SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, They will sit down Thursday for their first major television interview of their presidential campaign as the duo travels through southeast Georgia on a bus tour.
The interview with CNN’s Dana Bash will give Harris a chance to appease critics that it has avoided uncontrolled environments, while giving her a new platform to define her campaign and test her political mettle ahead of an upcoming debate with former President Donald Trump scheduled for Sept. 10. But it also carries risks as her team tries to capitalize on the momentum of ticket shuffling following Joe Biden’s departure and last week’s Democratic National Convention.
Joint interviews during an election year are commonplace in politics: Biden and Harris, Trump and Mike Pence, Barack Obama and Biden, all did them at similar points in the campaign. The difference is that the other candidates all did solo interviews, too. Harris has yet to give an in-depth interview since becoming her party’s standard-bearer five weeks ago, though she did give several interviews while she was still Biden’s running mate.
Harris and Walz continue to resonate with voters, unlike Trump and Biden, who were nearly universally known and viewed by people.
The CNN interview is scheduled to air at 9 p.m. ET. It is scheduled to be taped at 1:45 p.m. ET during her two-day bus tour of southeast Georgia, which will conclude with an evening rally in Savannah. Harris campaign officials believe that to win the state Asset In November, she must make inroads into GOP strongholds across the state.
Harris, during her tenure as vice president, has given on-camera and print interviews to The Associated Press and many other outlets at a much more frequent rate than the president — with the exception of Biden’s late-campaign media blitz after his disastrous debate performance that marked the end of his campaign.
Harris’ lack of access to the media over the past month has become a key Republican argument in support of the campaign. Trump’s campaign has been counting the number of days she hasn’t given an interview. On Wednesday, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, suggested that Harris needed a “babysitter” and that was why Walz would be there.
“They know Kamala Harris can’t interview herself. There’s not a lot of trust in someone who can become the leader of the free world and ask people to nominate her for president of the United States when she can’t even sit down for an interview,” she said on Fox & Friends.
Trump, meanwhile, has largely turned to conservative media in his interviews, though he has held more open news conferences in recent weeks as he seeks to reclaim the spotlight that Harris’ elevation has earned him.
After the CNN interview, Walz will leave and Harris will continue his bus tour alone, hitting a rally before returning to Washington. On Wednesday, they hung out with a high school marching band to the delight of students and stopped at a Savannah barbecue restaurant.
Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said the bus tours provide an “opportunity to go to places we don’t typically go (and) make sure we’re competitive in all communities.”
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The campaign wants these events to motivate voters in Republican-leaning areas who don’t traditionally see the candidates, and hopes these engagements generate viral moments that cut through crowded media coverage to reach voters across the country.
These stops are meant to be moments where voters can learn “not only what they stand for, but who they are as people,” Tyler said.
Harris will lead another blitz with Biden in Detroit and Pittsburgh on Labor Day, just over 70 days before the election. The first mail-in ballots will be sent to voters in just two weeks.
Democrats’ enthusiasm for voting in November has grown in recent months, according to Gallup PollAbout 8 in 10 Democrats now say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting, up from 55% in March.
That gives them an enthusiasm they didn’t have earlier this year. Republican enthusiasm has increased much less over the same period, and about two-thirds now say they’re more enthusiastic than usual about voting.
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Extended reporting from Washington. Associated Press writer Amelia Thomson DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.
