? And I think if they get a chance to do that, they're going to like her, and that's going to be the extra edge we need for November.”
In a statement to Spectrum News, Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, said Harris will continue to lay out her vision to lower the cost of living, support small businesses, and help families with the cost of raising children.
“She will highlight her record as prosecutor, where [she] advocated for the most vulnerable, and discuss her accomplishments as Vice President where she represented America on the world stage and championed women’s reproductive freedoms,” the statement goes on to say. “This will be a clear contrast to Donald Trump who has only offered nonsensical answers to Americans' most pressing challenges and whose record includes providing tax cuts to big corporations and taking away reproductive freedoms from millions of women.”
The debate hosted by ABC News and simulcast by Spectrum News and other networks will last 90 minutes, there will be no live audience, and each candidate will have their mic turned off when the other is speaking.
"Whether you like Donald Trump's personality or not, that doesn't matter," Tiffany said. "Who's going to fix America? Kamala Harris, with her record as vice president? Or someone that knows how to fix these things, and that's Donald Trump. And I think if he adjudicates the case with, 'Here's the policies that are going to work. They worked under me. We can do this again.' If he does that, he's going to be just fine."