If you don’t have time to watch Kamala Harris’s blitz of interviews this week, you could skim through her 2019 book The Truths We Hold. Or watch her speech from the party convention in August. Or listen to any of her old interviews. You will come away with the same information. In each, she reels off familiar talking points (she wants “consensus”, Donald Trump is “unserious”, we shouldn’t “throw up our hands instead of rolling up our sleeves”) and anecdotes (her go-to is her mum’s instruction to take responsibility and not complain).
And that was the point. Harris toured the alternative media scene because she wanted to speak to the disengaged who don’t know her stories and punchlines. These shows have big audiences, who don’t read Politico’s Playbook every morning. Guests aren’t expected to have detailed policy ideas, and hosts won’t make sure they do. If social media was the hot new medium in the 2010s, then alternative media like podcasts are dominating politics in the mid-2020s.
Trump, or at least his younger aides, recognised this a while back. He has traipsed through the studios, recording podcasts aimed at young men, hosted by the likes of Lex Fridman, Logan Paul and Theo Von. Harris was late to the game, but in the past 48 hours she’s hit back with a string of friendly media appearances, from the wildly popular podcast Call Her Daddy to Howard Stern’s show.
Traditional media is looking on flummoxed, as candidates realise that the New York Times or CNN’s grip on the narrative has slackened and alternative media can better serve their needs. Which is hardly surprising. Both candidates are fighting on their personalities. Policy is too often relegated to niche Substacks and think tank reports. The Democratic campaign knows that Harris’s history of U-turns makes her vulnerable on detail. But these interviews showed the Democrats’ political strategy is simpler than any policy: Harris is not Trump. She is not anti-women. She won’t overturn the election. She sounds kind; he’s a narcissist. This is character over policy. And there is no better medium to convey vibes than shooting the breeze with friendly media personalities.
But this comes with a downside: journalism gets replaced with cosy, informal chats that skirt around real issues in the pursuit of entertainment. Take her interview on Call Her Daddy hosted by Alex Cooper, a podcast about sex and relationships, which recently bumped Joe Rogan as the most popular podcast on Spotify in the US. Cooper’s questions about abortion elicited little more than that Harris thinks the overturning of Roe vs Wade was wrong. The Republicans’ bans on abortion, Harris said, are “immoral”. She continued: “This is the same guy [Trump] who said that women should be punished for having abortions. This is the same guy who uses the kind of language he does to describe women. So, yeah, there you go.”
This was the space for Harris to reply to the Republican Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ barbed comments that the vice-president “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” because she doesn’t have biological children. Harris retorted that “a whole lot of women out here… are not aspiring to be humble”. It was not the space for a discussion about actual solutions to abortion bans, such as appointing liberal judges or passing legislation through Congress.
Or take her time on Howard Stern’s radio show. Stern’s introductory remarks are a fair representation of the rest of the interview. He began: “I don’t understand how my fellow Americans – I don’t even understand how this election is close. And yes, I’m voting for you, but I would also vote for that wall over there, rather than a guy who says – where do I begin? A guy who says he doesn’t support Ukraine, wouldn’t get on that stage with you and say, I [support] Ukraine. Why do my fellow Americans want this kind of chaos overseas?”
An interview with a podcaster or a long-form show host like Stern has a different purpose to a sit-down interview with a broadcast journalist. Podcasts are supposed to be easy on the ear; gossip is often prized over insight. Stern was curious about whether Harris liked Raisin Bran more than Special K, for example. The guest is asked how they feel about something, not what they will do.
That’s not to say this doesn’t happen in traditional broadcast interviews: see BBC One around 9am on Sundays. The old media has its own gaps. On 7 October, Harris was on the current affairs show 60 Minutes, which was tougher than any podcast interview because Harris was asked how she would actually confront the problems she would face as president. But she got away with delivering platitudes.
When asked why the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ignored the administration’s push for a ceasefire, for instance, she responded: “The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles… We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
These types of interviews seldom go beyond two things: to test whether a candidates’ policy would work in practise – in other words, that their policy would deliver on its own terms – and to hold politicians to account for hypocrisy. Which means a lot of what a candidate thinks goes unexamined. Interviewers avoid the underlying beliefs from which a politician’s policies sprout because they want to seem impartial.
For instance, Harris was not asked whether American support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon was predicated on the belief that the life of a Palestinian civilian is worth less than an Israeli. This is a common criticism of the administration’s policies, one that could very well be costing her votes in swing states such as Michigan, and would not be a fringe question to ask. Instead the premise of her response – that the US is right to provide the weapons for Israel to wage war in exchange for influence – was accepted. It went unacknowledged that she avoided answering the question asked – about the delivery of that policy, ie why Netanyahu is not listening to Joe Biden. These broadcast questions – whether on podcasts or traditional magazine shows – rarely go beyond whether a candidate is competent and consistent. That’s important, but is not the same as interrogating what principles are on the ballot.
Beyond the formats of the interviews, there is perhaps another reason why Harris cruises through interviews: much of the media don’t want a critical interview or article to be remembered as contributing to a potential second Trump term. Which only adds to some of Trump supporters’ sense that the establishment is uniting around Harris. And that makes Maga’s anti-establishment argument even more resonant.
Given Harris’s strategy is to be the anti-Trump, perhaps that doesn’t concern her campaign. At one point in the 60 Minutes interview, she said it was wrong that billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than teachers – a principle around which an effective campaign could be built. But it was a few seconds amid hours of broadcast. Economic equality is clearly not the mandate on which her campaign wants to win.
Sharing a can of Miller High Life beer with Stephen Colbert on his late-night comedy show on 8 October proved that. On shows like Colbert’s, there is no pretence of journalism. He and his fellow late-night comedians are self-proclaimed entertainers. And yet it was the show on which Harris got to the crux of her offer. “Well, I mean, I’m obviously not Joe Biden… and so that would be one change,” Harris said. “But also, I think it’s important to say with, you know, 28 days to go, I’m not Donald Trump.”
[See also: Israel and Iran’s final reckoning]
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