Vice President Kamala Harris has not sat for an unscripted interview for 22 days after joining the presidential race, underscoring the media’s curious failure to secure an interview.
The lack of interviews runs counter to the multitude of interviews the media typically conduct when candidates enter presidential races. Harris appears to the exception to the rule.The media have not interviewed Harris on television since June 24, 2024. The last time the press reportedly questioned her at a solo news conference was eight months ago on December 2, 2023.
Only a few reports last week recount Harris’s lack of unscripted interviews, much less any blistering headlines about her failure to sit for a primetime interview after receiving the nomination.
Democrats, meanwhile, praised Harris’s lack of unscripted media events that could shed light on her policy prescriptions to fix the economy under the administration and explain her radical positions as a U.S. senator and vice president.“Why would we start talking about policy?” one Democrat lawmaker told Politico Playbook on Monday. “We’re actually better off just running on this real wave of enthusiasm and energy. … It’s the best thing [Harris] can do.”“Values unite and specific policies divide,” a senior Democrat aide added. “So I don’t think there is a desire to spend the next 80 days litigating Medicare for All, for example.”
“The Harris camp is hoping to ride the wave as long as it can,” Politico’s West Wing Playbook explained, appearing to defend Harris’s lack of media access. “So there is little worry about the candidate avoiding something else that has long been required of presidential nominees: taking questions from the press.”
Harris appears to have at least two reasons to avoid unscripted interviews for as long as she can. First, she has a habit of delivering silly word salads. Harris is infamous for spouting odd phrases and explanations for simple ideas. In 2022, for example, she marveled over Venn diagrams. “More alphabet soup from Kamala,” one X user mocked. Another time Harris rambled about the “significance of the passage of time.”
Second, Harris appears to be trying to navigate policy debates within her own party. Anonymous campaign aides reportedly flipped-flopped on five of her radical-left policies, such as fracking, a key policy to voters in The Keystone State of Pennsylvania. More is here on Harris’s radical record.
“What can be. Unburdened by what has been,” as Harris often says.
RELATED — Dem Rep. Robert Garcia: Harris ‘Has a Lot of Press Availability’ ‘She Has Been Doing’
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
