US Politics

Is it time for Kamala Harris to do interviews and press conferences?

Author: Andrew Prokop Source: Vox

August 21, 2024 at 13:00

Vice President Kamala Harris addresses the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, on August 19. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

There are real risks involved. They may be worth taking

Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

Members of the media agree: Vice President Kamala Harris needs to start doing press conferences and interviews with members of the media.

It’s been about a month since Harris suddenly became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. In that period, Harris has at times briefly answered questions from reporters publicly — and has reportedly spoken to her traveling press pool off the record. But she’s done no formal interviews and held no formal press conferences.

In fairness, she’s been quite busy. Over just a few scant weeks, Harris has had to take over a campaign, hit the trail, pick a running mate, develop a policy platform and message, and oversee preparations for a convention.

On August 8, Harris said she wanted “to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.” With so much in flux, it’s perhaps not surprising that high-stakes reporter Q&As aren’t at the top of the priority list.

But should they be?

If you zoom out from the electoral stakes, of course it’s bad for democracy if politicians avoid talking to the press. Of course we should, in the abstract, expect the next potential future president to publicly answer questions about their proposals and other topics in the news.

Plus, with Harris’s campaign starting so unusually late, the public deserves to learn more about her. If she’s seen mainly in the tightly controlled and scripted settings of ads, rally speeches, and social media clips, we may not learn much about her views on issues and topics she prefers not to address, or assess how she responds to unplanned events.

But while it’s tempting to say (and convenient for journalists to argue) that Harris doing more press is both the right thing to do and the strategically smart thing for her to do, things may not align so neatly.

Interviews and press conferences are risky for any politician. There is no guarantee they will go well, and for Harris in particular, some in recent years have gone infamously poorly. As a candidate trying to win an election (against an opponent who is hostile to democracy and uses his own press appearances to lie and exaggerate wildly), she will naturally weigh the risks and rewards of what might help, or harm, her campaign.So what’s arguably the right thing to do for the health of our democracy — facing down some difficult media questions — really may not be the best strategy to help Harris win. However, remaining unavailable indefinitely poses its own strategic risks, and is likely unsustainable over the longer term.

Interviews gone awry have haunted Harris in the past

Since Harris joined the race, she has jumped out to a small lead in polls and has benefited from overwhelmingly positive media coverage. The Democratic base has rallied around her and swing voters so far seem to like what they see. And all that has happened without a single formal press conference or interview.

With things trending so positively, interviews and press conferences appear to present mainly downside risk. That is: the campaign probably calculates that it’s unlikely many undecided voters will be persuaded by anything she says in such formats (as opposed to messaging Harris can more fully control, like rallies and ads), while a botched answer could generate a great deal of new negative coverage and attacks.

Harris has suffered such fates in the past.

In January 2019, at the start of her presidential campaign, anchor Jake Tapper asked at a CNN town hall whether her support of Medicare-for-all meant she wanted to eliminate private health insurance. Harris responded by saying that, yes, you won’t have to go through a private insurance company anymore: “Let’s eliminate all that. Let’s move on.” That answer, and the topic of health care generally, would dog her in the months to come (she would eventually backtrack on her answer).

Accounts of Harris’s vice presidency typically treat a June 2021 interview with Lester Holt of NBC News as the moment that put her off interviews in general. Tasked by President Joe Biden with addressing root causes of unauthorized immigration, Harris came prepared to discuss that policy matter and her recent trip to Guatemala and Mexico. But Holt pressed her on a different question: why hadn’t she gone to the border herself yet?The question was of questionable relevance — how much can a president or vice president really learn from a brief border drop-by? And Harris had been tasked with addressing “root causes” and migration-related diplomacy with the Mexican and Guatemalan governments, not border security logistics.

But Harris answered strangely. Rather than simply batting it away by giving a vague answer that she planned to visit the border later on, she said she’d go at some point but then asserted “We’ve been to the border,” repeating that sentence four times. Holt naturally followed up by saying that she hadn’t, in fact, been to the border. Harris responded: “And I haven’t been to Europe,” and laughed, before saying she didn’t understand Holt’s point.

Harris seemed to be trying to say that you don’t always have to physically go somewhere to learn a lot about a policy issue, and that she had only been in office for a few months and couldn’t have traveled everywhere yet. Regardless of what she meant, that exchange instantly became the only thing anyone focused on about that interview, and it earned Harris much mockery and criticism. Unsurprisingly, she did far fewer interviews like that afterward.

Accounts of Harris’s thinking suggest she intensely prepares for such interviews, that she’s highly concerned things may go wrong, and that she believes racism and sexism give her less leeway to make a mistake. “She felt as if she would be unfairly punished by the press corps if she ever faltered — and that her slipups might make it difficult for every Black woman who followed in her path,” Franklin Foer wrote in his book about the Biden administration, The Last Politician.

Harris may feel she has to give interviews to avoid negative coverage for not giving interviews

Politicians in certain situations have good reasons to talk to the press. Some seek to increase their prominence and name recognition. Some are hoping to turn around their numbers because they are losing. Some want to promote their ideas.None of these currently apply to Harris, who has gotten a ton of coverage since unexpectedly becoming the new Democratic nominee, who is currently leading in polls and who is still honing her ideas for a campaign and governing agenda.

But there is actually a strategic case that doing more press could have its benefits for Harris — or at least, that it could avert possible future pitfalls.

For one, if a candidate does not have ample practice doing press in unscripted settings, he or she may get rusty and perform worse when such settings are unavoidable. (This may have been one factor explaining Biden’s candidacy-destroying performance at the June debate.)

Additionally, if Harris keeps avoiding interviews, grumbling from the press will likely increase, and the narrative that she’s too afraid or incompetent to do interviews could catch on, generating negative coverage of a kind she’s mostly avoided so far.

Finally, the post-convention period is arguably the optimal time for Harris to do press, since as Election Day draws nearer, the media typically frames coverage far more as a binary choice for the voters between the two nominees. That’s a frame Harris likely prefers, as she can focus on prosecuting the case against Trump.

So, expect Harris to do more press soon after the convention ends. But probably not too much more — unless she sees something in it for her.