NEW YORK– Then vice president Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with podcaster Alex Cooper, the conversation didn’t begin by dissecting policy positions. The goal, Cooper told the Democratic nominee, was “to get to know you as a person.”
And that was fine with Harris, who said she was going along the popular podcast ‘Call Her Daddy’ because “one of the best ways to communicate with people is to be real.”
Long after the midpoint of her unexpected presidential campaign and with voting already underway, Harris is still introducing herself to Americans who will decide her fate in this year’s presidential election.
On Tuesday, her media blitz will take her to studios across Manhattan as the Democratic nominee tries to reach as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. It’s a sharp shift after she has largely avoided interviews since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, and it’s an implicit admission that she must do more to defeat the Republican nominee. Donald Trump.
Harris will chat with the women of ABC’s “The View,” speak with longtime radio host Howard Stern and tape a show with late-night comedian Stephen Colbert. The trio of appearances comes after Harris gave interviews to CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which aired Monday night, and Cooper’s podcast, which released Sunday.
“Call Her Daddy” is often raunchy, with frank conversations about sex, but Harris and Cooper started by talking about their mothers.
Harris said her mother’s first instinct was never to comfort her eldest daughter when she got into trouble. Instead she asked, “What did you do?”
While that may sound cold, the vice president said, “She basically taught me: think about where you had agency at that moment, and think about what you had the choice to do or not do. Don’t let things just happen to you.”
It’s interactions like the ones Harris’ team is prioritizing for the vice president in the final four weeks before Election Day. She has yet to give an interview to a newspaper or magazine, but her staff is considering additional podcasts that they believe could help Harris reach voters who don’t follow traditional news sources.
Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said Harris should energize people who have turned away from politics because they believe that “all politicians are the same, they all say the same thing, they don’t know anything about my life, I can’t do it.” have nothing to do with them at all.”
“They want to like and trust you,” she said.
Jennifer Harris, the former White House senior director of international economics, said Harris has a steeper hill to climb because of the way she became the Democratic nominee.
“We didn’t have a long primary to face Kamala Harris in the way that most voters are used to,” she said. Harris must find a way to demonstrate the instincts and principles that will “guide several hundred specific policy questions that will emerge over the course of the presidency.”
Although Harris has unveiled a number of policy proposals during her two-and-a-half months at the top of the ticket — such as increasing the child income tax credit and taking a range of measures to help lower the cost of housing — she gets top billing for speeches about her “economic philosophy’, as she proclaimed it in Pittsburgh two weeks ago.
There, Harris pushed back against Trump’s claims that she promotes “communist” ideas, embraced capitalism and positioned herself as a pragmatist who would “take good ideas from wherever they come.”
“As president, I will be grounded in my fundamental values of fairness, dignity and opportunity,” Harris said. “And I promise you that I will be pragmatic in my approach.”
Senior campaign officials have largely shut down criticism from some quarters that Harris has not articulated more policy positions. Instead, they say that small but crucial numbers of undecided voters say they want to know more about Harris before making a decision, and that the more those voters see Harris, the more they like her.
Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden said defining Harris in the eyes of voters is the central challenge of the campaign.
“This race is actually quite simple in the sense that the next few weeks are about who is going to fill in the blanks about who Harris is,” he said.
Being vice president comes with a certain amount of name recognition. In October 2019, while Harris was one of several candidates running for the Democratic presidential nomination, AP-NORC polls showed that about three in ten Americans did not know enough about her to have an opinion. That share dropped to about 1 in 10 Americans in early 2021, when she and Biden took office, where it remained until earlier this summer.
Now almost all Americans know enough to have at least a superficial opinion — positive or negative — about Harris.
But that doesn’t mean perspectives on Harris are set in stone, or that Americans know as much about her as they would like. Harris’ favorable numbers have changed somewhat over the summer, suggesting that opinions about her are still somewhat malleable.
Other polls indicate that some voters are still looking for more information about Harris, while views on Trump appear more settled. A quarter of likely voters said they still feel like they need to learn more about Harris, according to one New York Times/Siena College Survey then carried out her debate against Trumpwhile about three-quarters say they already know pretty much what they need to know about her.
Trump, on the other hand, was more of a known quantity. One in 10 likely voters said they feel like they need to learn more about Trump, while about nine in 10 said they know most of what they need to know.
On “Call Her Daddy,” Cooper told Harris that people are “frustrated and just exhausted with politics in general.”
“Why should we trust you?” she asked.
Harris responded by saying, “You can look at my career to know what I care about.”
She continued: ‘I believe it is important to ensure that people are entitled to and receive the freedoms they are entitled to. I think it’s important to lift people up and make sure you’re protected from harm.”
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Megerian reported from Washington. AP writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.
