FFirst came “Joy,” a cozy but unmemorable TV show with a sympathetic host, a Vogue cover, and $1 billion spent on TV ads. Then reality hit. Kamala Harris was slipping in the polls after her strategy to win over undecided American voters wasn’t working.
So the vice president appeared on Fox News as part of a pitch to white working-class women who voted more strongly for Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016. It was a win for the Fox News division, with 7.8 million viewers, four times as many as host Bret Bayer. Nightly Average – But was it a win for the Harris camp?
Harris asserted herself, avoided offering an incomprehensible word salad, pushed back on Baier’s line of questioning, aired some Democratic key points, and continued to use her time until the end of her 25-minute slot. Ta.
“Let me be clear: my presidency is not a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” Harris said. “I represent a new generation of leadership. For example, I didn’t spend the majority of my career in Washington, D.C..”
Then the spin machine started up. Democrats say Fox News helped Harris win the November election. “I think she had a mission that she wanted to do. She probably wanted to have a viral moment,” Baier later said. “And I think she might have figured it out.”
But Fox’s prime-time opinion host spent the next three hours eviscerating her. President Donald Trump praised Baier’s “tough but very fair interview that clearly showed how completely incompetent Kamala is.”
With $15 billion spent this election cycle, candidates are still searching for campaign strategies that will give them an edge. Harris went from hating interviews to accepting explosive interviews. She followed other Democrats to Fox News because, the theory goes, there are independent, Trump-neutral Republican voters there.
But does it matter? There is no guarantee that voters who are not making decisions or not voting today will be even less likely to make decisions in two and a half weeks.
“You want to go to a place like Fox where you might be able to talk to people who aren’t already in your corner,” says Bob Thompson, a media professor at Syracuse University. “If you do a good job, it’s a rational strategy. But I don’t know how that would happen in an irrational world.”
What mattered, said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, was that she survived. “There were no major gaffes, and she managed to reprimand the interviewer. Did it have any repercussions? No, it’s just a hard part of campaigning day-to-day. Millions or even thousands of votes. No votes will be changed.”
Television interviews, even adversarial ones, have been an important part of presidential campaigns for as long as television has existed. The big change in Harris’ media strategy is the adoption of podcasts.
Harris appeared on the highly successful women’s empowerment podcast Call Her Daddy, where she also spoke with shock jock founder Howard Stern and talked about her love for Prince. She then appeared on the popular black radio show “Charlamagne Tha God,” where she curried favor with young black voters, a key concern for Democrats, and dismissed criticism that she was “very scripted.” Harris agreed with the radio host that Trump is a fascist.
This is a strategy known as “podcast populism,” and President Trump has also embraced this strategy.
In recent weeks, President Trump has appeared on eight podcasts, online shows popular with male viewers, creating a flurry of viral moments.
He appeared on “Full Send,” “Bussin’ With the Boys,” the PBD podcast (where he reiterated his belief that many people didn’t know Harris was black), and later appeared on “Flagrant.” ” I spoke with Andrew Schultz. Along with eccentric young redneck podcaster Theo Fong, the hosts discussed go-karts, cocaine, and Big Pharma. Trump spoke about his brother’s alcoholism.
Fung and Schultz are two of the pod world’s biggest stars, each pushing back against political correctness and conventional political wisdom. Both candidates reportedly joined Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is second only to “Call Her Daddy” in popularity and has 30 times more viewers than CNN, even before it was rapidly shared on social media. He is said to be positive about appearing.
So, with less than three weeks left, who made the right call?
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Trump has largely avoided mainstream media, which he has long criticized as purveyors of fake news, and Harris has visited audiences across political lines.
While Trump is focused on mobilizing friendly voters, Harris is trying to win over undecided voters.
In his new book Tribal, Michael Morris, a leadership professor at Columbia University, argues that to understand the uphill battle in which both candidates have established their dominance, we need to understand the pervasiveness of tribalism in modern politics. They argue that understanding the impact is essential.
“The idea that some kind of tribal drive to hate outsiders has woken up (people) in isolation and now you can’t put the genie back in the bottle and democracy is over makes for a good story, but it’s not good policy. “Not,” he says. . Morris argues that political disagreements stem from our conformist instincts, as we spend time absorbing opinions and signals from people. Over the past few decades, American liberals have moved to coastal cities, while conservatives have migrated to the suburbs and inner cities.
“Each is accustomed to forming different understandings of factual issues, and as a result we distrust the other, are embarrassed, and feel distrustful that we believe what they are saying is sincere. “I started to embrace it,” Morris said. “Partisanship is a byproduct of how we process information.”
Interviewing candidates in liberal or conservative corporate media, where audiences are already distrustful, has little effect, he argues. But with podcasts, things can be different.
“The medium of podcasting creates the illusion that someone on the other end is really just a friend of a friend, a chat with someone you trust,” Morris says, adding that listeners may not be as conflicted. He pointed out that he was probably on his way to work or exercising. treadmill.
“Trump’s conversations with Theo Fung made him seem like a real person and sound like he was empathetic,” he says. Harris’ conversation with Howard Stern had a similar effect, he added. “She doesn’t seem like a leader on the other side at first glance. She’s just a conversation partner for Howard, and they trust Howard.”
In these situations, candidates are enemies rather than sworn enemies. “Maybe your mind is more open, and tribal psychology can help you understand that.”
