Harris’s Biden-esque 'hiding in the basement' campaign has Dems worried

Vice President Kamala Harris has emulated her former running mate’s 2020 presidential campaign in minimizing her time in the spotlight and carefully managing her few public media interactions with friendly outlets. Some Democrats are increasingly worried that what worked for President Joe Biden, may not yield similar fruit for her.

“They're trying to keep her away. It's like seeing your favorite Hollywood actor, and then they're on a talk show and they can't even speak,” former New Hampshire Democratic House Speaker Steve Shurtleff told Fox News. "It’s so obvious she’s been avoiding the one-on-one interviews, and the voters deserve better."

The Harris campaign has long faced scrutiny from its Republican counterpart over its perceived unwillingness to engage with the media and the public outside of a carefully controlled setting. Indeed, a Fox News analysis released last week found that former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance had participated in at least 65 interviews between them, while Harris and running mate Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., had done a mere 26 non-scripted interviews since making the Democratic ticket.

Apart from the infrequency of such events, the lack of substance of Harris’s public statements has also attracted criticism. In a September campaign event, for instance, Vance mocked her penchant for responding to policy questions with seemingly unrelated anecdotes.

“Vice President, Harris. What are you going to do? What is your specific plan to solve the inflation crisis that's making it unaffordable to buy groceries and housing?” he asked. “And Kamala will say, ‘Well, did you know that I grew up in a middle class family? I had a very nice lawn back there in Berkeley, California.’”

“How are you going to solve [the Israel-Gaza conflict] as President of the United States?” he then added. “And Kamala Harris will say, ‘Well, did you know that I worked at McDonald's for about three months when I was a teenager?’”

But while such lines have been ubiquitous at Republican events, such refrains have become more common in Democratic circles as well.

Harris’s “friendly” interview series

Harris is set for a media blitz this week, including appearances on “60 Minutes,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and a town hall event on Univision. The majority of her appearances, the New York Times conceded, will occur on “friendly” networks.

Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis outlined the risks of minimizing public appearances and giving softball interviews in a statement to NBC News last week.

“The campaign is taking a chance that they can run out the clock and Trump’s weaknesses will be enough to win,” he said. “But the danger in that is if you don’t define your own candidacy well enough, people will start defining it themselves.”

Biden was able to employ his so-called “basement” strategy during 2020 in part due to his substantial polling lead, as well as his decades in the public spotlight and status as a known commodity, in addition to a campaign based on personal hatred towards Donald Trump. But Harris has not been in the national spotlight nearly as long and signs have shown a narrowing race.

Her most noteworthy public appearance was her debate with former President Donald Trump, a public event that saw moderators lopsidedly fact-check Trump while giving Harris a pass on several questionable statements. While pundits widely pronounced Harris the winner, she evidently failed to win over a substantive bloc of undecided voters as panels and post-debate polling suggested the needle did not move.

"I still don't know what she is for. There was no real meat and bones for her plans,” one undecided voter told a Reuters panel after the debate.

Ahead of the showdown, the Harris campaign expanded its “issues” page to further outline her policy positions and contrast her agenda with that of “Trump’s Project 2025”, though voters, throughout the month, remained hungry for opportunities to see Harris in greater detail. A Quinnipiac University survey from late September found that 64% of voters wanted a Harris-Trump debate rematch. Trump declined a challenge from Harris to participate in another debate.

Some appearances seems to have backfired

At least one Democratic lawmaker implied to NBC News that Harris was ill-prepared for public appearances, in part because she was out of practice. “It’s been a mistake to shield Walz and Harris from interviews,” that lawmaker told the outlet. “It’s like playing basketball — if you don’t play for weeks, you’re not going to get it into a game and do well. You’ve got to be on the court.”

“I would have them out there very extensively,” the lawmaker said. But at least some recent attempts to put her in the spotlight have led to backlash.

In a recent appearance on “All the Smoke,” Harris appeared to attempt a fake African American accent, saying “my best friend from kindergarten’s still one of my best friends. Stacey Johnson! We used to go to clubs in her father’s [Cadillac] Seville.”

The attempt drew considerable rebuke online and marked the latest in a string of awkward moments in which Harris, like Hillary Clinton before her, seemingly changed her accent to reflect that of her audience.

This week, Harris appeared on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast amid ongoing efforts to aid victims of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina and Tennessee. The Trump campaign seized on the timing of the appearance and juxtaposed Harris’s discussion with commentary from hurricane victims in the area. "Call Her Daddy" is not an uncontroversial choice for a campaign stop. The show originally gained a reputation for its raunchy discussions of sex, Slate Magazine noted.

It wasn’t just the Trump campaign, however, as the program’s viewers on social media expressed frustration with her appearance amid the storm’s fallout, while others expressed their displeasure with the host for having her.

Walz's consistently "misspeaking"

Walz, for his part, has faced independent scrutiny over his penchant for telling demonstrably false anecdotes in apparent bids to bolster his credibility, which sympathetic media have labeled merely “misspeaking.”

The governor has previously claimed he was in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, though local public radio and newspaper reports showed him to be in Nebraska at the time. He has also come under fire for inaccurately claiming to have retired at a higher rank in the Minnesota National Guard. He also campaigned on his wife’s “IVF” experience, when she in fact received intrauterine insemination (IUI), a materially less controversial practice. He also claimed at one point to have "carried a weapon in combat" when in fact, he quit the National Guard shortly after he learned his unit was going to be deployed to the Middle East.

The governor faced pressure from Fox News host Shannon Bream on Sunday, who asked him "What do you say to the American people who think, ‘I don’t know that I can trust this guy with all those modifications to be the potential commander in chief of this country?'”

He responded by criticizing Trump and saying “I will own up when I misspeak; I will own up when I make a mistake.”

Waltz previously attempted to brush off such criticisms, saying in the recent debate with Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, laughing it off by admitting that he’s a “knucklehead” and “will get caught up in the rhetoric.”