Kamala Harris on Media Tour as Voting Begins: Still Introducing Herself to the Public
When Kamala Harris sat down with podcaster Alex Cooper for an interview, she didn’t start by explaining policy positions.

Kamala Harris campaign
Kamala Harris on Media Tour as Voting Begins: When Kamala Harris sat down with podcaster Alex Cooper for an interview, she didn’t start by explaining policy positions. “I want to get to know you as a person,” Cooper told the Democratic nominee. And that was just fine with Harris who said she was on the Call Her Daddy podcast because being real is the best way to communicate with people.
Well past the midpoint of her unexpected presidential campaign and with voting already underway, Harris is still introducing herself to the Americans who will decide her fate in this election.
On Tuesday she’ll hit the studios across Manhattan as the Democratic nominee tries to reach as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. It’s a big change after she’s largely avoided interviews since taking over as the top of the ticket and it’s an admission she needs to do more to get ahead of Donald Trump.
Harris will sit down with the women of ABC’s The View, talk to radio host Howard Stern and tape a show with late night comedian Stephen Colbert. The three appearances come after Harris did 60 Minutes with CBS on Monday and Cooper’s podcast on Sunday.
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Call Her Daddy is often raunchy, with explicit talk about sex but Harris and Cooper started by talking about their mothers.
Harris said her mother’s first instinct was never to comfort her eldest daughter when she ran into problems. Instead she would ask, What did you do? Although that sounds harsh, Harris said, she was actually teaching me, think about where you had agency in that moment and think about what you had the choice to do or not do. Don’t just let things happen to you.
It’s interactions like those that Harris’ team is focusing on for the vice president in the final four weeks before Election Day. She has yet to do an interview with a newspaper or magazine but her staff is considering more podcasts where they think Harris can reach voters who aren’t following traditional news sources.
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Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said Harris has to energize people who have tuned out of politics because they think all the politicians are the same, they all say the same thing, they don’t know anything about my life, I can’t relate to them at all. “They want to like and trust you,” she said.
Jennifer Harris, the former White House senior director of international economics, said Harris has a tougher road because of how she became the Democratic nominee.
We didn’t have a long primary to meet Kamala Harris the way most voters are used to.
She has to figure out how to show the instincts and principles that will guide hundreds of specific policy decisions that will come up over the course of the presidency.
Harris has proposed some policies in the two and a half months she’s been at the top of the ticket – like increasing the child tax credit and taking a bunch of actions to lower the cost of housing – but she’s given her biggest speeches about her economic philosophy – like the one in Pittsburgh two weeks ago.
There, she pushed back against Trump’s claims that she’s a communist, endorsed capitalism and positioned herself as a pragmatist who would take good ideas wherever they come.
As president I will be rooted in my core values of fairness, dignity and opportunity, Harris said. And I promise you, I will be practical.
Campaign officials have largely shut out criticism from some quarters that Harris hasn’t proposed enough policies. Instead they say a small but crucial number of undecided voters want to know more about Harris before they make up their minds and that the more they see Harris the more they like her.
Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden said the central challenge of the campaign is defining Harris in voters’ eyes.
This is actually a pretty simple campaign in the sense that the next few weeks are about who’s going to fill in the blanks on who Harris is, he said.
Being a vice president gives you some basic name recognition. In October 2019, when Harris was one of many candidates in the Democratic primary, AP-NORC polling found that about 3 in 10 Americans didn’t know enough about her to have an opinion. By early 2021 when she and Biden took office that number was down to around 1 in 10 Americans and it’s been there until this summer.
Now nearly all Americans know enough to have at least a surface opinion – positive or negative – of Harris.
But that doesn’t mean opinions on Harris are set or that Americans know as much as they want to know about her. Harris’ favorability numbers moved slightly over the summer so opinion of her may still be somewhat fluid.
Other polls show some voters are still looking for more information on Harris while views of Trump seem more fixed. One-quarter of likely voters said they still need to learn more about Harris according to a New York Times/Siena College poll after the debate with Trump while about three-quarters said they pretty much already know what they need to know about her.
Trump was the known entity. One in 10 likely voters said they still need to learn more about him while 9 in 10 said they already know what they need to know.
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