She has hosted a convention, weathered a debate, held her first sit-down interview with a major television network.
Now the question for Vice President Kamala Harris’s media strategists is: What should she do next?
With no more mass-audience events remaining before Election Day, and former President Donald J. Trump declaring, for now, that he will not submit to another debate, Ms. Harris must determine the best way to keep introducing herself to voters who still have questions about her policies and plans for the nation.
During her 2020 campaign and early in her vice presidency, some of Ms. Harris’s biggest missteps came during unscripted encounters with journalists. To avoid taking chances, she has granted only six interviews in the 58 days since President Biden withdrew from the race, three with friendly radio hosts. Even the press-averse Mr. Biden took more questions in the final two months of his campaign than Ms. Harris has in what is nearly the first two months of hers.
Her team says this is about to change, promising a series of appearances across an array of media venues, including local and national outlets, podcasts, radio stations and daytime talk shows.
On Monday, she recorded an interview with Stephanie Himonidis, a Spanish-language radio host known as Chiquibaby whose show is syndicated on more than 100 stations. On Tuesday, Ms. Harris will be interviewed by three reporters at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists, the same forum where Mr. Trump, in July, faced some of the toughest questioning of his campaign.
“If you want to know the kind of things we plan to do, look at the things she was doing all year before the ticket switch,” Brian Fallon, a senior adviser for Ms. Harris’s campaign, said in an interview, referring to Ms. Harris’s regular media appearances before she succeeded Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket.
Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have concluded that the old-school strategy of interviews with broadcast networks and national newspapers may not be worth the risk, given that voters increasingly get their election news from a variety of less traditional sources, like TikTok influencers or celebrity-hosted podcasts.
Mr. Trump, for his part, has almost entirely avoided the gantlet of one-on-one interviews with experienced political reporters. Instead, he has sat down with a series of mostly fawning interviewers, including various Fox News pundits; Elon Musk, the X owner who is donating millions of dollars to the former president’s campaign; and Adin Ross, an online video game celebrity who gave Mr. Trump a Rolex watch and a Tesla Cybertruck.
Mr. Trump has, however, held three recent televised news conferences with the mainstream reporters covering his campaign, who posed challenging questions on numerous fronts.
Ms. Harris’s campaign is particularly focused on local TV and radio stations in battleground states like Pennsylvania, where Ms. Harris sat on Friday for a somewhat circuitous 11-minute interview with WPVI, the ABC affiliate in Philadelphia, in between stops in Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre.
Asked for “one or two specific things” she would do to address high prices, Ms. Harris spoke for 1 minute 52 seconds about her biography before she got around to articulating her proposals for tax deductions to new small businesses and tax credits for housing developers.
An answer for people worried about the price of groceries this was not.
Every big news network has a standing request with the Harris campaign for an interview. One potential appearance could be on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” the country’s most-watched news program, which is planning its quadrennial election special on Oct. 7 and has requested interviews with both candidates.
But aides say Ms. Harris is more likely to spend time answering questions from inquisitors with smaller, more niche audiences that include many voters in battleground states. These interviewers include drive-time radio hosts and anchors from the local evening news — particularly those who, like the television reporter from Philadelphia, tend not to ask follow-ups if and when Ms. Harris filibusters or dodges their questions.
“There are big pluses to do local media; there’s no urgency for her to do national press,” said John Del Cecato, who was a media strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. “There’s no soft spots that she’s desperate to keep armored. She simply has better ways to deliver her message to people than in national interviews.”
One of those ways is leveraging the power of the most influential and popular Americans who have endorsed her: On Thursday, Ms. Harris will appear in a virtual event with Oprah Winfrey, who spoke on her behalf at the Democratic National Convention.
In the final seven weeks of the race, Ms. Harris’s campaign is also shifting its focus from tent-pole events like the Democratic National Convention and last week’s debate to get-out-the-vote efforts as the first Americans begin to cast their ballots. Her campaign is planning to use interviews with local reporters — known in the business as earned media, as opposed to advertising that the campaign pays for — to drive a message that it is time to vote.
“There’s an old adage that ‘earned’ beats ‘paid’ every time on a presidential campaign,” said Kate Bedingfield, a former communications director for Mr. Biden in the White House and a deputy campaign manager for his 2020 bid. “Local media is king, and I think she should do it a lot.”
Ms. Harris received mixed reviews for her 20-minute sit-down in August with Dana Bash of CNN. She brought along her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who sat next to her quietly. Asked by Ms. Bash about her shifting views on policy areas like criminal justice and fracking, Ms. Harris deferred repeatedly to a pat phrase — “My values have not changed.”
Mr. Walz, for his part, had not done any interviews since being added to the ticket and had avoided answering questions from his traveling press pool until he spoke with cable TV hosts after the debate last week. Last weekend, he held interviews with local news reporters in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Superior, Wis.
The Wisconsin interviewer asked Mr. Walz who was playing Senator JD Vance of Ohio in his debate prep (nobody yet, Mr. Walz said); if marijuana should be legalized nationwide (“It’s an issue for states,” Mr. Walz replied); and if the campaign was working to have Taylor Swift appear at a rally (“If they are, they haven’t told me,” he answered).
Mr. Walz is also cooperating with a feature story about him being written for The Atlantic magazine.
Before they joined forces on the Democratic presidential ticket, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz, especially the Minnesota governor, had been more accessible figures for journalists.
When it was Mr. Biden running for re-election, Ms. Harris was an eager interviewee. And Mr. Walz’s rise from a rather obscure Midwestern governor to the nominee for vice president was powered by his willingness to make himself available for virtually any national media and cable television request over a two-year period.
But lately, she and Mr. Walz have been speaking to an array of social media influencers. They even produced footage of them interviewing each other.
“I’m the first vice president, I believe, who has ever grown chili peppers,” Ms. Harris told Mr. Walz in a video last month.
Mr. Walz replied, “I’m trying to expand my food knowledge.”
“We’ve got some cantaloupes,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”
The video of them chatting in a Detroit cafe has nearly two million views on YouTube.
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