Gavin Newsom Says Kamala Harris Has To “Make The Case She’s Not Joe Biden, And She Sure As Hell Ain’t Donald Trump” – Update

Ted Johnson and Dominic Patten
·4 min read

UPDATED: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of the spin room surrogates for Kamala Harris, told reporters that the debate will be an opportunity to “take the best of the Biden record, but also make the case that she’s not Joe Biden, and she sure as hell ain’t Donald Trump.”

“She is a new generation, a leader, and that’s her opportunity,” he said.

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Newsom was a surrogate for Biden as well, and appeared at the spin room in June, a disastrous night for the president.

Newsom also said that Harris has to communicate “a vision where people feel heard and included.”

People have to “feel that she’s talking about them, and Donald Trump, in contrast, we know will be talking about himself.”

The governor said that he was not nervous about the debate, but said that if Trump “feels he’s losing, this will be very interesting, and we will feel that very quickly. We are going to feel that right out of the gate.”

He said that if Trump disrespects her — noting he mispronounces her name — she will strike back. “You’ll see that she can easily get under his skin just by asserting herself confidently and by prosecuting the case against a guy who, quite literally, is a convicted felon. He’s a fraudster. He’s boring. … He’s become boring, and that is showing up more and more.”

PREVIOUSLY: President Joe Biden said that he spoke to Kamala Harris about tonight’s debate with Donald Trump, an event that he plans to watch this evening.

“She seems calm, cool and collected,” Biden told reporters at the White House as he left for New York. “I think she’s going to do great. And I’m not going to tell you what advice I gave her.”

Biden had such a poor debate performance in June that it eventually led to him dropping out of the race.

The stakes of the debate are enormous: Harris and Trump are neck and neck in the polls, and this event may be their only match-up of the cycle.

Amazingly enough, Harris and Trump also have never met in person before. The most obvious place where they would have — during the transition from one administration to the next on January 20, 2021 — never happened because Trump refused to attend.

ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis are moderating the debate, their first time at the helm at such a general election event.

The ABC News set is surprisingly free of the network logo and instead features a backdrop of “We the People,” a nod to its location at the National Constitution Center. The set also reflects the more intimate setting, with no audience and limited media.

The network has located reporters several blocks away, at the Philadelphia Convention Center, in a massive and windowless exhibition hall where there are work stations for 960 journalists. There, the ABC News logo is on banners and walls, even the floor.

Connected to the media workspace is the spin room, where campaign spokespeople started arriving late in the afternoon.

Two of the first were Anthony Scaramucci and Olivia Troye, two former Trump administration officials now backing Harris. Scaramucci, who introduced himself by noting that he famously served in the Trump White House for just 11 days as his communications director, spoke of hope that “the fever will break” after a Harris victory and “we will see a center right coalition” that does not have the volatility of the Trump era.

About 90 minutes later, a surrogate for the Trump campaign, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) arrived for a scrum with journalists, albeit slightly smaller in size.

The Harris campaign announced its lineup for the post-debate spin room, a list that includes California Governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA). Expected for the Trump campaign: Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance.

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