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Harris will deliver a mediocre performance that will look positively masterly next to Trump's old man ravings. It will have minimal impact because every aspect of Trump's incapacity is priced in. Practically speaking, Harris can't win, she can only lose.
Trump's biggest policy strength is simply that he is the challenger and can thus run on vague promises instead of his actual record. Whenever he talks about specifics, it's embarrassing (but again, priced in - no one expects Trump to know what he's talking about). His biggest vulnerability on that front is that he's surrounded himself with extremist weirdos who have fairly radical ambitions and Trump has a history of being pretty milquetoast with respect to his advisors, so he may suffer if those attacks stick to him. "JD Vance pals around with mask-off authoritarian billionaires" is probably a more fruitful line of attack than "your proposed economic policies are positively Argentinian", even though the latter is more substantive.
Harris' biggest policy strength is that she's not Trump and can thus talk about policy in a way that doesn't threaten to have your brain self-deport through your ear canal. Her biggest policy weakness is that her policy proposals are still very bad and she's not going to get graded on a curve like Trump will be.
5% chance Trump refers to Harris with a racial slur. 50% chance Trump makes some implausibly deniable misogynistic remark.
Then why take the debate?
There's only certain lengths you can go before defensive campaigning looks like cowardice.
And you can't really afford that given the circumstances.
You don't want Trump able to say "I knocked out Biden and now Harris is hiding, I took a bullet for the American people and she's too afraid to even tell you who she is. Who do you want standing up for you?"
Doing one debate denies him at least that.
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As far as I can tell, she inherited the debate agreement from the Biden campaign, and would look weak backing out of the already-reduced debate schedule (and rules!) he had committed to. I believe the last few cycles have had three debates, all after the conventions.
I think there are rumors they tried to get the rules modified (unmuting mics), but I don't think they changed them. IMO if Harris were a strong candidate, they'd be trying to schedule another one or two, but I haven't heard any such rumors.
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She and her staff may not share my belief. Also, they may believe (possibly correctly) that not debating is worse than the likely outcome of an unimpactful debate.
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Trump is the moderate realignment candidate, this is why he's backing off abortion and being endorsed by Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk. The odds of Trump using a racial slur are zero, because like his decorum or not he comes from a generation that finds such things unspeakable. (If he didn't say it about Michael Jackson or Muhammed Ali why would Trump wait 80 years and then start dropping slurs now?)
Like the Biden administration? Like Kamala?
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