Will Kamala Harris’ CNN Interview Silence Her Critics?

Vice President Kamala Harris’ interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, which is due to be broadcast on Thursday evening, is a chance for the Democratic presidential nominee to focus on her policy proposals, a prominent political scientist has said.
Harris is set to appear alongside her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in a pretaped CNN prime-time special scheduled to be broadcast from Georgia at 9 p.m. ET. It is Harris’ first unscripted interview since formally becoming the 2024 Democratic nominee at the beginning of August.
The vice president swiftly established herself as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, and she proceeded to outperform Republican rival Donald Trump in more than a dozen polls. However, Harris has recently been criticized for not holding an unscripted news conference or interview, while Trump took questions from journalists on August 8 at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
Speaking to Newsweek, Dafydd Townley, an American politics expert who teaches at the University of Portsmouth in England and is vice chair of the American Politics Group, said Harris should discuss her policy program following her more personality-focused speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 22.
He said: “The Harris-Walz interview today is an opportunity for the Democratic ticket to advertise their policy proposals, should they be elected. While the Democratic National Convention introduced them to their supporters and the global media, there was little discussion of policy.
“Harris has come under fire for not meeting reporters earlier in the campaign, but as her nomination was not confirmed until recently, that is perhaps wide of the mark. It is not unusual that the presidential and vice presidential nominees conduct a joint interview with the press, Trump did the same with Mike Pence, as did Biden and Harris, and Obama and Biden.”
Townley added that Harris’ interview performance “could not be as bad” as Biden’s were before he withdrew from the 2024 contest.
The politics expert said: “Republican criticism has claimed that Harris has avoided doing a one-to-one interview because it will illustrate how poor she is at these events, pointing to the interviews she gave in 2020 when competing for the nomination. However, the same claims were made about her public speaking, and she blew the convention away with her closing speech.
“It may be that Harris has improved as an interviewee just as she has as a public speaker. Having Walz there will make it difficult to judge that, but her performance could not be as bad as that of Biden’s has been in similar circumstances over the last six months.”
Newsweek contacted the Harris and Trump presidential campaigns for comment via email.
Clodagh Harrington, an American politics lecturer at University College Cork in Ireland, agreed that Harris would be under pressure to focus on policy specifics.
Harrington told Newsweek: “With the election coming into view, she knows that she must deliver in terms of laying out policy specifics for the future and defending past positions.
“Having her running mate present this evening could be interpreted as a lack of confidence, but I am more inclined to see this as presenting Team Harris-Walz from the outset. These days, the vice presidency matters. Just ask Kamala Harris.”
Harrington added: “Regarding the GOP accusations of Kamala Harris dodging scrutiny by avoiding interviews to date, I would argue that she has actually played this situation rather smartly.
“It’s been a month since that tumultuous period when President Biden announced that he would not run again. Since then the Democrat campaign has been ignited, and Harris has had a rather glorious run thanks to a successful DNC and a lot of internet humor. August is invariably silly season, so the timing was fortuitous.”
Thomas Gift, a political scientist who heads the Center on U.S. Politics at University College London, told Newsweek that Harris’ CNN interview is unlikely to silence conservative critics, especially as she is doing it alongside Walz.
He said: “Republican criticism that Harris hasn’t made herself available to the press is certainly valid. The fact that she’s doing the sit-down interview with Tim Walz won’t quiet Republicans who think she should answer questions solo. It gives ammunition to detractors who argue that Harris struggles in unscripted settings.”
On X, formerly Twitter, Jim Geraghty, a senior political correspondent at the conservative-leaning National Review, criticized the length of time between Harris’ interviews.
He wrote: “We are witnessing the establishment of a new and awful precedent where the president and vice president avoid interviews and press conferences for long stretches, sometimes more than a month. Joe Biden has done two on-camera interviews since July 17. The most recent one was with Robert Costa of CBS News on August 12.”
Mark Knoller, a former CBS White House correspondent, likewise wrote on X: “Should CNN have insisted on a one-on-one interview with Harris and turned down a joint interview with Harris and Walz? Too tough to walk away from. But first question to Harris ought to be why [she] couldn’t appear solo.”