Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists Jamelle Bouie, Ross Douthat, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Tressie McMillan Cottom about Tuesday’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Patrick Healy: Heading into tonight’s debate, what do you want to hear or learn from the candidates?

Michelle Goldberg: Honestly this question kind of infuriates me, because it assumes that what matters about tonight is some contest of policy positions, which is absurd. The media, I realize, has collectively decided that we’re going to treat Trump like a normal political candidate, and while that might be the right call in terms of preserving our journalistic institutions — though I’m genuinely unsure — it obscures the stakes. In this debate, the only thing that matters is whether Harris wins. It’s a cliché to say it, but she’s all that’s standing between us and autocracy.

Ross Douthat: For Harris, at least, I think there’s a clear upside to acting like the debate is a contest of policy positions, however the media covers it. Her campaign has been signaling — perhaps sincerely or perhaps as misdirection — that she wants to challenge Trump, to interrupt and pick fights and fact-check him.

But since this is only Harris’s second appearance in a challenging high-profile format since she locked up the nomination, I think she might benefit more from a kind of reintroduction of her candidacy, with more policy detail than her convention speech (her campaign finally debuted its issues page on Sunday). The much-discussed Times/Siena poll this past weekend found that a number of undecided voters want to hear more about who Harris is and what she stands for. That seems like it might be a better use of her time than trying to bait Trump, who has survived plenty of bad-seeming debate performances.

Jamelle Bouie: It would be a waste of time for Harris to try to bait Trump or get him to overreact. Instead, she should use the time to, as Ross said, reintroduce herself to the public, present her policies, contrast them with those of the former president, and demonstrate that she has the clear capacity to serve as chief executive. With that said, I do hope that at some point Harris makes clear that Trump’s policy of “mass deportation” would be a social, economic and moral catastrophe of the highest order.

Tressie McMillan Cottom: Harris has usurped some of Trump’s strengths on national security and patriotism. Her campaign is doing a better job than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden of caricaturing Trump as unserious and incoherent. Trump has to find a way to hit back because he controls news cycles by demoralizing political opponents. Can Trump take a punch from Harris? Trump’s acolytes want more of what they got in his first campaign — a sarcastic, prowling authoritarian who intimidates his debate rivals. If he cannot deliver, it could look like weakness with a voter base that values strength above all else.