The Harris-Walz Interview Won’t Impact the Race
Breaking down perspectives on Dana Bash’s interview with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz
I’m Isaac Saul, and I’m the executive editor at Tangle where I write an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.” For more political analysis like this, subscribe to Tangle here!
On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz spoke with CNN’s Dana Bash in their first interview since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. The interview, which was broadcast Thursday night but recorded earlier that day, lasted approximately 27 minutes and touched on a range of issues, including border security, fracking and the war in Gaza, as well as how Harris’s positions on those issues have changed over time.
Bash began the interview by asking Harris what she would do on day one as president. Harris answered that her highest priority is “to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class.” She did not share specifics when pressed by Bash, instead pointing broadly to her plan for an “opportunity economy.”
Harris’s positions on fracking and border security also came up repeatedly. Bash asked whether Harris still supports a ban on fracking as she initially had in her 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination. “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking,” Harris responded.
On the border, Bash noted that Harris had been “tasked with addressing the root causes of migration” and asked why the Biden administration had “wait[ed] three and a half years to implement sweeping asylum restrictions.” Harris defended her efforts on border issues, suggesting her efforts to address root causes had “actually resulted in a number of benefits, including historic investments by American businesses in that region.” She also criticized former President Donald Trump for his efforts to stall a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year, saying he “killed the bill” because Biden signing a solution would not have benefited Trump politically.
Walz fielded just a few questions during the interview, including one over his comments on his National Guard service. When pressed by Bash, Walz seemed to concede that he misspoke, but added, “My wife the English teacher told me my grammar’s not always correct.”
Is it possible for an interview like this to have a less-than-detectable impact?
Past Predictions Coming True
A few weeks ago, I published a piece on the 2024 race becoming a toss-up. In the that piece, I alluded to the fact Harris was going to do an interview in late August. Here is what I wrote then:
Whenever she does take a tough interview (and she could do so soon), she is going to be challenged on her record. She’ll be asked about her flip-flops, her role on the border as vice president, the Biden administration’s record, and what she really believes now. One of three things will happen: 1) She’ll step on a few rakes, remind us why she struggled so much in the 2020 Democratic primary, and bleed some support; 2) She’ll show that she is the refreshing and engaging candidate, give us something new, and the enthusiasm will go into overdrive; or 3) She’ll have some gaffes and some great moments, each side will cherry-pick those parts, and the race will not actually change much.
I think it’s safe to say we are living in reality #3. Kudos to Tangle Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, who actually suggested including that bullet point as not just an option — but the most likely option, which he was right about.
I don’t think Harris nailed it, as some liberal commentators suggested. I didn’t think it was a disaster, as many conservative commentators suggested. The whole interview was a predictable shrug. In fact, we predicted it! In our Sunday podcast from two weeks ago, Ari and I guessed several questions that were going to be asked and guessed how Harris might answer a few of them — and we did a pretty good job. I’m still waiting for someone to ask Harris how she will govern differently from Biden, but she’ll probably have to answer a few more questions for us to get those answers.
Smart Answers from Harris
Some of Harris’s responses in the interview were very smart. For instance, she didn’t take the bait on the question about Trump saying she “turned black,” instead saying it was the same old playbook from him and then moving on. I thought this was the perfect way to handle it: Voters aren’t interested in that stuff right now, and Harris made a conscious choice to just say “That’s Trump being Trump” and then keep the interview going — which is a very effective way to both call out his character and stay focused on her own campaign.
Some of Harris’s answers were smart politically, even if they require favorably reframing her history. For instance, when asked about “Bidenomics,” she defended the president’s economic agenda by emphasizing that they inherited a crisis where hundreds of people were dying per day from Covid and an economy that had crashed; therefore, they spent most of their first term addressing multiple crises.
It’s true the economy had crashed and thousands of people a day were dying of Covid when Biden and Harris came into office. But it’s also true that in January of 2021, Trump was already leading a recovery — the unemployment rate had been falling for months and the global economy was already bouncing back. So they inherited a less-than-ideal situation, and certainly a far worse one than what Trump inherited from Obama, but you could also fairly say that they didn’t just inherit the crisis but the recovery effort as well. And, of course, people continued to die of or with Covid under Biden and Harris.
Unhelpful Answers from Harris
Some of Harris’s answers were unhelpful. For instance, she had no real explanation for her change of position on fracking — except to say her “values” hadn’t changed, that she did not move to ban fracking as vice president (how exactly would that have worked?), and that she has seen we can have a clean energy economy without banning fracking. That last part seems like the real answer (and I’ll tout again that this is actually the answer we thought she’d give), but she took a while to get there. I think it’s safe to say Harris isn’t going to ban fracking, but she still hasn’t given a good answer as to why she changed her mind from four years ago.
Some of Harris’s answers were just bad. On Biden’s Israel-Gaza approach, Harris effectively said she would not do anything differently from Biden, and then insisted there would be no change of policy because they “have to get a deal done” to end the war and get the hostages home — even though the current policy has not produced a deal in 11 months.
That answer embodies what is ultimately going to be her biggest challenge as a candidate: She needs to simultaneously champion the good things about the Biden-Harris administration while also promising to offer something new. She needs to promise to get things done while also explaining why those things haven’t happened in the last four years. She needs to back the current president while also explaining how she is doing to be different. It is an incredibly difficult line to walk, and I’m not entirely sure she has a good plan for how to walk it.
A Brief Note on Walz
As for Walz, I was not one of the people who thought it was a bad look for him to join Harris for the interview. Presidential candidates do joint interviews with their running mates all the time, and Harris and Walz are on a compressed timeline, so it makes total sense to me that he’d be there. Still, it may have been a better decision (for the optics) to let Harris go out there alone, then have Walz join her for an interview later.
Grading the Interview
After watching the interview a second time, if I were grading the three participants, this is how I’d mark them: Walz gets a C-, Harris gets a C, and Bash gets a B-. It’s never great for a campaign when the interviewer gets the best grade, but it’s not a disaster when your candidates are pulling down C’s, either. Ultimately, I don’t think this will go down as a meaningful moment in the 2024 race.
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