Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz have been scheduled for a joint interview with CNN on Thursday night, the first sit-down interview that the Democratic presidential nominee will give since she replaced President Joe Biden atop the party’s ticket last month.
The vice president and her running mate will be interviewed by CNN’s Dana Bash, one of the two moderators of the June 27 presidential debate that sent Biden’s candidacy into turmoil. CNN will air the Harris-Walz interview in a prime-time special at 9 p.m. eastern time on Thursday, the network announced, as the pair are on a bus tour through the battleground state of Georgia.
Unlike her Republican rival, Harris has been avoiding the press ever since Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her as his successor on July 21. Her media strategy has done nothing to silence criticism, which has only grown stronger in the days since last week’s Democratic National Convention. Harris had promised to give a sit-down interview or press conference by the end of the month.
Since launching her campaign 37 days ago, Harris has talked very little about the policy platform she’s running on this election cycle. It’s likely that, during Thursday’s interview, she will address several of her policy shifts since she last ran for president in 2019.
The Democratic nominee has reportedly undergone changes in her views on certain issues, perhaps most notably on border security. Harris pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the border wall to curb illegal immigration, Axios reported on Tuesday, despite having once been opposed to the construction project. The Trump campaign accused her of flip-flopping on the issue.
“How much longer will the mainstream media allow Kamala Harris to hide and use staff to speak on her behalf?” the Trump campaign’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “It’s DAY 37 of ZERO interviews and Kamala’s anonymous campaign sources are now claiming she supports President Trump’s border wall — this is a preposterous and false claim.”
While actively campaigning in battleground states over the past few weeks, Harris has answered some questions shouted at her by reporters. She also taped three interviews with social-media influencers at the DNC in Chicago last week and, the week before, held an informal interview in which she asked Walz about “white-guy tacos.”
Similarly, Walz has not given any meaningful interviews since he joined Harris on the ticket earlier this month.
Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump and Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio) have spoken with reporters to explain their campaign’s policy positions. Trump has given two press conferences this month, while Vance has taken numerous opportunities to jab at Harris’s lack of interaction with the press.
“I think it’s really disgraceful, both for Kamala Harris but also for a lot of the American media that participates in this stuff, to have a person who has been the presumptive nominee of the Democrat Party for 17 days and refuses to take a single question from the American media,” Trump’s running mate said in Wisconsin.