Members of the media agree: Vice President Kamala Harris needs to start doing press conferences and interviews.
It’s been more than a month since Harris suddenly became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. In that period, she has at times briefly answered questions from reporters publicly — and has reportedly spoken to her traveling press pool off the record. But she has done no formal interviews and held no formal press conferences.
In fairness, she’s been quite busy. Over just a few scant weeks, Harris has had to take over a campaign, hit the trail, pick a running mate, develop a policy platform and message, and oversee preparations for a convention.
If you zoom out from the electoral stakes, of course it’s bad for democracy if politicians avoid talking to the press. Of course we should, in the abstract, expect the next potential future president to publicly answer questions about their proposals and other topics in the news.
Plus, with Harris’ campaign starting so unusually late, the public deserves to learn more about her. If she’s seen mainly in the tightly controlled and scripted settings of ads, rally speeches and social media clips, we may not learn much about her views on issues and topics she prefers not to address, or assess how she responds to unplanned events.
Interviews and press conferences are risky for any politician. There is no guarantee they will go well, and for Harris in particular, some in recent years have gone infamously poorly. As a candidate trying to win an election (against an opponent who is hostile to democracy and uses his own press appearances to lie and exaggerate wildly), she will naturally weigh the risks and rewards of what might help, or harm, her campaign.
Since Harris joined the race, she has jumped out to a small lead in polls and has benefited from overwhelmingly positive media coverage. The Democratic base has rallied around her, and swing voters so far seem to like what they see. And all that has happened without a single formal press conference or interview.
With things trending so positively, interviews and press conferences appear to present mainly downside risk. A botched answer could generate a great deal of new negative coverage and attacks.
Harris has suffered such fates in the past.
In January 2019, at the start of her presidential campaign, anchor Jake Tapper asked at a CNN town hall whether her support of Medicare for All meant she wanted to eliminate private health insurance. Harris responded by saying that, yes, you won’t have to go through a private insurance company anymore: “Let’s eliminate all that. Let’s move on.” That answer, and the topic of health care generally, would dog her in the months to come. (She would eventually backtrack on her answer.)
Accounts of Harris’ thinking suggest she intensely prepares for such interviews, that she’s highly concerned things may go wrong, and that she believes racism and sexism give her less leeway to make a mistake. “She felt as if she would be unfairly punished by the press corps if she ever faltered — and that her slipups might make it difficult for every Black woman who followed in her path,” Franklin Foer wrote in his book about the Biden administration, “The Last Politician.”
Politicians in certain situations have good reasons to talk to the press. Some seek to increase their prominence and name recognition. Some hope to turn around their numbers because they are losing. Some want to promote their ideas.
None of these currently applies to Harris. However, if she keeps avoiding interviews, grumbling from the press will likely increase, and the narrative that she’s too afraid or incompetent to do interviews could catch on, generating negative coverage of a kind she has mostly avoided so far.
The post-convention period is arguably the optimal time for Harris to do press, because as Election Day draws nearer, the media typically frames coverage far more as a binary choice for the voters between the two nominees. That’s a frame Harris likely prefers, as she can focus on prosecuting the case against Donald Trump.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations.
