U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will face each other in their first presidential debate on Tuesday, with Jewish voters as a potentially persuadable audience for both candidates.
Nathan Diament, executive director of public policy at the Orthodox Union, told JNS that he hopes the moderators will ask both candidates questions about the issues about which Jewish voters are most concerned.
“Ms. Harris has said she is committed to Israel’s security but wants to see a ceasefire in Gaza,” Diament said. “With Hamas having rejected a deal yet again, we hope she will be asked what she would do to put more pressure on Hamas’s sponsors, such as Qatar and Turkey, to get them to press Hamas to relent.”
He added that Trump “has said he was the best president for Israel ever.”
“What specifically would he do in a second term to improve Israel’s security and block the efforts at places like the U.N. and International Criminal Court to isolate Israel?” he added.
Diament told JNS that both candidates should address what they would do to curb the rise in antisemitism in America. “Antisemitism against American Jews rose during President Trump’s term and continued to rise during the Biden-Harris term,” he said.
For Harris, Tuesday’s debate will be one of the first opportunities to present her agenda since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July.
The vice president has avoided press interviews largely and has yet to address why she has reversed positions that she held as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary, when she ran significantly to Biden’s left on issues like Medicare-for-all and policing.
“My values have not changed,” Harris said in August, during her first interview as the Democratic nominee, when pressed on her shifts in policy.
The Harris campaign released an “issues” page on its website on Sunday, detailing some of her policy priorities.
On Israel, the campaign site repeats the Biden administration’s position that it supports Israel’s right to self-defense but wants the war against Hamas to be concluded with a ceasefire-for-hostages deal.
“Vice President Harris will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to protect U.S. forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups,” the page states. “She and President Biden are working to end the war in Gaza, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
Sam Markstein, the national political director at the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JNS that the lack of clarity on Harris’s positions makes this debate a must-win for her.
“She has said very little about her policy positions,” Markstein said. “She’s been lying and deceiving the American people and having them believe that she’s this moderate when she’s actually this wildly liberal former senator and vice president from California and San Francisco.”
“I think if it’s a policy debate, it’ll be a great night for Donald Trump,” Markstein said. “If he lets her get away with not getting into specifics, then it’ll probably be a good night for her, as she dips and dodges any sort of conversation about policy items.”
Given how close the election is likely to be in key swing states, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, Harris will likely have to calibrate her message on Gaza to retain the support of the anti-Israel faction of Arab, Muslim and left-wing Democrats without alienating Jewish and pro-Israel voters.
Jews, Arabs, Muslims and anti-Israel progressives make up only a small fraction of the electorate. But their votes—or their decision to stay home on Election Day—could prove decisive if the key swing states are decided by just thousands or tens of thousands of votes, as they were in 2016 and to a lesser extent in 2020.
“The Democratic Party is split between pro-Israel and anti-Israel factions, and so I think it’s a sad commentary on the state of today’s Democratic Party that you have to appease, coddle and placate these sorts of radical voices in their party’s base,” Markstein said.
“They’re trying to have it both ways, where they’re saying one thing to the Arab community and one thing to the pro-Israel community,” he said. “It’s clearly divided the party.”
“I say that with a bit of sadness because it really should be bipartisan,” he added. “Unfortunately it’s not, because the Democrats are more focused on partisan political campaigning in states like Michigan than they are on actually doing what’s right.”
Harris and Trump will face off in Philadelphia on Tuesday at 9 p.m. Eastern on ABC.
