WASHINGTON — The audiences cheered for Kamala Harris during her media blitz this week. So did the talk show hosts posing the questions.
“You’ve gotta win,” Howard Stern told her on his eponymous radio show.
“I personally cannot understand why anyone would vote for him,” Joy Behar, of ABC’s “The View,” said of Donald Trump.
“Would you like to have a beer with me so I can tell people what that’s like?” asked CBS’s Stephen Colbert.
Out came the Miller High Life, and the vice president gamely clinked cans with Colbert and sipped.
Looking to gain ground with crucial voting blocs, Harris shed some of the caution she’s shown since entering the race and sat for a series of interviews, albeit on her own terms with mostly friendly hosts. Her campaign believes the appearances will help introduce her to Americans who never much thought about Harris before she became the presumptive Democratic nominee in July and want to learn more about her life story.
“We’ve seen in polling that people want to get to know her better. They want to see her more, and we’re engaging with that and want to continue to do that” before Election Day, a Harris campaign aide said.
There’s nothing random about the places she’s been showing up. Mindful that “The View” is especially popular among female voters, the campaign used Harris’s visit on Tuesday to roll out a new policy proposal meant to help “sandwich generation” households who are caring both for elderly parents and dependent children.
Stern’s audience skews male — a chance for Harris to eat into a core part of Trump’s base. NBC News polling this year showed that only 25% of men between the ages of 18 and 49 held a positive view of Harris, compared to 55% with a negative view.
She needs help wooing young male voters and Stern vouched for her, inviting his millions of listeners to open themselves to the prospect of a female president. Stern is famously raw — he once asked actor Warren Beatty about his toilet routine. In Harris’s case he struck an admiring tone, gently drawing her out on her upbringing and career.
He praised the women he’s known in positions of authority, saying his “best associations in radio and business have been collaborating with women.” Men, by contrast, “can bull—- their way through it and get away with a lot,” he said.
“I’ve been the first woman in almost every position I’ve had,” replied Harris, a former U.S. senator, state attorney general of California and district attorney of San Francisco. “I believe that men and women support women in leadership and that’s been my life experience and that’s why I’m running for president.”
A challenge for Harris is her opponent’s sheer ubiquity. Whether he’s in or out of power, Trump tends to dominate the news cycle, running a presidential campaign that began in 2015 and never really stopped.
Harris has seemed cloistered by contrast, wary of the slip-ups that are always a risk in freewheeling encounters with the media. But four weeks out and the race too close to call, Harris is looking for ways to leapfrog into what the campaign aide called, “the front of the conversation.”
She dialed into the Weather Channel and then spoke by phone to CNN on Wednesday afternoon, urging Floridians to heed warnings and get out of the path of Hurricane Milton.
She gave an interview to CBS’s “60 Minutes” for an election special that aired Monday. Trump declined the show’s interview request.
And Thursday night Harris is scheduled to take part in a televised town hall event in Las Vegas, hosted by Univision. Taking questions from audience members, Harris will try to make inroads with Hispanic male voters who’ve aligned themselves with Trump. In two important battleground states, Nevada and Arizona, majorities of Hispanic men under the age of 50 favored Trump over Harris, according to USA TODAY/Suffolk University polling.
Even if voters miss her appearances when they air, they may still catch viral moments that are replayed in their social media feeds, the campaign aide said.
“People may not see it live, but there’s a trickle down of clips — maybe an image of her having a beer with Colbert — that gets disseminated by the campaign and by a lot of folks,” the aide said.
Trump has taken a more unorthodox approach. He has kept a tight focus on his electoral base, making repeated appearances on Fox News and other conservative outlets, along with podcasts that appeal to far-right male listeners.
The conversations can veer in any direction — and often do. Cocaine was discussed at length during Trump’s appearance on a podcast hosted by comedian Theo Von. At one point, Trump asked the host if the drug gives the user a “stronger up.”
“Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie,” Von said to America’s former commander-in-chief. “You know what I’m saying? You’ll be out on your porch. You’ll be your own streetlamp.”
For her part, Harris has seemed most at ease talking about her personal life, less so when the subject is policy.
She told Stern how in 2016, she coped with the news of Trump’s victory by downing an entire family-size bag of Doritos.
When Stern asked whether therapy might be an antidote to the stress she faces on the trail, she said, laughing: “This is my form of therapy right now, Howard.”
“With me? Oy vey!” Stern said.
She seemed less sure-footed in her “60 Minutes” interview. Asked how she would win passage of her plan to raise taxes on wealthy Americans, she offered no plausible path to overcoming Congress’s divisions.
“You know, when you talk quietly with a lot of folks in Congress, they know exactly what I’m talking about, ‘cause their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about,” she said.
“And Congress has shown no inclination to move in your direction,” her interviewer, Bill Whitaker, said
Still, Harris campaign officials say they’re delighted by how she’s performed in these less scripted settings.
“She rocked them!” one Harris adviser said.
“It’s been great,” another senior Harris campaign aide said. “We’ve been able to communicate to a lot of voters.”
Beyond that, she connected with the campaign’s target audiences, including young people, the senior aide said.
Speaking without notes, Harris stumbled at times in delivering her message. She is casting herself as a change agent — a barrier-breaking woman who looks, acts and sounds younger and more lively than either Trump or Biden. Yet she is still struggling to show respect for Biden while explaining how her presidency would differ from his.
In her appearance on “The View,” Harris was questioned about what she would have done anything differently than Biden in the nearly four years she has spent as his understudy.
“There’s not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.
Later in the interview, she revised her answer, saying: “You asked me what’s the difference between Joe Biden and me. … I’m going to have a Republican in my cabinet because I don’t feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea.” (That’s no different from what Biden had planned for a second term. He was also amenable to adding a Republican to his Cabinet).
It may be days or weeks before Harris’s media offensive registers in the polls, for better or worse. Early in-person voting opened Wednesday in Maricopa County, Arizona, the populous heart of an important electoral battleground.
In 100-degree heat, one voter said she was unimpressed by Harris’s appearance on Stern’s show as a swath of the South reckoned with storm damage.
“She’s laughing on Howard Stern,” a woman who showed up to vote told NBC News.
Leave a Reply