The Memo: Harris’s media blitz gets off to uneven start

Vice President Harris is seeking to recapture the momentum in a White House race that appears to be getting ever tighter.

But the media blitz Harris is conducting this week has proven uneven so far. While the vice president handled an appearance on ABC’s “The View” adeptly for the most part, an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” was rockier.

In particular, Harris’s answer on how she would pay for the tax credits that are a central part of her economic plan was halting, as was her explanation of why she has changed position on a number of topics.

On the latter issue, Harris sought to rationalize her shifts on subjects such as fracking and the decriminalization of unauthorized border crossings. She suggested the changes had occurred as a byproduct of how she had “been traveling our country” throughout her tenure as vice president and had concluded that “the American people” want “leaders who can build consensus.”

It’s not entirely clear how that would explain some of the sharper turns she has pulled, such as ceasing to support a ban on fracking or abandoning her earlier belief in “Medicare for All.”

The danger for Harris is that those kinds of moments sharpen the same doubts about authenticity and ideological consistency that dogged her quest for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

Still, former President Trump has his own flip-flops in his past record, including on abortion, a central issue in this year’s campaign.

The former president, at one point in his prepolitical life, was firmly in favor of abortion rights. Then, as president, he nominated three of the conservative Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. But just last week, Trump said he would veto any federal abortion ban that reached his desk if he were elected president in November.

Harris, meanwhile, got some good news from a New York Times/Siena College poll released Tuesday morning.

The nationwide poll put her up by 3 points among likely voters, leading Trump 49 percent support to 46 percent. Last month, an opinion poll from the same organizations had shown the race exactly tied, with each candidate getting 47 percent support.

The Times poll also showed Harris with an 8-point edge among likely voters when they were asked whether she or Trump cared more about “people like you.” Harris had a narrower edge, of 2 points, on whether she or Trump best “represents change.”

Even a small advantage on that question could be important at a time when almost every poll shows voters are unhappy with the direction of the nation.

Harris leads the national polling average maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ by 3.3 points. But the seven key battleground states are all close, with Harris holding a slight edge in four of them and Trump in three.

Decision Desk HQ currently gives Harris a 52 percent chance of prevailing in November, a projection that underlines the fact that the election is basically a dead heat. Harris’s chance of winning has ticked down slightly in the Decision Desk HQ projections from a high of 56 percent.

Harris’s busy schedule of media appearances this week aims to rebut criticism that she has largely avoided the press since President Biden abandoned his quest for reelection in July. Harris waited more than a month after that before sitting for her first major TV interview, with CNN’s Dana Bash.

In addition to her appearances on “60 Minutes” and “The View,” Harris also appeared on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show while she was in New York on Tuesday. She recorded an interview on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” set to be broadcast Tuesday night, as well.

The appearances could help assuage the doubts of voters who feel they don’t know Harris well enough so far.

In her “60 Minutes” interview, CBS News’s Bill Whitaker noted that “a quarter of registered voters still say they don’t know you. They don’t know what makes you tick. … What’s the disconnect?”

Harris replied that she understood she had to “earn everyone’s vote … and that’s what I intend to do.”

Some of the softer focus elements of this week’s media appearances might help in that regard.

With Stern, Harris talked about her love of Prince’s music. Her affinity for hip-hop and her husband Doug Emhoff’s fondness for Depeche Mode, she said, left them with “Prince [as] the one intersection where we both love.”

More substantively, Harris announced a new plan to make Medicare pay for at-home care during her appearance on “The View.” She framed that idea around her own experience of caring for her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, as she suffered from cancer. Gopalan died from colon cancer in 2009, aged 70.

Still, even friendly venues like “The View” aren’t fully safe.

Asked by co-host Sunny Hostin whether she would have “done something differently from President Biden over the past four years, Harris responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Republicans, including Trump, seized on that answer.

On social media, Trump gloated that Harris “would have done nothing different than Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.”

Trump added: “The Lamestream Media doesn’t want to pick up the story, the dumb women on the show wish they never asked her the question that led to that Election Defying answer, but the Internet is going WILD.”

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

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