News Information and Media Site: Live Now: Watch the Debate With Fact Checks

October 7, 2020

By Lisa Lerer

Politics Newsletter Writer

Hello from New York, where I’m hosting our debate livestream and chat. Join us!

Eric Baradat/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images; pool photo by Tim Tai

In 2016, Mike Pence effectively won the vice-presidential debate with an aggressive defense of the “deplorables” — the Trump supporters derided by Hillary Clinton during the campaign.

Four years later, Mr. Pence, the vice president, must execute a far trickier defensive play.

The vice president will take the stage tonight as the head of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, an entity charged with containing a pandemic that has killed more than 211,000 people in the United States and infected more than 7.5 million — including President Trump.

While Mr. Pence will surely defend the administration’s efforts to combat the virus, I’ll be watching to see how stridently he defends the president. Even after being hospitalized, Mr. Trump has argued that the virus is not all that serious of a threat — but most Americans have consistently said in polls that they’re worried about it. With the president running what is presumably his last political campaign, Mr. Pence will probably be thinking a bit about his own future ambitions tonight. Will he adopt a different attitude?

Senator Kamala Harris, facing off against Mr. Pence, is expected to focus heavily on the faltering White House response to the pandemic.

But the virus has complicated her political calculus as well. At a time when the state of Mr. Trump’s health remains largely unknown, she must delicately walk the line between attacking the president’s performance and attacking him personally.

The debate will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern and run for 90 minutes without commercial interruptions. The candidates will be separated by plexiglass shields, a carefully negotiated protection that experts say will be mostly useless to protect Ms. Harris if Mr. Pence is infected.

You can watch on your television or you can watch The New York Times’s livestream of the event. Either way, be sure to follow along with our live chat — I’m hosting! — where we’ll have real-time analysis and fact-checking from our reporters.

I’ll be back in the morning with a special edition of On Politics, sharing my thoughts on everything that happens tonight.

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