Kamala Harris came fishing for Republican votes in choppy waters — the airwaves of Fox News. Fox News, meanwhile, sought to sink her boat.
The unusual encounter speaks to the crude electoral math in this U.S. campaign: Harris needs to add some of these viewers to offset potential losses of other voters.
Her message to normally right-leaning voters is that she’s a safe bet who will protect American democracy, many Republicans endorse her, she’s more stable than Trump, and she’s focused on moderate, bread-and-butter issues.
In other words, she hoped to penetrate the Fox News fog with the same messages of her summer convention speech, and another event she held Wednesday with Republicans.
U.S. Vice-President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris engaged in a combative first interview with Fox News on Wednesday, sparring on immigration policy and shifting policy positions while asserting that if elected, she would not represent a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.
It was an extraordinary programming choice given how rarely Harris sat for interviews early in her campaign, let alone in the proverbial lion’s den; Trump himself has done way more adversarial interviews, albeit not so much lately.
Her interviewer was Bret Baier, a news anchor who has occasionally golfed with Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Trump’s golf buddy teed off on Harris.
The interviewer pressed her a way she’s never been pressed before as a presidential candidate: Unrelentingly, on topics seemingly custom-built to remind Fox News viewers why they shouldn’t like her.
Illegal migration; publicly funded sex changes for prisoners; her past left-wing promises; President Joe Biden’s mental decline. The Fox host pressed her on these topics — and, unlike a recent CNN interviewer, he kept following up.
It started with Baier asking how many illegal border-crossers had been released, pending their asylum cases; when Harris started delivering her customary answer, that Trump sabotaged an immigration bill, he pushed back, citing scores of actions the current administration itself took, early on, to loosen the border.
“May I finish responding please? You have to let me finish,” Harris replied, when Baier cut her off, to interrupt her Trump-blaming.
That essentially set the pattern for the ensuing 25 minutes.
Frosty exchanges
Baier then played a video of a grieving mother whose daughter was killed by an undocumented migrant and asked if she would apologize. Harris said she was sorry for the loss; Baier pressed again for an apology; Harris repeated that she felt awful.
On the topic of when Harris realized Biden had lost a step, cognitively, Baier asked: “You didn’t have any concerns?” Harris defended her boss, and turned the topic to Trump.
Harris tried referring to how unsuited Trump is for power, and referred to the numerous Republicans, including military members, and members of Trump’s team, who have endorsed her, or who even refer to Trump as a fascist.
“He’s unfit to serve, he’s unstable, he’s dangerous,” Harris said.
Baier cast that as an insult to half the country: “Are they misguided, the 50 per cent? Are they stupid?” Baier said, referring to Trump supporters.
Harris defended herself: “Oh, God, I would never say that.”
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is doubling down on recent controversial comments he made, including suggesting he would use military force against political opponents he called ‘the enemy within.’
In fact, she said, Trump is the one who demeans and diminishes people. Trump is the one who refers to opponents as the enemy within, she said. He’s the one who has talked, for years, about turning the American military on Americans.
Baier pushed back by playing another video clip — this one was of Trump, and was flattering to him; it edited out a soundbite where Trump uses inflammatory language about his opponents, as Harris accused him of.
A Harris spokesperson later posted the two different versions of the clip on the social media platform X, showing what Fox had cut out.
(L) What Trump actually said on Fox about his “enemy within” comments<br><br>(R) What Fox tried to claim he said, but Vice President Harris wouldn’t let stand<br><br>Fox omitted the first 60+ seconds of Trump’s answer, where he again called Democrats the “enemy from within” and “evil.” <a href=”https://t.co/IjGCZRN0rG”>pic.twitter.com/IjGCZRN0rG</a>
—@IanSams
Polls twitch in Trump’s direction
To the interviewer’s earlier point, Trump does, indeed, maintain solid support. In fact, the polls have twitched ever so slightly lately in Trump’s favour, within the margin of error.
Harris still leads the popular vote in most national surveys, but not all: on Wednesday, Harris was five ahead in a poll by one reputable pollster, Marist, and two behind in a poll by Fox News’s well-regarded bipartisan polling team.
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The swing-state surveys are less favourable to Harris.
Whether she wins or not could come down to the basic math of whether enough college-educated moderate Republicans, especially women, shift her way, to offset the potential loss of non-college-educated voters of colour.
On the very same day, in the very state where Harris did that interview, Republicans were in a nearby Latino-majority city, registering new voters on a busy street.
Many motorists honked their horns in support, or offered a thumbs up as they passed a pro-Trump registration stand on 7th Street in Allentown.
In another nearby swing county, also with a growing Hispanic population, the local Republican chairman insisted he’s seeing similar movement in his area.
Pete Begley described some new registration numbers as evidence his party is now the election favourite. He then cited Harris’s new media schedule.
“Kamala Harris is now doing interviews with Fox News. This is desperation,” said Begley, the party chair in Monroe County, Penn., near Philadelphia.
“This is a woman that went, what, 60 days without a press conference? So they’re panicking and they’re panicking for one reason: Trump is surging.”
The evidence of that is less clear. What is clear is that Harris wanted some former Trump voters to hear her out.
As Wednesday’s interview ended, with Baier cutting her off, Harris quickly invited viewers to go to kamalaharris.com and see 80 pages of her policies on affordable housing, small business and the military.
“That’s why we invited you here,” Baier said, after an interview that touched none of those things.
Afterward, a Fox News panel called Harris evasive. To be fair, she avoided the substance of some of Baier’s questions, starting with that border exchange.
But the panel’s resident Democrat, Harold Ford Jr., insisted she probably came out ahead just by showing up. He said exchanges like this benefit the country, as people want to hear about how she’s jettisoned some of her 2020 campaign policies.
“Coming on Fox, coming before our audience, is the right thing to do,” Ford said.
