Just weeks before the presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are switching up their campaign strategies in different ways.
Harris, who has faced criticism for not doing enough unscripted media interviews, announced on Sunday she would do interviews this week on The View, and the entertainment talk shows The Howard Stern Show, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
On Monday, her interview with 60 Minutes will air. Trump refused a 60 Minutes interview in 2024. His campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on X last week that no interview had been locked in, and that the campaign opposed the program’s insistence on live fact-checking.
Later this week, Harris will address a town hall hosted by Univision, a Spanish-language television network.
Kamala Harris, left, in Flint, Michigan, October 4, 2024, and Donald Trump, right, in Evans, Georgia, October 4, 2024. Just weeks before the presidential election, Harris and Trump are switching up their campaign strategies in different ways.
Mark Shiefelbein and Evan Vucci/ASSOCIATED PRESS
On Sunday, Harris appeared on Alexandra Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, a show popular with younger listeners, especially women, where she discussed issues like reproductive rights and student loan forgiveness.
The upcoming interviews are expected to be largely friendly, with hosts like Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert both having endorsed Biden in 2020.
Stern interviewed Trump several times in the 1990s, but he has stated he does not support Trump politically.
This is a change in tactics for Harris, who has given scripted speeches at several large rallies while largely avoiding unscripted interviews. After becoming the Democrats‘ White House candidate on July 21, she did not give an interview until August 29, when she and her running mate Tim Walz were interviewed jointly by CNN’s Dana Bash.
The interview followed weeks of Republican attacks on Harris who claimed their Democratic rival was dodging scrutiny.
Meanwhile, Trump, who in the past months has done several unscripted talks with sympathetic interviewers including tech billionaire Elon Musk, television personality “Dr. Phil” McGraw, and Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld, has switched his campaign to a different direction, returning to his core campaign strategy since 2016: frequent swing state rallies.
Newsweek has cotnacted Trump’s and Harris’s campaigns via email for comment.
Over the past week, Trump has hosted six rallies in Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, with his Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, at the site where he was nearly assassinated in July, drawing tens of thousands of supporters.
He has two more events scheduled in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, including a rally in Reading.
This is a dramatic increase in the number of rallies he is holding. In August, he held only eight rallies in the entire month, followed by 13 in September.
As well as declining to appear on 60 Minutes, Trump has repeatedly refused another televised debate against Harris after their first on September 10, which Harris was widely declared to have won, according to various media outlets and polls.
During the debate, Harris put Trump on the defensive and baited him with taunts about his crowd sizes and record as president. The former president produced a few viral moments, specifically a false claim alleging Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s cats and dogs.
