Kamala Harris Faces First Major Interview Since Taking Over the Ticket

Kamala Harris will be interviewed by CNN on Thursday, alongside her running mate Tim Walz. This will be her first sit-down interview with a cable news outlet in months.

The interview presents a challenge for Harris, who has yet to face a sustained grilling from a journalist since taking over the ticket. She has taken questions on the tarmac and spoken with reporters on the campaign trail, but interviews offer more opportunities for misstep.

Harris is no stranger to interviews, but a series of awkward answers in interviews during her vice-presidency opened her up to political attacks and negative press coverage.

One example was her 2021 interview with NBC's Lester Holt, where she initially insisted she had been to the US-Mexico border, before correcting herself. This led to reports of exasperation within the Biden team over Harris's "frustrating" start to the job.

Harris also has a history of defensiveness in interviews, which has sometimes verged on combativeness. This was seen in her recent talk with The Breakfast Club co-host Charlamagne Tha God, where she called his question about who was really president "disrespectful".

Despite these challenges, Harris's campaign faces a very unclear future. She has crossed more than half a billion dollars in donations in the first month of her campaign, and national and state-level Democratic Party organizations continue to report thousands of new volunteers.

However, Harris has faced questions about her strength as a campaigner in the past. Her 2020 bid for the presidency underwhelmed expectations, and she dropped out without winning a single state.

Another awkward moment and the resulting news cycle could derail some of that momentum. But if her performance is an echo of her speech to the Democratic convention last week, Trump's team could have to contend with a promising candidate whose greatest weakness just disappeared.