One week from today, the two major political parties' presidential candidates will debate each other. Although this will be the second general election campaign debate held, it is not technically accurate to use the word "again" in that previous sentence, since we won't see the same two candidates on stage that we did last time. This is unprecedented in modern American politics, and 2024 might very well be remembered in the future as "the year the debates mattered."

Although pundits and other political junkies might not want to admit it, in most presidential election years, the debates don't really matter all that much. Oh sure, we love to watch them and declare afterwards who "won" and who "lost" the debate, but it usually doesn't move the needle all that much with actual voters. The candidates spend most of their time desperately trying to utter the one golden soundbite that will be replayed endlessly afterwards, but most of these attempts fall flat and much of the debate is forgotten almost immediately afterwards.

This year, of course, is already different. The first debate went so disastrously badly for President Joe Biden that his candidacy didn't survive it. This wasn't so much Donald Trump "winning" the debate as it was Biden self-immolating. Unlike most presidential debates, the next day there were no competing partisan views of what had happened -- because Biden had clearly lost. Three weeks later, he withdrew from the race. The first debate was monumentally important, to put this another way.

The second debate will likely not be quite as important as the first, but it is still going to matter a lot more than debates normally do. The Democrats have passed the torch to Kamala Harris, who is still defining herself to the electorate. She did so in a big way at the Democratic National Convention, but conventions are usually watched by people who already know how they're going to vote. The audience for the debate might contain a lot more people who have genuinely not made up their minds about who is going to get their vote.

The theory behind presidential debates is that both candidates present their ideas and defend their agendas and the people watching weigh the policy proposals in order to make their decision. But that's assuming a normal election, and no election with Donald Trump in it can be considered normal in any way. Trump has always been about style, not substance. And up to this point, no opponent has truly figured out how to counter this in any effective way.

Harris might be able to. She is running mostly on style (or "vibe" as it is being called now), which hasn't really been true of any of Trump's other debate opponents. People aren't going to be tuning in to learn the intricacies of the Democratic tax plans versus the Republicans' ideas, instead they're going to be tuning in to watch the political equivalent of a cage match. Or professional wrestling, perhaps.

Harris is even leaning in to this -- her team wanted the microphones to be live throughout the debate rather than muted when the other candidate talks, which would only have added to the free-for-all nature of things. This didn't work -- the microphones will indeed be muted -- but it certainly showed more confidence than any other Trump debate opponent has to date.

The big question is how Harris will attempt to counter Trump's firehose of lies and bluster. Will she call him on every lie he utters? Or use her best prosecutorial style to deconstruct Trump's claims? Will she just laugh at his idiocy? Will she match playground taunt with playground taunt? The best thing she can do is to get under Trump's notoriously thin skin, but there is more than one way to do this. Her main objective is to try to make Trump melt down in spectacular fashion, but it remains to be seen what tactics she will deploy in her effort to do so.

Both sides have hinted that they might be open to future debates, but that is in no way guaranteed. This might be the only chance America gets to see Harris and Trump verbally joust with each other. It used to be normal for there to be three presidential debates in the general election, but that rulebook has already been tossed aside (this is the first year the debates are happening outside of the official debate commission structure that was put in place previously). And this year is already abnormal, since the Democrats switched candidates after the first debate was held. This means that there may only be one debate between the candidates who will appear on November's ballots, which certainly ups the stakes for next Tuesday.

Donald Trump is a known quantity to most people by now. Kamala Harris is not. I fully expect the ratings to be through the roof, in a way that another Biden-Trump debate couldn't hope to match. People will be tuning in for all kinds of reasons, but mostly just to watch the fur fly. They won't be watching to learn any policy ideas so much as to see whose style emerges as the dominant one.

Debates are, by their very nature, adversarial. The candidates attack each other directly, standing on the same stage. Personality conflicts are almost inevitable. Candidates who get used to being surrounded by people who agree with them constantly are at a disadvantage, because they are just not used to being challenged at all. It's easy to sneer at the audience's bloodthirsty appetite for such sparring, but it does indeed serve a purpose. After all, one of these candidates is going to become president, where they will have to go toe-to-toe with hostile world leaders. The debates give the viewer some sense of whether they'd be up to it or not. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's all the voters have to go on.

Donald Trump, as mentioned, is already a known quantity. He's likely not going to surprise anyone with his performance, since we've all seen it so many times already. But Harris has the chance to show millions of people who she is in a way she's never had before (debating Mike Pence in 2020 just doesn't count -- after all, the only thing people remember from that debate was the fly that landed on his head). Can Harris take on Trump and beat him at his own game? The possibility certainly exists. Can she cement a memorable impression of herself in voters' minds? That's certainly on the table as well.

It would be a rather historic turnaround to have the Democrat dominate Trump in the second debate after Trump so effectively dominated the Democrat in the first debate. Whatever happens, the odds are that next Tuesday is going to be quite meaningful to the race. It might be our only chance to see the two candidates interact with each other. And it could be decisive in terms of political momentum. The first debate already crushed one candidacy. The second debate is probably not going to be that impactful, but unlike most presidential debates the odds are that it is going to matter greatly.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant