WASHINGTON — Even as polling shows the presidential race is a toss-up, Vice President Kamala Harris has been running with a measure of risk aversion that some Democratic strategists and activists worry has failed to fully capitalize on the excitement surrounding her entry into the race in July.
Until this point, Harris has largely eschewed freewheeling interactions with voters like town hall-style events or interviews with the media that could offer a sense of her authentic self and make people more comfortable with her abrupt emergence at the top of the ticket, these Democrats say.
“They’re trying to keep her away,” Steve Shurtleff, a former Democratic speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, said of the Harris campaign. “It’s like seeing your favorite Hollywood actor and then they’re on a talk show and they can’t even speak.
“The president of the United States has to be able to be on their toes all the time and answer questions,” he added. “It’s so obvious she’s been avoiding the one-on-one interviews, and the voters deserve better.”
Harris campaign aides say she will venture into new forums in the coming weeks, a chance to reveal more about her temperament and character. She is giving an interview to CBS News’ “60 Minutes” as part of an election special that will air next week. And she is expected to appear on late-night talk shows, as will her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Open questions at this late stage of the race are whether Harris can rely on her early momentum and whether she can reach and leave a favorable impression on that sliver of the electorate that hasn’t yet made up its mind.
Early voting has already begun in some states, and Harris has been diverted from the trail in recent days because of the devastating damage wrought by Hurricane Helene.
Interviews and town halls aren’t the only ways to reach voters — her campaign is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads targeting swing voters, but that may not be enough.
An NBC News poll last month found that as Harris entered the final sprint to Election Day, a chunk of voters still harbored doubts about the kind of president she would make: 13% said they were “uncertain and wondering” whether she would do a good job.
Harris’ campaign has acted as if she’s sitting on a lead, even though she has failed to separate from her opponent, former President Donald Trump, others said.
“The campaign is taking a chance that they can run out the clock and Trump’s weaknesses will be enough to win,” said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist. “But the danger in that is if you don’t define your own candidacy well enough, people will start defining it themselves.”
Walz’s performance at the vice presidential debate Tuesday kindled fresh doubts on the part of the Democratic faithful. He exhibited the caution that some Democrats say has hamstrung the campaign. In a competent if mostly workmanlike showing, Walz looked as if the campaign had sanded down the natural exuberance he displayed when Harris picked him to be the vice presidential nominee.
“It’s been a mistake to shield Walz and Harris from interviews,” a Democratic lawmaker said. “It’s like playing basketball — if you don’t play for weeks, you’re not going to get it into a game and do well. You’ve got to be on the court.
“I would have them out there very extensively,” the lawmaker added.
Walz was sheltered in part so he had time to prepare for the debate, and now he, too, will be mixing it up with voters in more spontaneous ways in the coming weeks. He set out on a Pennsylvania bus tour Wednesday. And he took part in a video call with Muslim voters Wednesday night — an opportunity to shore up ties to a constituency that has been angry about the Biden-Harris administration’s position on the war in Gaza.
A Harris campaign spokesman, Kevin Munoz, said in a statement: “Our task for the final stretch of this campaign is ensuring that [Harris’] winning vision reaches the undecided voters who will decide this election in places and ways that will actually reach them. That may look different in today’s evolving media environment than prior campaigns, but coupled with campaign events, aggressive organizing and a historic paid media campaign, it’s a winning approach.”
Harris’ guarded public posture may be a carryover from President Joe Biden’s defunct campaign. Worried that Biden, 81, might make a gaffe, his campaign carefully controlled and limited his public appearances. Many of the people who ran Biden’s campaign are working to elect Harris.
The campaign has repeatedly demonstrated a deep distrust of the media and a concern that news outlets might seize upon any misstep resulting from an impromptu remark.
“They are very cautious,” a person involved in Harris’ race said of her campaign. “Sometimes it seems like they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. I know Harris is willing to do whatever they ask her to do. The campaign is controlling all of this stuff. She’s in the ‘wind me up and let me go’ — she’s willing to do whatever it takes.”
Younger and more telegenic than Biden, Harris doesn’t need to be cocooned, some analysts said. For one, many undecided voters are still unsure of her position on issues. They need to hear from her and be persuaded that she’s not at heart a “San Francisco progressive” who’s trying to make herself palatable to a wider electorate, said Sarah Longwell, host of “The Focus Group” podcast.
But Harris also benefits from something any candidate would envy: The more people see of her, the more they like her, Longwell said. Indeed, Harris’ favorability rating jumped 16 percentage points from July to September, NBC News’ poll found, the largest increase for any politician in the network’s surveys since President George W. Bush’s numbers soared after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Still, her 5-point lead over Trump among registered voters was within the poll’s margin of error.
“She’s had these big appearances that have in many cases gone very well,” said Longwell, who also heads a group called Republican Voters Against Trump. “And sometimes there’s an impulse to say: ‘We just crushed that. Let’s not disrupt the narrative of everyone talking about that we just crushed the debate.’ But that’s not the world anymore. You’ve got to keep pushing. You’ve got to own media cycle after media cycle after media cycle. You have to be on permanent offense. That’s something that Republicans understand but that Democrats struggle with.”
A facile argument would be that Trump is always commandeering the spotlight, while Harris is hidden away. Trump declined to be interviewed for the “60 Minutes” special and, unlike Harris, refused to take part in any more debates. In both cases, he chose to forgo TV audiences in the millions.
As for Harris, she recently appeared on the podcast “All the Smoke,” hosted by two former NBA basketball players, Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. She seemed relaxed and chatty throughout, talking about cooking, parenting and race — while also saying she supports legalizing recreational marijuana, or, as she called it, “weed.”
The popular podcast, with two friendly hosts, offered a vehicle for her to reach Black male voters, in particular.
Harris’ campaign has also made overtures to voters in unconventional forums like the gaming site IGN.
Trump has taken a more in-your-face approach from his earliest days as a candidate. He tends to generate headlines whether he wants to or not, most recently because of the court filing by special counsel Jack Smith that spelled out his alleged role in trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
He has done 175 interviews since February on nearly every type of platform, including mainstream outlets and podcasts that have huge audiences of generally far-right male listeners.
It was part of the campaign’s strategy to court younger, male voters who have historically been disconnected from politics. The campaign has seen them as an untapped voter bloc and has spent significant time on podcasts that they listen to as a result, advisers have told NBC News.
Michael LaRosa, a former press secretary for first lady Jill Biden, said: “What Trump and [running mate JD] Vance are giving to the electorate is accessibility. They are seen and heard because they are accessible. They are willing to sit down and answer questions from anyone. And you have to respect that.
“A duck-and-cover approach does not exude strength and confidence,” he said.
