Thursday Letters with Jen: On Kamala Harris and Debating as a Woman
On what women have to do and cannot do to win debates.
This month's delayed Thursday-ish newsletter is based on a question that I have been asked several times, but was not formally submitted on my dank Google Form:
"Who won the presidential debate?" — Anxious voters, perplexed non-Americans, and the many people who texted me.
You asked and, in response, I watched the debate, then analyzed it, then reflected on my own experiences as a former competitive debater.
As a warning, this newsletter is longer than usual. In addition, I often time-stamp the debate using this publicly available version. Finally, if you don't make it to the end, I hope you consider donating to my efforts to support my pod that is canvassing in Arizona.
Most of all, enjoy and vote!
Dear anxious voters, perplexed non-Americans, and the many people who texted me (mostly memes):
Believe it or not, I am excited about answering this question!
For a long stretch of my life, I loved presidential politics and I enjoyed being at a bar while watching Mitt Romney say aloud, "I have binders full of women" circa the 2012 election. That was when the stakes were not intolerably high, when ideas like the peaceful transfer of power were normative, when a 2016 Trump would say, "It could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK? You don't know who broke in to the DNC" and I could meme this:
Since 2020, I stopped watching presidential debates. The advent of the Trump campaign translated into a viewing experience where I ceased to learn anything — debate strategy, policy platforms, insights about each candidate, etc. I also began to feel the emotional weight of watching cruel rhetoric morph into physical violence.
I made an exception this year for one reason: Kamala Harris. I was interested in seeing the rhetorical strategies of a woman on a big stage where she is being adjudicated by the American electorate. My intrigue is very personal in nature. For six years, I was a competitive debater. This meant that, for much of my adolescence, I competed in ten or more debate tournaments per year, debated five or so rounds at each of the tournaments, and was thus adjudicated by someone — often a young man — at minimum 300 times.
When you stand in front of people that many times for the literal purposes of being assessed as a winner or loser, you learn a lot about the malleability of human persuasion and argumentation. You can pose the same argument in multiple settings, but the notion of a "winning position" is contextually dependent on the following questions:
Who is your judge?
Who are you debating?
Who are you?
Most importantly, what do people ascribe to who you are? Especially as a young woman and/or as a person of color.
It was a hard and incredible education, but I would absolutely do it again.
The other important lesson was the different tools of persuasion that I could employ, but needed to shift with the cultural, political, or sociological circumstances surrounding the debate. At a very basic level, most new debaters are taught the Aristotelian modes of persuasion, which are:
Ethos: The speaker persuades through the appearance of expertise, such as credentials, being an expert in a field, or using empirical evidence (statistics, research, etc.) to establish command of content.
Example: "According to an Emory University study consisting of canine MRI scans, dogs show more prefrontal lobe activities when they see human faces. Therefore, my dog loves me."
Pathos: In Greek, "pathos" means to "experience, undergo, suffer." This mode of persuasion is premised on appealing to the emotions.
Example: "You have a dog, right? Well, me too. They have been there for our happiest moments and even the moments when we felt so bad about ourselves, we ate a 50-piece bucket of Chicken McNuggets and watched 6 consecutive seasons of Lost. You've been there, right? Our dogs were there too without judgement, so they love us."
Logos: This form of persuasion is argumentation through logic. The most common form of logic is a sequential form of reasoning called syllogism, which deduces that if "A" is true, "B" must be true. The same goes in the inverse.
Example: "My dog loves food. I give my dog food. Therefore, my dog loves me."
My brief debate career took me across the state of Texas to compete against and be judged by mostly men. They were from all over the state — the plains of the Panhandle, the desert mountains of West Texas, the earthen stretches of the Rio Grande Valley. My most significant learning is that as a young woman, I only had one out of three modes of persuasion that I could consistently use to win. Since I could not be emotional (more on that later) and I was rarely taken as seriously as young men (a teammate once compared young me to a mole meets Daria Morgendorffer), I often defaulted to logos. I began to debate very technically, which resulted in more winning than losing. I used to attribute my surgical form of argumentation as "my style." However, after years in academic settings and in the work place, I realized something else:
Women have to fight in the persuasive arena — an arena often constructed by and for men — with fewer rhetorical tools.
How would Kamala Harris fare in a debate forum where she is one of few women to compete, where the prize of the presidency has only been won by men, where she would be adjudicated by an American electorate that still privileges the words and decisions of men at its highest levels of power?
This is the reason I returned to the 2024 Presidential Debate featuring Kamala Harris (California KH) v. Donald Trump (Florida DT).
I'll take you through my analysis vis-a-vis through three highlights. I will not discuss the political content of the debate, but the rhetorical turns, tactics, and approaches focusing specifically on Kamala Harris.
Let the best debater win.
Highlight #1: The Handshake
The first interesting moment of the evening transpired before anyone spoke. In an oft-discussed moment, Kamala Harris walks over to Donald Trump, introduces herself, and shakes his hand.
From my perspective, there are two important things to assess here. First, let's talk about what she's wearing and how she is styled. Notice Harris' choice of a black pants suit, a neutral white blouse, and her shirt's neckline that obfuscates most of her upper body. She is not wearing heels. The entire look draws very little attention to the shape of her body, which appears to be very intentional.
I am not focusing on her style because of my proclivity for fashion, but to illustrate a lesson I learned when in debate: as a woman, I will be assessed before I speak. The nature of so-called "feminine style" is that there is significant latitude for both incredible self-expression and judgement. There are so many ways to lose even before you open your mouth because of how we evaluate women's bodies. For example, here are some of the questions I had to think about even though I was, as the young say today, a demure teenager:
Is my skirt too short?
Is my neckline too revealing?
Can I wear a sleeveless shirt? Will that show too much skin?
How far up should I button up this shirt? How far down can I leave it unbuttoned?
Is my shirt too tight?
Is my shirt too sheer? Can they see my bra?
Are my heels too tall?
Is my hair too messy?
Since I debated from the ages of 12 to 18, my body went through significant changes, sometimes by the week. Thus, the answer to the above questions could shift quickly. I learned that the best approach was to hide my body so that it could not distract the debate. Like Harris, the less shapely, more straight-line look was the winning choice. I strongly believe that that is what transpired here with Harris' very smartly designed outfit.
Second, let's talk about her move to shake her opponent's hand first. She walks over to Trump with her arm stretched forward. Harris is my height — 5'4 — and Trump towers over her by nearly a foot at 6'3. The two have never physically met in person.
I would classify this moment as high risk, high reward. It highlights her diminutive stature and he could have easily declined the handshake in a counter-power move. Since she approached first with confidence and assertion, the move pays off significantly to the extent that it has been extensively highlighted. It's also one of the few times I enjoyed Trump in the debate with his fantastic response — "Have fun."
In this gesture, I see Harris using disadvantages — her size and the perceived passiveness of femininity — to her advantage. It's also an assertion of power that is optically fascinating. She introduces herself with a simple statement of "Kamala Harris" — no hello, no good luck, just her name, and an insinuation of, "You don't know me, so here's my name." All of this is unexpected. It's psychological whiplash, which is one of the most effective debate tools you can wield.
At the highest levels, debate is just as much of a psychological game as it is intellectual. An effective debate strategy is to psychologically destabilize the opponent and divert their energy away from processing intellectual arguments. Most debaters know that the actual fight is the one you are fighting within. It's like how a boxer figure must out how to expediently bounce back after taking a hit. A debate is similar and looks a little like this awful fighting brains graphic I drew:
A good debater uses all the space afforded to them to prey on their opponent's internal struggle. To use another cultural reference, this is what Kendrick Lamar employed in his rap battle with Drake this summer, which was a long musical embodiment of a debate. By the way, in the final round between Kendrick Lamar (Compton KL) and Drake (Toronto AG), the winner on a 3-0 is Kendrick Lamar (Compton KL).
When I started to become decent at debate, I realized the power of all the space before the first speech is given. My personal and most effective form of psychological whiplash what I call a "Texas Tonic." As a reminder, here's what I looked like in high school:
Given how unassuming and docile I looked, I often began to small talk with each of my opponents with the explicit purpose of sounding friendly and not serious before the round. This was to lower the guard of my opponent. Once we got into the debate, my primary goal was to change the cadence, tone, and the power in which I spoke — to force my opponent to spend precious time and intellectual energy recalibrating their perception of me. As we will see in a subsequent highlight, Harris is beginning her biggest strategy of psychological destabilization from the very beginning and it starts the moment she walked into that stage.
Highlight #2: A Passionate Plea for Reproductive Rights
Only 16 minutes into the debate, Harris takes her first huge intellectual punch on the issue of reproductive rights. I am very intrigued by her response, which is one of her few policy platforms that really sticks out in the debate. Every other media highlight has been premised on provocation (more on than later).
As I previously mentioned, I believe that women are only afforded one out of the three modes of persuasion. The two modes that I have found difficult to consistently employ are ethos (expertise) and pathos (emotion).
For the former, women aren't really afforded expertise in many domains of power. For example, only 52 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (less than 11% of CEOs) and Harris is only the second woman to grace the presidential debate stage is this country's 248 years of existence. Women are often questioned on their authority and expertise. If you don't believe me (of course you wouldn't!), here's John Mulaney describing why the New York MTA uses male and female voices on subway recordings (the bit begins on 4:10). By the way, I chose a white male comedian for a reason.
For pathos, there's significant empirical evidence indicating that men are afforded a wider array of emotional expression as figures of authority. On the contrary, "emotional" is often considered a pejorative for women leaders.
All of this plays out on a debate stage.
From my perspective, Harris only had two opportunities to employ an ethos and/or pathos based argument in this debate. The first is any response inviting her to talk about her personal story. She did so at the very beginning of the debate — a very mediocre and not-very-compelling response about her origin story. If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's how ineffectual it was.
The other opportunity was the issue that directly impact women themselves: reproductive rights. She took the opportunity to speak with passion because she is afforded expertise in a single domain: being a woman. This, in my opinion, was the biggest policy story of the debate.
She begins with an ethos-based argument describing the series of executive and legal decisions that led to our troubling health system for women. Then, at 17:19, she goes into two very tragic stories — the first about a woman bleeding out in her car and the second involving a young victim of incest. She employs "They didn't want that" repetition that is effective in the moment. It is an impassioned, controlled, and rousing 2.5 minutes of speaking time.
What's most impressive to me is that she speaks with great fluidity and fluency, which is also a quality that Trump has. Trump is often labeled an incoherent rambler. Even if this is true, he speaks confidently and without very many fluency breaks. A "fluency break" is an interruption to the flow of speaking, which can come in the form of a long pause or a verbalized filler such as "um" or "ah." From my perspective, fluency breaks mar a speech more than rambling because it fosters a disjointed experience and a discomforting feeling of not knowing how the rest of the speech will transpire. This was one of Joe Biden's unfortunate follies — as a stutterer, I felt uncertainty during his speeches related to when he was going to break
In my debate years, a common sight at the bottom of a ballot was tally marks. An advanced judge would often "tally" when a fluency break transpired. One of the worst in-round feelings was to hear myself say "um" and then to watch a judge mark it on the ballot. In a good round, the tallies would be less than three, which became a consistent goal of mine.
The best debate prep isn't so-called fluency drills. It’s really believing in yourself and the case you put in front of others. When you believe in something, it flows - you can feel it, you don't have to think about the words. In these 2.5 minutes, Harris excels at the highest levels.
Highlight #3: The Calm Amid (De)bait
Much of the post-debate commentary has been about Harris' successful strategy of baiting Trump. As much as I agree with this analysis, I see it from a different vantage point: Harris didn't have very many options to begin with.
I call debating that goes beyond ideas and policies a technical debate. It's the type of debate style that I adopted in an effort to win more. There are implications to this style. Even though you can win, you win based on what your opponent did/did not do — not because YOU made the best argument. One of the biggest questions of this election is "Who is Kamala Harris." The baiting method, though effective, did not get me much closer to understanding who she is as an individual — just who she is relative to Trump.
Notice how most media coverage is about what she made him do as oppose to what she said. I understand this was an effective strategy, but I also want to underscore that this form of debate can be very limiting. It's also one of the few rhetorical tools given to women.
I specifically became an "extensions debater" which meant that I would try to win through syllogism. I did a lot of "If A is not true, then B can't be true, and therefore I win." In Harris' case, the pivot from a relatively normal competitive debate to a very undisciplined Trump debate begins on the topic of immigration at 23:59. Harris stays on message by discussing the intentional Republican failure of an immigration bill in congress.
Suddenly at 25:33, she begins talking about Trump's rallies. Thus far, Trump's facial expressions have remained fairly consistent. He's done a good job with a poker face that is consistently very dour. It turns at 25:50 when she references people leaving his rallies. Remember, we are talking about immigration, one of the most important policy concerns impacting America today. The issue is so complex — involving everything from free trade agreements to internal discord of foreign countries to climate change — that Harris makes a rhetorical decision. She pivots to Trump's rallies.
Trump begins a debate doom spiral, wherein he lets his internal debate become externalized. At 26:10, he takes the bait and rebuts the rally claims. Then, he attempts to go back to immigration by arguing, now infamously, that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats. Once he finishes his thought, we go back to Harris who has made a definitive final choice at 28:25.
In response, Harris calls Trump "Extreme." Remember, we were talking about immigration. Now we are absolutely not talking about immigration. We are talking about Trump. This is intentional.
I find this sequence to be especially intriguing on two levels. First, we are watching a very technical ploy come to life where instead of talking about the issues, she is trying to portray the debater as unreliable. The other part is her calmness, but she probably can't be anything but calm. As previously referenced, an emotional woman is someone that we still, for some reason, can't take seriously.
I wanted to be more than just a technical debater and I believe Harris wants to be more than just a foil to Trump. I am sure Harris wants to be taken seriously as a leader and a policymaker just as I wanted to debate cases with philosophical argumentation.
On that note, I know that it sucks to be a high school debate judge watching two puberty-stricken teenagers slur through braces caked in Costco hot dog bits bickering about Peter Singer's ethical scenario of saving drowning children at the expense of yourself. That said, I wanted to be taken as seriously as the boy who went to The Greenhill School or Strake Jesuit Academy or Grapevine — not limited for being the Vietnamese girl from public school wearing her sister's old JC Penny suit.
By the end of the debate and the subsequent media analysis thereafter, the narrative was that Harris "won." You can tell in her appearance in Philadelphia immediately after that she was elated. It is a striking contrast to Trump, who entered the media spin room looking very angry.
Winning is an incredible feeling and I hope Harris has been able to relish the embers of it. That said, winning is fleeting and often very subjective. I have won debates that I thought I should have lost. I have lost debates that I knew I should have won. Regardless of the result and how I felt, one thing is absolute:
You have to move onto the next round.
That's the thing about a debater's mindset. Even though I won more than I lost, I never thought of myself as a winner — that's a fixed mindset in an activity that is incredibly dynamic. What may have worked in one round may not work in front of the next set of judges. You could sink and swim, feel smart and stupid, be elated and deflated all in the same day of a single tournament.
A debater's mindset is based on the next argument, the next round, the next tournament, the next year. I learned that regardless of whether I won or lost, I needed to process and move on quickly. I imagine that this is what running a campaign feels like on a much greater scale.
I worry that Democrats are fixated on the current victory when this is simply one milestone (albeit a big one) in a remaining two month slugfest. I want to remind people of the last two months, which included: 1) a candidate dropping out, 2) two presidential assassination attempts, and 3) the nomination of the first woman of color presidential candidate. TWO MONTHS with TWO to go.
Harris could still lose — perhaps that's the debater in me, but it's also a potential statistical outcome. What I am holding on to at the moment is the possibility that, should she win, it could create more space for women to enact an entire spectrum of persuasion — a world when girls and women can employ more than just technical tactics. From my time as a young debater to where I am now — still somehow debating and working against systems that silence — I have been waiting so long for this.
If you feel so inclined, donate to my pod's effort to canvas in Arizona. Most of all, wherever you are — vote.
Oh yeah. Who won? Kamala Harris (California KH).
Best,
JTVN