The interviews Harris bombed as VP — and why her CNN appearance might be different

Harris returns to the hot seat, and unfriendly territory, on Thursday as she seeks to maintain a stunning surge of momentum

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz share the stage at the DNC on Thursday, August 22. They’ll share a stage again this week as they sit down for their first joint interview. (EPA)

On Thursday, Kamala Harris will sit down with CNN and her running mate, Tim Walz, for their first joint interview since the pair were officially nominated by their party.

It will be Harris’s first sit-down interview with a cable news outlet in months — and you better believe they’ll be watching at Mar-a-Lago.

Thursday’s interview presents the first post-convention challenge for the vice president, who already passed one hurdle with her selection of Walz as a running mate. That selection ended up wowing both progressives and centrists in her party; even anti-Trump conservatives who say they are voting for Harris this year seem to be on board.

But the interview is another ballgame.

Harris has yet to face a real sustained grilling from a journalist in the wake of taking over the ticket. She took a few questions on the tarmac while welcoming home American captives from Russia, and has gaggled with reporters on the campaign trail — so she isn’t hiding from the cameras. But interviews are different, with extended follow-ups and more opportunities for misstep.

Harris, as a politician, is no stranger to this. And it’s part of the reason why she had seemed so far out of the public eye before Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

A series of awkward answers to questions in interviews over the course of her vice-presidency opened her up to political attacks and caused negative headline cycles for the White House in the press.

Take her 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt. It took place just a few months after Harris was tasked with “leading the Administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” per a White House statement. During their conversation, Holt repeatedly asked the vice president when she planned to visit the US’s southern border with Mexico.

Harris initially insisted that she had: “At some point, you know, we are going to the border…we’ve been to the border. So this whole thing about the border — we’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”

“You haven’t been to the border,” Holt shot back.

Then Harris corrected herself, while adding: “And I haven’t been to Europe…I don’t … understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.”

The fallout from that exchange was immediate and damaging. CNN reported at the time that Biden White House officials were "quietly perplexed about what they perceive as her bumpy answers to questions about whether she will go to the US-Mexico border”. Another report from the news outlet’s Edward Isaac-Dovere a few months later described “exasperation” amid the Biden team over Harris’s “frustrating” start to the job.

“Harris’ staff has repeatedly failed her and left her exposed, and family members have often had an informal say within her office,” Dovere reported multiple sources as saying in November of 2021.

It was a rocky start for sure, and one Biden’s team were all too willing to write off as caused by Harris’s weaknesses rather than the myriad of burdens weighing her down. Even as she was put nominally in charge of taking on issues for the administration like migration and voting rights, she was seemingly set up to fail — Congress has made little progress on addressing either one, with an election-year compromise bill to address border security going down in flames after pressure from Donald Trump on the GOP caucus.

Complicating the issue for Harris is her history of defensiveness in interviews when pressed on sensitive topics, which has verged at times into a combativeness that has not served her in the way it has for her Republican opponent. A recent example was her talk with The Breakfast Club co-host Charlamagne Tha God, who asked her whether Biden or Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat who has often been a deciding vote on Biden administration policies, was really president. Harris responded by calling the question disrespectful. But, somehow, that wasn’t the worst part — that honor went to the pair of moments where Symone Sanders, Harris’s now-ex-spokesperson, was then heard trying to cut off the interview early.

Harris’s campaign faces a very unclear future. The momentum is undoubtedly on her side; an announcement from her team last week indicated that she had crossed more than half a billion dollars in donations in the first month of her campaign. National and state-level Democratic Party organizations continue to report thousands of new volunteers pouring through the doors.

Yet the vice president, in the past, has faced questions about her strength as a campaigner — her 2020 bid for the presidency underwhelmed expectations and she dropped out without winning a single state that year, even after delivering a memorable strike against Biden on the debate stage.

Another awkward moment and the resulting news cycle could derail some of that momentum at a time when Harris looks to be on the cusp of clearly taking the lead over Trump. But if her performance is an echo of her speech to the Democratic convention last week — praised by progressives and conservative Democrats alike — Trump’s team could have to contend with a promising candidate whose greatest weakness just disappeared.