In a high-stakes situation, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for their first joint interview as Democratic nominees, airing at 9 p.m. ET on CNN today. This marks Harris’s first extended interview since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, making her the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party.
Harris has faced mounting pressure to do an interview with a major news outlet to share her own policies and answer questions on her prior positions. Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have accused Harris of dodging the press to avoid tough questions. “She hasn’t done an interview,” Trump said during a news conference earlier this month. “She can’t do an interview. She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview.”
Prior to becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris had taken plenty of questions from reporters as the sitting vice president. Her team says she’s done 80 interviews this year, including traditional network media, podcasts, and social media. However, in these previous conversations, she was generally selling Biden’s agenda. Now, as a presidential candidate, this CNN interview may be one of the first times she’s pressed to spell out her own policies and answer questions about how, if at all, she would govern differently than Biden.
During the interview, Harris insisted that her “values have not changed” when explaining several shifts in her policy positions. She vowed to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, emphasizing the importance of diversity of opinion. “I think it’s really important. I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion. I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who was a Republican,” Harris said.
The interview, recorded in Savannah, Georgia, offers a rare unscripted look at Vice President Harris, who has stuck to the campaign trail, rarely taking questions from reporters since Biden ended his re-election campaign last month. The stakes are high for Harris, who will be seeking to rebut Republican claims that she cannot handle an extended grilling from a reporter.
CNN’s Dana Bash, an experienced news anchor with a long history of questioning presidential candidates, conducted the interview. Bash, who anchors CNN’s “Inside Politics” program, has already played a prominent role in the election, co-hosting the June 27 debate between Biden and Trump.
Harris and Walz are on a two-day bus tour in Georgia, a state they hope to keep in the Democratic column in November. The full interview airs at 9 p.m. ET on CNN, providing voters with a crucial opportunity to hear directly from the Democratic nominee and her running mate as they blitz battleground states in an effort to win over undecideds and increase Democratic voter turnout.