SAVANNAH, Ga. — Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will sit down for their first major television interview of their presidential campaign on Thursday, as the duo travels by bus through southeast Georgia.
The interview with CNN’s Dana Bash will give Harris a chance to suppress criticism that she has shunned uncontrolled environments, while also giving her a new platform to define her campaign and test her political mettle ahead of an upcoming debate with former President Donald Trump scheduled for Sept. 10. But it also comes with risks as her team tries to build on the momentum of the ticket reshuffle following Joe Biden’s departure and last week’s Democratic National Convention.
Joint interviews during an election year are a standard part of politics; Biden and Harris, Trump and Mike Pence, Barack Obama and Biden — they all did them at similar points in the race. The difference is that those other candidates also did solo interviews. Harris hasn’t done a full-length interview since becoming her party’s standard-bearer five weeks ago, though she did a couple when she was Biden’s running mate.
Harris and Walz are still not as well known to voters, unlike Trump and Biden, whom voters had almost unanimous opinions about and knew well.
The CNN interview, which airs Thursday at 9 p.m. EDT, comes during her two-day bus tour of southeast Georgia, where she is campaigning in the crucial battleground state. The trip ends Thursday with a rally in Savannah, where Harris campaign officials believe they must win the state Trump In November, they must capture the GOP strongholds in the state.
Harris has done on-camera and print interviews with The Associated Press and many other media outlets during her time as vice president, far more than the president has, except for Biden’s late-stage media campaign following his disastrous debate performance that ended his campaign.
Harris’ lack of media access over the past month has become a key line of attack from Republicans. The Trump campaign has kept track of how many days she has gone without giving an interview as a candidate. On Wednesday, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, suggested that Harris needed a “babysitter” and that Walz would be there for that reason.
“They know Kamala Harris can’t sit through an interview by herself. There’s not a lot of trust in someone who becomes the leader of the free world and asks people to make her president of the United States, when she can’t even sit (for) an interview,” she said on “Fox & Friends.”
Trump, meanwhile, has focused primarily on conservative media outlets for interviews, though he has held more open press conferences in recent weeks in an attempt to regain the attention Harris’ promotion had commandeered.
After the CNN interview, Walz will disembark and Harris will continue the bus tour alone, heading to a rally before heading back to Washington. On Wednesday, the duo visited a high school marching band to the delight of the students, and stopped at a barbecue restaurant in Savannah.
Michael Tyler, Harris’ campaign communications director, said bus tours provide “an opportunity to go to places we don’t normally go (and) make sure we’re competing in all communities.”
The campaign hopes the events will engage voters in GOP-leaning areas that candidates typically don’t see. It also hopes the engagement will create viral moments that cut through the media frenzy and reach voters across the country.
The stops are intended as moments where voters can “learn not only what they stand for, but who they are as people,” Tyler said.
Harris has another Labor Day campaign blitz with Biden in Detroit and Pittsburgh, with the election just 70 days away. The first mail ballots will be sent to voters in just two weeks.
