Vice President Kamala Harris continues avoiding scrutiny by refraining from allowing interviews as her recently-launched presidential campaign enjoys its honeymoon period.
It has been more than two weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic nominee. And during that time, she has not granted any interviews or held press conferences, setting a new precedent for candidate access to the press in an unprecedented election cycle.
Harris has had a honeymoon period of sorts. The legacy media has showered her candidacy with glowing coverage from immediate comparisons of Barack Obama’s political rise to reframing her word salads as meme royalty. She has tightened polls against former President Trump. And the honeymoon will likely continue with the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as running mate and the upcoming DNC convention, where candidates historically receive a bump in the polls.
Perhaps most significantly, she has avoided scrutiny.
The opposite had happened to her ex-running mate, President Biden, particularly in the days leading up to his exit from the race. Following his disastrous debate performance, the legacy media began scrutinizing the White House over Biden’s health, his polling took a hit and Democrats launched an intense, unprecedented pressure campaign to remove him from the top of the ticket.
Stunningly, Biden was quicker to grant an interview during a terrible news cycle than Harris has in the much more favorable news cycle she is currently experiencing, speaking with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos eight days after his frail debate showing that scrambled the 2024 race. Subsequent interviews and rallies didn’t undo the damage, and he dropped out of the race on July 21.
Even Harris was far more accessible to the media in the aftermath of Biden’s debate, making appearances on MSNBC, CNN and ABC to push the « bad night » narrative.
Both Harris and Trump have been on the campaign stump during their newly-formed match-up, but only Trump has been doing interviews, most notably at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual conference in Chicago where he sparred with the panelists. Harris didn’t attend.
Instead, the media has heard from a plethora of high-profile Harris supporters. One of her top surrogates, Transportation Secretary and former VP contender Pete Buttigieg, has done at least 10 interviews hyping her candidacy and attacking the Trump-Vance ticket over the two weeks since Harris became the presumptive nominee.
Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance, who hopes to become the next vice president himself, specifically called out Harris as having a « basement strategy » on Tuesday and urged reporters to hold her more accountable.
