The Harris campaign should be “a dog with a bone” when it comes to making the public aware that former President is unwillingness to debate her a second time.  There is no question that Kamala Harris made “minced meat’ of Donald Trump in their first debate.  It was a spectacular debate performance. Kamala Harris “played Donald Trump like a fiddle” skillfully repeatedly manipulating him into constantly take the bait she threw out to trap him. Trump’s performance was far worse than Joe Biden’s disjointed performance that resulted in him being pressured to step aside. Even strong Trump supporters acknowledged that his debate performance fell far short of expectations and he lacked focus and that he too often “took the bait.” No one, other than Trump’s core MAGA supporters, who Trump has boasted in the past, would support him even if he shot someone in the middle of a crowded street, were claiming as he did that he had a “monumental victory” in the debate and the “poll clearly show that I won,” and so there is no reason to debate again. Early poll results all showed Harris winning the debate handily by margins ranging from 63% to &% for the CNN poll to 54% to 31% in a  YouGov poll.  Late night host Jimmy Kimmel hit the mark on Trump’s debate performance when he said: “More than 67 million Americans watched the debate on television last night, and of that 67 million, the only one who seems to think Trump did a good job is Donald Trump.” Obviously, Donald Trump is now afraid to debate Kamala Harris a second time.  He, no doubt, is scared that second disastrous debate performance will further expose his demented nature, verbal incoherence and the vapid nature of his candidacy which is based on fabrications, untruths and is devoid of policy solutions. Trump’s debate with Joe Biden made it abundantly clear that debates matter, that they can be a vehicle for exposing potential underlying weakness.  In the case of President Biden, it was his cognitive decline. When the decline became apparent for all to see, the result was President Biden’s decision to bow out of the race. Trump knows that he is unable, given his fundamental personality, to avoid digressing into tangents, to distinguish fact from fiction and to avoid going down bizarre rabbit holes, i.e., contending that immigrants eat pets and teachers give students sex change operation. The Harris campaign’s response to Trump wussing out on a second debate should be an unrelenting torrent of television and social media ads depicting a quaking Donald ducking the debates.  These “chicken liver” style attacks on his lack of machismo, should be relentless and designed to bait and provoke the former President and present him as fearing Kamala Harris. The “chicken liver” ads should include the most bizarre clips of the former President from the first debate.  With some sort of a tag line suggesting that the former President is afraid to participate in a second debate because he was afraid of what he might say in response to being baited by Kamala Harris. In the end, I think the campaign will come down to which candidate is better able to appeal to the pent-up resentment of undecided, rural, working-class white voters in the seven pivotal swing states which Trump won in the last two elections.  My gut tells me in the end it will be meat and potato issues, not cultural issues that will swing these voters. This is why the campaign made a good decision in selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a rural voice to eat into Trump’s vote among those who have felt abandoned by coastal Democrats. With this in mind, the Democrats need to stress preserving health care and Social Security, making housing more affordable for first-time home buyers, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, reinstating a woman’s right to choose, and providing good paying jobs. They need to make it clear that the only new taxes they are proposing are for those who earn more than $400,000 annually.  And that the benefits of trickle-down economics are a myth and that the United States’ continued leadership in NATO is pivotal to maintaining peace in the world and containing dictators like Putin from invading democracies like Poland. Karma Harris needs to fully embrace the mantra contained in this quote from FDR: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it’s whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Irwin Stoolmacher is president of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofit agencies that serve the truly needy among us.