This is the Harris-Walz media strategy in a nutshell: Avoid the press at all costs, even when asked questions that should be layups. The Democratic ticket, or perhaps those who advise them, seem to believe that nothing good can come from talking to the media—that answering questions only invites negative coverage of pseudo-scandals (like Walz relatives endorsing Trump) instead of the real issues at stake in November. If this sounds familiar, it’s because President Biden employed the same media strategy in his reelection campaign. That didn’t work out so well for him—and it may not for Harris, either.
Real issues are indeed at stake in this election—economic inequality, housing affordability, the climate crisis, Israel’s war on Gaza, and the migrant crisis, to name a few—but where Harris stands on them is one of the big mysteries of this campaign; her policy agenda is, at best, a rough sketch of a first draft of an actual agenda. And this mystery only grows because she refuses to speak with the press, having only done one nationally televised interview—a joint sitdown with Walz—since becoming the nominee.
Media scrutiny is good in and of itself. Interviews with serious journalists, as the Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop argued last month, “remain the best forum we have for stress-testing candidates’ positions and holding them to account.” That argument might not sway Harris’s team, but it’s also strategically unwise to avoid the media: The longer she goes without speaking one-on-one to the press, the more coverage she gets about her failure to speak to the press. In mid-August, Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin noted that her failure to do a sitdown was “becoming a thing,” and that hasn’t changed: On Friday, Axios observed that “Vice President Harris isn’t getting subjected to the media scrutiny typical for a presidential nominee.” Her efforts to circumvent the media are reinforcing the exact narrative that Donald Trump and his allies are pushing—that she’s not prepared to be president.
