Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force Two to depart for New York at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Monday, Oct. 7, 2024. (Evelyn Hockstein/Pool via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) – When Vice President Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with podcaster Alex Cooper, the conversation didn’t start by parsing policy positions. The goal, Cooper told the Democratic nominee, was “to get to know you as a person.”
And that was just fine with Harris, who said she was on the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast because “one of the best ways to communicate with people is to be real.”
Long past the midway point of her unexpected presidential campaign and with voting already underway, Harris is still introducing herself to Americans who will determine 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 period of time. It’s a sharp shift after largely avoiding interviews since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, and it’s an implicit acknowledgment that she needs to do more to edge out Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Harris will sit for a conversation 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 granted interviews to CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which aired Monday night, and Cooper’s podcast, which was released Sunday.
“Call Her Daddy” is often raunchy, with frank talk about sex, but Harris and Cooper began by talking about their mothers.
Harris said her mother’s first instinct was never to comfort her eldest daughter when she ran into problems. Instead, she asked, “What did you do?”
Although that might sound cold, the vice president said, “she was actually teaching me, think about where you had agency in 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 those that 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 pondering additional podcasts where they believe Harris can reach voters who aren’t following traditional news sources.
Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said Harris has to energize people who have tuned out politics because they believe “all the politicians are the same, they all say the same thing, they don’t know anything about my life, I can’t relate to 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 did not have a good long primary to meet Kamala Harris in the way most voters are accustomed to,” she said. Harris has to find a way to demonstrate the instincts and principles that “will be guiding any number of hundreds of specific policy questions that will come up in the course of the presidency.”
While Harris has unveiled some policy proposals during her two and half months at the top of the ticket – such as increasing the child income tax credit and taking a range of actions to help lower the cost of housing – she’s given prime billing to speeches about her “economic philosophy,” like one she delivered in Pittsburgh two weeks ago.
There, Harris pushed back against Trump’s claims that she’s advancing “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, I will be pragmatic in my approach.”
Senior campaign officials have largely blocked out criticism from some corners that Harris hasn’t articulated more policy positions. Instead, they say that small yet pivotal numbers of still-undecided voters say they want to know more about Harris before making up their minds, and that the more those voters see Harris, the more they like her.
Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden said defining Harris in voters’ eyes is the central challenge of the campaign.
“This race is actually pretty simple in the sense that the next few weeks are about who’s going to fill in the blanks on who Harris is,” he said.
Being a vice president confers a certain amount of basic name recognition. In October 2019, while Harris was one of many candidates in the Democratic presidential primary, AP-NORC polling found that about 3 in 10 Americans didn’t know enough about her to have an opinion. That share dropped to around 1 in 10 Americans by early 2021, when she and Biden took office, where it stayed until earlier this summer.
Now, nearly all Americans know enough to have at least a surface opinion – whether positive or negative – of Harris.
But that doesn’t mean perspectives on Harris are settled, or that Americans know as much as they would like about her. Harris’ favorability numbers shifted slightly over the course of the summer, suggesting that opinion of her may still be somewhat malleable.
Other polls indicate that some voters are still looking for more information about Harris, while views of Trump appear to be more settled. One-quarter of likely voters said they still feel like they need to learn more about Harris, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after her debate against Trump, while about three-quarters say they pretty much already know what they need to know about her.
Trump, on the hand, was more of a known quantity. One in 10 likely voters said they feel like they need to learn more about Trump, while roughly 9 in 10 said they pretty much already know what they need to know.
Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, also is spending more time doing interviews to help people get to know him better rather than going deep on policy. In an appearance on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on Monday night, Walz talked about the “surreal” experience of being on the ticket, his background as a high school teacher and football coach, and even how he lists Harris in his phone contacts – as the “dry cleaner.”
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 answered by saying “you can look at my career to know what I care about.”
She continued: “I care about making sure that people are entitled to and receive the freedoms that they are due. I care about lifting people up and making sure that you are protected from harm.”
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Megerian reported from Washington. AP writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.
