Voters Aren’t Seeing Enough of Harris
Voters Aren’t Seeing Enough of Harris
After the debate she needs a media blitz.
KAMALA HARRIS’S MOMENTUM HAS STALLED, and she heads into the final eight weeks of the campaign with a challenging map in the Electoral College. Voters in a new national New York Times/Siena poll see Donald Trump as the candidate representing change and say they don’t know enough about what Harris stands for or plans to do as president.
It’s high time for her to stop by local television morning shows, call into radio programs, chat with reporters in the back of the plane, and appear on podcasts of all kinds. Harris needs to start having conversations with the press. Loads of them.
In a race this tight, one debate, even a home run, isn’t likely to win Harris the election. She can talk to Hillary Clinton about her successful debates that preceded losing to Trump in 2016. One debate should not be the last time voters see Harris in an unscripted back and forth on critical issues, and a bad debate can be mitigated by a relentless media offensive.
As she embarks on her “New Way Forward” tour this week to tout her policy agenda, Harris should hit the airwaves to highlight her proposals, slam Trump for lies he told in the debate, and flash that dazzling smile.
Opportunities—to amplify her ideas, show empathy to voters, and endear herself to them—are everywhere. Find some streaming show that reaches young women who may not be registered to vote. Go back to The View and The Drew Barrymore Show. Sit down again with Charlamagne tha God. In every setting Harris can speak to voters’ worries and articulate her solutions. But it won’t hurt to talk about her favorite musicians, the Golden State Warriors, or her passion for cooking, either.
The NYT/Siena poll showed 28 percent of respondents said they needed to know more about Harris, versus 9 percent who said they need to learn more about Trump.
Familiarizing the electorate with policy plans requires repetition. No one knows better than Harris that President Joe Biden’s remarkable accomplishments remain largely unknown to the average voter because he was never able to sell them. Voters who will decide this election aren’t watching rallies on cable news. But they will see clips of interviews if they start to pile up.
Harris doesn’t have to hang out in every lions’ den or poke every hornets’ nest; there is no need for her to face down questions from Laura Ingraham to meet her objective, which is to promote her plans and her personality in enough places until polling begins to show she has broken through.
Trump is out there not only talking to audiences in the cult cocoon on Fox News and Newsmax but also devoting time to niche “manoverse” podcast audiences where he hopes to run up the score with young male voters.
Harris should do the same. And in every conversation she has, Harris must use the word “change.” The NYT/Siena poll showed voters see the vice president as more of an incumbent than Trump, the former president. A strong majority, 61 percent of voters, in the survey saw Trump as representing change, while only 40 percent of likely voters said Harris represented change.
Meanwhile, the vice president is being pummeled by ads that tell voters in battleground states she is “dangerously liberal” and seeks open borders and an invasion of the country by migrant criminals who will eat your pets. These lies, and the fears they stoke among voters across the political spectrum, can’t be countered or answered at a rally.
Speeches on big stages won’t close the gap between what voters know about Harris and what she wants them to know. Only the highly engaged attend campaign events. The voters Harris must persuade aren’t politically active, and she needs to take every chance to reach them.
This will require Harris to change her mind. She has avoided unscripted interactions with media, providing just one interview to CNN two weeks ago, since becoming the party’s nominee.
Her prevent-defense plan is weakening her. In writing about how she borrowed this approach from Biden, Axios cited doubts that Biden sources had about Harris’s ability to withstand the national spotlight, that “they found her risk-averse to the point of paralysis.”
But here’s the thing: Harris is more articulate than Biden and Trump. She isn’t going to tank her poll numbers going on Morning Joe or giving an interview to Kara Swisher. She will improve with each exchange, and her confidence will grow. The more off-the-cuff exchanges she has the better chance voters will have of seeing her authentic self, which is critical to the success of her campaign (even voters who loathe Trump consider him authentic). Voters need to see that confidence too, to be assured she has what it takes to lead the free world as our first woman president.
Biden’s late departure from the race created a compressed campaign without a primary contest. And it’s precisely because Harris wasn’t in the spotlight starting a year ago that she needs more exposure now. She can’t risk swing voters believing she is hiding.
Trump’s willingness to be poked at and probed in media sitdowns gives the impression he is forthcoming. Yet while he takes questions, he hardly ever provides factual answers on any policy. Most of his responses are lengthy, garbled diatribes about the desperate state of the nation and puffy, policy-free promises about how great everything will be as soon as he is in power again.
Harris has been smart to go easy on the Trump talk, she apparently appreciates that voters feel like they already know everything about him, are tired of hearing about him, and instead want to know what she will do for them.
So the best use of Harris’s time in the interviews she should be ramping up after the debate will be for her to focus on the policy she chooses, and to glide quickly through other questions that attempt to put her on the defensive.
When asked about the Biden–Harris border policies, she can answer the question then raise Trump’s threat to create “a bloody story” by rounding up illegal immigrants for mass deportations. And in almost every question on any domestic policy issue she can always turn to the threats posed to it by Project 2025.
In these sitdowns, Harris should deploy some Trumpian tactics to control much of the conversation—tell the host what is weighing on her mind, or what struck her the most from talking to voters the day before. She can answer the Trump outrage of the day when she feels like it, and other times she can simply pass. That’s up to her. What she relays and reveals in these exchanges is all up to her—so is the length of them.
Harris is not Pete Buttigieg—and she doesn’t have to be. She needs to be herself. Not silver-tongued, just genuine. If she tosses up a word salad that gets shared on social media, she can count on the news cycle remaining a gusher these next two months. A bad interview will likely get washed out with something repugnant Trump or JD Vance says.
Harris needs to show she trusts her stuff. If she doesn’t, we can’t. The low-trust voters Harris still needs to win over, some of whom were once in the Democratic coalition, need to be convinced that what you see is what you get. She should be encouraged by her rising favorability ratings and the fact that the more people see of her, the more they like her.
Sharing her thoughts and plans, and some of her true self, with the country will help Harris win, and then it will help her lead. If Harris wants to defeat Trump, she can’t remain in a comfort zone. The stakes, and the threat, demand that she leave it all on the field.