Vice President Kamala Harris has managed to do only a handful of interviews since ascending to the top of the ticket, which is one of the main criticisms she’s faced as voters try to get a better sense of her and her policies.
The Democratic presidential nominee has participated in only three TV and print interviews since announcing her bid for presidency after President Joe Biden dropped out on July 21, meanwhile during that same time period Donald Trump has participated in 14, according to Axios.
But it is Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who is dominating the press. He has participated in a total of 59 TV and print interviews since being announced as the vice presidential nominee.
Before becoming Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) was very receptive to engaging with the press, but now he’s ignoring reporters’ questions as he departs from planes, according to the first-hand account of a Minnesota Star Tribune reporter. He’s only done four press interviews — one of them being a joint interview with Harris.
The Harris-Walz campaign team has intentionally limited sit-down interviews with the press in an effort to prevent either Harris or Walz from making statements that could damage their image. In the past, Walz has exaggerated his military service in which he said he carried “weapons of war” while at war, but he was never deployed to a combat zone. On the other hand, Harris has been criticized for making flippant comments. For instance, she said she had never been to Europe when questioned by NBC’s Lester Holt about why she hadn’t visited the Southern border as the border patrol struggled to handle the large numbers of migrants crossing the border.
Harris-Walz has not held a single press conference; meanwhile, Trump has held three, and Vance has done 12.
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The Harris-Walz campaign’s media strategy appears to be working. While Trump-Vance is running circles around Harris-Walz in terms of press engagement, polling shows that the pair are in a national deadlock, with Trump leading Harris by just 47% to 46% as well as being neck-and-neck in all seven swing states.
With Vance leading the charge in media interviews, he’s also been subjected to greater criticism. Following the resurfacing of a three-year-old video where he made quips against “childless cat ladies,” Vance sat down in an interview with NBC News, where he said his sarcastic comment was misinterpreted. Vance has not been able to shake those remarks, with even pop icon Taylor Swift signing her message supporting Harris-Walz as a “Childless Cat Lady.”