Good evening. Good evening. And good evening. The candidates need no introduction. Are you ready? ready. A new race with a new democratic candidate. Mr. Vice president, i'm speaking. And a familiar republican opponent. Do i still have to stick to policy? a vice president running to chart a new course. It doesn't have to be this way. Against an expresident with a criminal record. I have been indicted more than capone. With more issues facing the american people, reproductive rights, the economy, immigration, foreign policy, and the future of democracy itself. We are not going back. Tonight, full team coverage with rachel maddow, nicolle wallace, joy reid, chris hayes, lawrence o'donnell, ari melber, stephanie ruhle, jen psaki, symone sanders townsend, plus, steve kornacki on the road to 270. Alex wagner at the debate in philadelphia. New jersey senator cory booker, california governor gavin newsom, and pennsylvania governor josh shapiro. Msnbc's special coverage of the presidential debate between kamala harris and donald trump begins now. And here we go. Thank you for joining us for our coverage of the first debate between vice president kamala harris and former president donald trump. It is being held tonight in philadelphia, at the national constitution center on beautiful and historic arch street in downtown philly. None of us has a crystal ball, and anything is possible, but as of now, this is the one and only scheduled debate between harris and trump. This is a presidential race that the polls say is tighter than just about any election at this point in modern history. And unless there is a second debate, this event tonight will almost certainly be the largest audience either candidate will have the chance to speak to before the november election. It was only about two months ago that we had what turned out to be the most consequential presidential debate ever. It led to the remarkable decision by the sitting president of the united states to drop his bid for reelection in favor of his vice president. A historic and still frankly gobsmacking decision by a president who really is beloved by his party, but whose decision to step down in favor of vice president kamala harris was viewed positively by nearly 90% of all americans. On what else do nearly 90% of americans agree? particularly when it is something about politics. When vice president kamala harris takes the stage tonight, she'll be facing an opponent who is a convicted felon, he is currently awaiting sentencing on 34 felony counts. He's facing numerous other pending criminal charges. He's an opponent who tried to stay in power through insurrectionist violence when he lost his last election. An opponent who said this weekend that if he regains power there will be, quote, longterm prison sentences for his political enemies including in his words, quote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and corrupt election officials. An opponent who is promising the mass deportation of millions of people, something he says will be a, quote, bloody story. Vice president harris brings her own set of unprecedented variables to tonight's debate. This will be the first presidential debate featuring a candidate who was nominated separate and apart from the primary process, just three months before the election. A presidential debate likely to be watched by literally tens of millions of americans, including many according to the polls, who say they want to know more about kamala harris, even though she is the sitting vice president of the united states. Tonight's debate will be donald trump's seventh presidential debate. It will be kamala harris' first presidential debate. And her first debate of any kind in four years. It's also likely the best chance either of these candidates will get to bend, to try to bend this incredibly close, incredibly high stakes contest in their own favor. No pressure. I'm rachel maddow here at msnbc headquarters in new york. I'm joined by my equally overcaffeinated stressed out colleagues joy reid and jen psaki and chris hayes and stephanie ruhle. Alex wagner will be joining us from the debate spin room in philadelphia which is both an awesome job and also a terrible one. Our friend steve kornacki is here, he'll be joining us shortly. Joy, let me start with you. I mean, how are you doing? how are you feeling about this? what do you think the stakes are? caffeinated was accurate. I had a lot of coffee today with espresso in it. I think it is an interesting moment for vice president harris. Most people don't generally know much about vice presidents so it's not like she's in this unique position of being relatively unknown. I thing for the vice president, her only job tonight is to make people who are not yet decided comfortable with the idea of her as president. I think that's really all she has to do. She doesn't need to do a knockout blow, anything extraordinary. She just needs to make the small percentage of biden voters who aren't there yet feel like okay, i'm good with her, and the small number of undecideds decide she doesn't seem too radical, too whatever, whatever it is that is stopping them from closing the deal, i think that's her job, because donald trump has a ceiling. And i don't see anything that he could possibly do whilst tweeting out cat memes and threats and weird stuff from truth social to add to his number. She just needs to close that gap and that's all her job is tonight. Steph, do you think that's right, there's nothing trump can do tonight to change the ceiling he's got to make people who are against him turn toward him? he has hit his ceiling, but for her, besides introducing herself, familiarizing the american people with who kamala harris is, she can also make it clear, this man has great tag lines and no policy. The two things he's been saying for the last two years are mass deportations and tariffs. And there are people across this country, many people who don't like politics who are upset about the cost of living, who are upset about inflation, but this idea that he says at rallies, made in the usa, other countries, we're charging you, people need to understand this will be devastating to our economy. Traditionally, republicans have this brand that they're good for the economy. Joe biden and kamala harris have presided over a very strong and complicated economy. This is her opportunity tonight to explain that and say we're going to make things better, but this guy has not only nothing to offer you, what he's offering is significantly worse. On the tariffs issue, and lawrence o'donnell has been talking about this a lot on his show and posting online about it. He's made the case that trump should be asked followup questions designed to elicit whether he actually understands what a tariff is. That would be a good question. The way he's talking about them, it's as if they're a free source of money that costs america nothing that makes other countries pay for our stuff. It's almost the opposite. A no information voter will absolutely buy into that and say you're damn right, and it makes no sense, so she needs to be asked that question because not only is there no explanation for it, if you're worried about inflation, having blanket tariffs across the board will be devastating. The last time we saw donald trump do this, with china, it put the american farmer in a desperate hole that then required a huge farm aid package. Billions and billions of domestic emergency aid to make up for the economic harm that he caused the last time he tried this in a smaller way. He must be asked about this tonight because pocketbook issues, the economy, is a number one issue for scores of americans. Jen. Maybe in the minority in this, i hope he's asked that question. I hope she does not proactively utter the word tariffs out of her mouth. I actually think, the thing i have been thinking about all day, she's a prepper, a studier. This is a thing we all admire, we're all nerds at this table. She's never met him before, never debated him before. He's a circus performer, she is not. It's a very different kind of skill set and muscle than i think she has even used in past debates. He's not mike pence. So for me, what i think is most important for her is to be in the moment and come back to the home of i'm fighting for you at home. And he is fighting for himself. And that to me is the message frame. If tariffs is a debate, great, but i don't think she should proactively be reiterating like a 12point plan on the economy. I think it's about reminding people who she's fighting for. I feel like some of the strategy discussion about the debate and some of the free advice is policy or no policy, as if it doesn't matter what the policy discussion is. The point is you need to get people at home to trust you, to understand what you're saying, and to think you're a better choice. Tariffs, i get it, she shouldn't talk about them, but tax cuts, the only people he's offering tax cuts to are the same he did last time around. Corporations and the wealthiest americans. And that should be made clear tonight. Which is also very popular. I mean, very popular, her position. Her position is, to your point. Nobody wants the highest income to not pay more taxes. Most people don't. 97% of people don't. I'm in the home frame of what people are feeling and their vibes at home. If they feel like she is thinking about them and he's talking about his weird tariffs plan. I think the main tactical question x i don't think it's an easy one, it's a difficult one, joy, i'm with you. How much you engage him, honestly. How much do you this guy is going to say crazy stuff. He's going to ramble, say nasty things, lie about you. He's going to cast aspersions. How much is the energy going here and how much is the energy going there? that is a very, very difficult tactical question because he will say things like, you know, lie about things that immigrants have done. Well, are you going to let that hang there? so at every moment making that tactical decision, he's a hard guy to debate for that reason. I come down in the same place i think we're all in in some ways. This is the most important lane for her talking to people at home. Talking to the camera and people at home. I'm kamala harris, i'm going to cut your taxes, he wants to raise them. I want to go forward, he wants to go back. I'm looking out for you and thinking about what we can do for you. He's looking out for himself. They have set that message frame pretty well. This is an opportunity for people to hear it from her, and it's very hard to not get lured in to the debate. The last thing i'll say is the one other thing is it is actually easy to get him to swim upstream. So swimming upstream i think about because we do this for a living. Someone says something 45 seconds ago, and am i going to swim upstream to talk about the thing 45 seconds ago or keep going? trump can't let certain things go. We saw it in the first debate. This went unnoticed because of biden's performance. He kept coming back to suckers and losers, to the point it was like, what are you going to do about climate? can i go back to the suckers and losers? like, so there are certain things you can bait him into obsessing over, whether he won the 2020 election, for instance. The suckers and losers thing, which is a sore point. Criminal convictions. I think all those things there are ways to deploy those as kind of land mines he's going to come back to. Because he can't let them go because he has no discipline around those things. Our friend alex wagner is in the spin room near the debate site in philadelphia tonight. As i just mentioned, you have both an excellent and terrible job tonight. Can you tell us what it's like, what you're expecting tonight, and what the physical environment has been like thus far? well, i am personally so overcaffeinated that i can hear a light ringing in my ear. Maybe going to be useful tonight. It's a massive spin room, like one of the biggest spin rooms i have ever been in. I don't know how that's going to play when it comes time for both campaigns to tell the press they won, they both won. I was talking with some senior members of the harris campaign, and maybe this will reassure jen, but vice president harris did not do any debate prep today. She spent the day relaxing. Her husband is in the area. We can assume that they are just chilling, for lack of a better term. They feel confident. They did admit that they believe she needs this, a big win tonight, maybe more than trump does. And they also acknowledged that, you know, the bar is just a lot higher for a woman and a woman of color on a stage like this at a moment like this. So i think that there's kind of quiet confidence but certainly not overconfidence about what might take place tonight. I think that, you know, i cosign everything that my fellow colleagues at the big table in new york are saying about the bar, the relative difference in terms of accountability for both of these candidates. I will just tell you in terms of quality of surrogate tonight, the harris campaign has three governors who are going to be out here spinning, three senators, four congress people, a gold star father, and what the campaign is calling a surprise guest. I don't think it's beyonce, so just get that out of your mind. You know, they have a solid roster. The trump campaign has matt gaetz, vivek ramaswamy, lara trump, michael whatley, the election denier and chair of the rnc, and jd vance. So it will be really interesting to see what planet both campaigns are living on after the debate tonight. And you know, the quality of the spin because listen, there's going to be the debate and then the public impression of what happens at the debate. Both of those are going to matter probably equally. One of the things i think we have all had in mind today thinking back to the trump versus hillary clinton debates in 2016, was trump and steve bannon pulling a stunt. Having a sort of it wasn't exactly a prank, but basically trying to pull off something between a prop and a stunt effect at the debate as a way of trying to get under hillary clinton's skin and rattle her campaign. It is the harris campaign that is promising a surprise guest in the spin room. Is there any other sign of any shenanigans or stunts either side is planning on playing? trumpian shenanigans, i have not seen any indicators of that. Nor have i heard any. So i can't give you more on potential trump appearance here, although as always, rachel, we're prepared for anything and everything, given what happened at the last debate. Who knows where this night ends? we will certainly be here if donald trump takes to the spin room, but as of right now, it's just the murderers row of vivek ramaswamy, lara trump, and michael whatley spinning in the former president's favor tonight. I mean, prepping for debates now, like now that it's the third donald trump election cycle, now that we have seen what happened in the debates and the stunts and all the other things i feel like you used to prepare for things the debaters might say. Now you have to prepare for like, is somebody going to bite the head off of a live bat? is somebody going to come out without their pants on? like, the realm of things that could happen is no longer zero to 100, it's zero to n, and who knows. But you'll be there physically, not us. If a bat loses its life, i will be here to tell you about it. Right on, alex. Also sorry. We'll be back with you, my friend. For more on the state of the race and what is at stake as we head into tonight's debate, we have been dying to do this segment. Steve kornacki, set it up for us. Tell us how high the cliff is that we are peering over the edge of. Let's take a look. Start here, this is our average of the national polling, the major national polls that are out there right now. Harris with a twopoint advantage over trump, 47/45, and this gets to one of the two major questions i'm looking at as this fall campaign unfolds and certainly as election night will eventually play out. It's this. Remember, in 2016, donald trump lost the national popular vote by 2. 1 votes to hillary clinton, but he won the presidency. In 2020, joe biden beat donald trump by 4. 5 points in the national popular vote, and trump nearly won the presidency. About 42,000 votes across three states would have kept trump in the oval office. A question for 2024 is, is there still going to be a republican advantage, a trump advantage in the electoral college relative to the popular vote? if there is, then this is a very, very uneasy advantage for democrats to have over donald trump coming out of labor day, just two points, because you can see what that has meant in the past. Or have things changed a little bit? one reason they might have changed a little bit, we have seen donald trump's appeal in polling broaden out demographically, he's made some inroads with nonwhite voters this time around, at least in polling, that he didn't have in 2020 and in 2016. Is that going to allow him to get more votes in places like california, new york, illinois? big blue states where he's not going to pick up electoral votes but it might tighten the national popular vote. That's one of the big questions is that republican advantage that trump advantage still there when it comes to the electoral college. Then let's look at that race for 270. The core seven battleground states, looking at our current polling averages in those states. This will get to the second big question that i'm kind of looking at here. You see right now, you do see some harris blue here, five of them just today, new polling out in north carolina has actually given harris one tenth of one point, the advantage for her in north carolina. You see trump right here, just very, very close. 1. 5, 0. 5, all this, except draw your attention to the lower right corner. You see wisconsin, harris with comparatively here 4. 3 points. This is significantly larger than you're seeing in the other ones. Again in the poll average. Remember, wisconsin 2020. There was a poll three weeks before election day in that state that had joe biden ahead by 17 points. He won it by a fraction of a point in the end. Just 20,000 votes. The biggest single polling miss in any key state in 2020 was in wisconsin. It was also a state where there was a huge miss in 2016 as well. One of the other big misses we saw in the 2020 polling was in michigan. Both states, democratic support significantly overestimated, trump support underestimated. We saw polling misses that were not evenly spread out in 2020 among all the battleground states. They were demographically, geographically specific, so that's the other question i think i'm looking at here. Are we seeing polling misses in those states again? trump voters undercounted in the northern battlegrounds. If they are again, any democratic advantage you're seeing in the polls come with a huge grain of salt, if the polling issue has been fixed, talking about something very different here maybe. Wow, so if we were just going to bottom line this, is it fair to say hey, look, it's a tie? i tell people i have it narrowed down to two. All right, steve. Thank you so much. We're just getting going tonight as the second presidential debate draws near, the first one involving vice president kamala harris and former president donald trump. Headtohead in philadelphia. We're going to hear from a former colleague and longtime friend of the vice president, senator cory booker is going to join us live next. Lots to get to. Stay with us. My dry eye symptoms got worse over time. My eye doctor explained the root was inflammation. Xiidra was made for that, so relief is lasting. Xiidra treats the signs and symptoms of dry eye disease. Don't use if allergic to xiidra and seek medical help if needed. Common side effects include eye irritat