Ahead of Kamala Harris’s first ever sit-down interview on Fox News, campaign spokesman Ian Sams told Vanity Fair that her appearance on the network is an “important piece of the puzzle” in the broader strategy of the final stretch of the campaign.
Sams joined host Brian Stelter on Vanity Fair‘s Inside the Hive podcast for a wide-ranging conversation in which Sams said that the interview on Fox News with anchor Bret Baier “serves two purposes” for the Harris-Walz campaign. First is the exposure that the network can provide, given their consistently high ratings. Second, he argued, “there are a lot of undecided voters who watch” the network, including some Democrats and independent voters.
The Fox News audience “frankly often gets fed a bunch of crap,” Sams continued, adding that through the sit-down, viewers “get to hear from her directly.”
Sams told Stelter, who is also CNN’s chief media analyst, that the Harris campaign has no illusions about Fox’s political bent; there is, he said, “an entire alternative reality that’s created every single day by Fox News” and other conservative media outlets. Yet the campaign still believes that providing the audience with Harris’s message could have an impact, three weeks out from Election Day. To that end, vice presidential nominee Tim Walz has appeared on Fox News Sunday two weeks in a row.
Wednesday’s sit-down “says something about the two candidates,”Sams said. “It says that, you know, she’s tough, she’s strong, she can go toe to toe with adversarial people. Donald Trump‘s weak and withdrawn and retreating to his comfort zone.”
In recent weeks, the campaign has made a concerted effort to draw comparisons between Harris and Trump’s media appearances. Earlier this week in a slew of social media posts, Sams highlighted the former president’s unwillingness to sit for a mainstream media interview this close to the election, pointing to Trump’s recent decision to back out of an already scheduled CBS News 60 Minutes interview.
“And so, you know, sitting with Fox is important in that regard,” Sams said.
The full episode of Inside the Hive, in which Sams and Stelter discuss Harris’s full media strategy and her approach with undecided voters, will be available at 9am EST on October 17, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
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