Republican New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu has come out against former President Donald Trump’s decision not to debate Vice President Kamala Harris for a second time.
Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, went up against Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, on ABC News’ debate stage in Philadelphia Tuesday night. Harris gave a strong performance, often goading her opponent into acting erratically—at one point Trump falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. The vice president repeatedly challenged Trump to a second debate, but he has rejected her proposal.
Sununu, who has been critical of Trump but still supports him in November’s election, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on The Source on Friday that Trump should debate Harris again.
“Look, anytime you can spend more time in front of the voters when you’re in a close race, it’s a positive,” he told Collins.
Sununu said that Trump “knows what he wants to say” but should divert from the way he handled his first debate with Harris.
“He’s got to talk at a more empathetic, more direct level and not just about like at 30,000 feet, right?” Sununu said, adding that Trump could reach voters who don’t like the former president’s personality but don’t agree with the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
“There’s an opportunity there, but they have to use the opportunity the right way and really re-establish a connection with those voters that they had in 2016,” he said.
When asked by Newsweek why Trump won’t debate Harris again, Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said via email on Saturday afternoon, “Like President Trump said, he totally dominated Kamala Harris on the debate stage and because she was so thoroughly defeated, she begged for another one because she lost so bad.”
Newsweek reached out to Sununu’s office via email for comment on Saturday afternoon.
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Other Republicans urged Trump to debate Harris for a second time before the former president announced on Thursday that he wouldn’t.
Senate Republican Whip John Thune of South Dakota, who is the second-ranking Senate GOP leader, told the Associated Press that he thinks it “would be helpful” for Trump to agree to another debate, arguing that he didn’t talk enough about policy the first time around.
“I don’t think they got enough into the substance of their differences, and I think elections are always about differences. The contrast this time around couldn’t be more clear in terms of their records, their positions, their vision for the future,” Thune said.
Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican who is a close ally to Trump, called a second debate an “opportunity” for Trump. “If I was in Trump’s position, I would,” he said, according to The Hill.
“It makes a lot more sense to, instead of talking about cats and dogs, talk about 1.5 million got-aways,” Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, told reporters, referring to illegal immigrants who made their way into the U.S. under the Biden administration, according to a New York Post report citing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data. “That’s a lot more frightening to me, and it’s a real threat.”
Tillis added that “we missed a lot of opportunities” at the debate, agreeing that another debate could be helpful.
According to three national polls and one poll from several swing states taken after the debate and collected by poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, Harris won the debate with, on average, 57 percent of debate watchers nationally saying that she did better than Trump.
However, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he had the better debate performance.
In a post to Truth Social on Thursday afternoon, the former president accused Harris of calling for a second debate because he “clearly” won their matchup Tuesday night.
“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,'” the post reads in part. “Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate.”
It is unclear what polls Trump is referring to.
“KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” he added.
