PROBABLY: Kamala has more to lose in the debate than Trump.

The Kamala Harris campaign team apparently based their debate strategy assuming that ABC News would prove as pliable and willing as the rest of the media toward their efforts, expecting that the rules requiring muted mics between answers would be thrown out. They assumed wrong, and now they are reportedly “scrambling” for a new plan, describing Kamala’s position as “handcuffed” by the rules agreed to when Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate:

Trump’s worst moments in the debates are when he gets upset and snaps,” said an aide to Harris in her 2020 presidential campaign, granted anonymity to speak freely. “And they have neutered that.

That the vice president was counting on a rule change as essential for her debate strategy is like expecting a professor to cancel the final exam — which is never a good approach. What we’ve learned about Kamala Harris to this point on the debate stage is that she is easily knocked off her game, even with basic frontal lines of attack. She lost her debate to Mike Pence in 2020, which is why all that anyone remembers about it is that at one point a fly landed on his hair. And the Tulsi Gabbard effect which led to the Harris presidential campaign’s collapse is still very much in her head.

All this sets up a debate where Harris will have to accomplish a lot more than Donald Trump, who really just needs to run it back for a repeat performance from June.

Harris performed well in her first Democrat primary debate in 2019, showing her prosecutor experience going after Joe Biden. But in her very next appearance, Tulsi Gabbard effectively dismembered Harris’s campaign in about one minute.

She can land a hit or two now and then — but she has a glass jaw.