Kamala Harris Needs To Get Out More

If something doesn’t change fast, Harris’ tepid approach will lose her the election.

Kamala Harris appearing with Oprah Winfrey, September 19, 2024. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.)

Kamala Harris, very slowly, has started to speak to the media. This month, she has granted interviews to a Phoenix Univision station, an ABC affiliate in Philadelphia, and comedian Rickey Smiley on the “Rickey Smiley Morning Show.” She spoke, recently, to the National Association of Black Journalists and, most recently, at a forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey. After a successful debate against Donald Trump, it’s plausible the vice president is beginning to pursue an exceedingly normal campaign tactic: talking to human beings who are not merely super-fans herded into a campaign rally.

From the time Joe Biden, on July 21, dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed her to Sept. 10, the night of the debate, Harris did not conduct a single solo interview. She spoke, along with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, to CNN’s Dana Bash in August. Her only other interactions with the media were occasional brief remarks delivered to the traveling pack of reporters on the campaign trail. These “gaggles” are terrible for asking questions. Reporters shout out their bits or wait for an aide to call on them. Rarely is substance delivered. 

Still missing from Harris is any sort of formal press conference or the regular television appearances that J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, still makes. She has not allowed for an extended interview with any newspaper or magazine reporter, either. If she’s visited a local Philadelphia TV station, she hasn’t sat down with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or any major print-based organization in a crucial swing state. It goes without saying she won’t subject herself to a grilling from the New York Times editorial board. Oddly, she has even dodged friendly outlets like MSNBC and pundits like Ezra Klein, who would ask probing questions but is fundamentally sympathetic to her project. 

She has been, without question, the most unavailable major party nominee in recent memory. 

Democratic partisans do not care. Defeating Trump is their only objective and the thinking goes that if avoiding almost all media is the way to halt a fascist takeover of America, so be it. I can make moral and civic arguments for Harris talking to the press and answering difficult questions about what she would do as the most powerful human being on Earth, in control of a nuclear arsenal that could annihilate civilization one hundred times over. I can argue, with ease, that it is profoundly anti-democratic to evade difficult questions and stand for little beyond defeating Trump. She has been vice president for nearly four years and should be capable of putting forth a detailed policy platform, telling Americans what she’d do in Israel and Ukraine and Sudan and taking questions about these plans. 

But since partisans in both parties care little for these arguments, I will speak to them in the language they understand. Harris, less than two months from Election Day, is, at best, barely winning. And scenarios clearly exist where she can lose, including those where she wins the popular vote and loses the Electoral College, as Hillary Clinton did. Harris’ average national polling lead, at just three points, is worse than Biden’s 2020 margin, if an improvement over how he might have run, at age 81, had he remained in the race. Biden’s 4-point defeat of Trump amounted to an extraordinarily slim victory in the swing states that mattered. If Harris finishes a mere three points ahead, she could be imperiled. 

Part of the reason the election continues to be close is that too many Americans feel they know too little about Harris. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll that revealed a dip in her standing since the sugar high of the Democratic convention, 28 percent of likely voters said they felt they needed to know more about Harris, while only 9 percent said they needed to know more about Trump. “I don’t know what Kamala’s plans are,” Dawn Conley, a 48-year-old small-business owner and undecided voter in Knoxville, Tenn. told the Times. “It’s kind of hard to make a decision when you don’t know what the other party’s platform is going to be.”

The answer to her problem is obvious: She needs to get out more. 

Really, Harris should be everywhere. The Sunday morning talk shows, the newspaper sitdowns, and formal press conferences are a start. Podcasts, ethnic media, alternative media, and regional outlets should be added to the mix. If she doesn’t crave the mass heterodox audience of a Joe Rogan, she can spend extended time with the aforementioned Klein or Alex Cooper, who has become something of the young millenial/Gen Z Howard Stern. A vast majority of Americans will never attend a political rally or even pay attention to rote media coverage. Rallies are worthwhile, but not all of what a successful political candidate typically does, especially in this fractured media landscape. Harris needs to be creative and to reach voters in every way she possibly can. 

In a sense, Harris has been extraordinarily lucky so far. Many of the fundamentals of the election favor Republicans. Inflation, immigration, and the GOP’s Electoral College advantage should be enough to propel Trump comfortably ahead, but Harris must be considered a slight favorite because Trump is so alienating to so many voters. Indefensibly for someone in her position, Harris is running the equivalent of a Rose Garden campaign. There is no world in which that makes sense. She is not proactively reaching out to voters in swing states. And, even if all goes well in the election, her approach makes little sense as long-term strategy. Rose Garden presidencies are difficult to sustain.

Ross Barkan is a novelist and journalist. His next novel, Glass Century, will be published next year and he’s working on a book for Verso about the contemporary political situation. His Substack is Political Currents.

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