Top questions Harris may face in highly-anticipated CNN interview

Journalists have had almost 40 days to dream up questions for Vice President Kamala Harris since she became the Democratic Party's de facto presidential nominee on July 21.

That lengthy streak comes to an end Thursday night when Harris, who will be flanked by her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), sits down for a CNN interview that airs at 9 p.m. EST. It will be Harris's first extended question-and-answer session with the news media since her campaign began.

With more than a month passed and several news cycles come and gone, the list of questions Harris faces is almost limitless. Given that the interview itself will not be, here are the top questions that CNN anchor Dana Bash should ask the Democratic Party's standard bearer.

The top policy question, or questions, concerns a rash of positions Harris took during her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign that her staffers say she no longer holds.

According to her staff, Harris no longer wants to end private health insurance, no longer supports an electric vehicle mandate, no longer supports mandatory gun buybacks, no longer wants to ban fracking, and no longer supports a federal jobs guarantee. As of this week, her campaign says she now supports funding for a border wall .

But none of this news has come from Harris herself. Thus, Bash may elect to go point by point and ask when Harris changed her mind, why she did so, and why she has not made any public statements about her change of heart.

Harris spent the first half of 2024 insisting Biden was in great health and deserved to remain in office until January 2029. In the immediate aftermath of the June 27 debate that would ultimately knock him out of the race, Harris was defending Biden's performance on CNN .

“Yes, there was a slow start,” she acknowledged. “But it was a strong finish. Joe Biden is fighting on behalf of the American people on substance, on policy, on performance. Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong, and that cannot be debated.”

Less than a month later, Biden was gone, and the party was rallying around Harris. Bash may ask her if she still believes Biden could withstand four more years in office and, if not, when she changed her mind and why. A related question is, if Biden shouldn't be reelected, should he remain in office through next January?

Fierce debate has raged over Harris's role or non-role in the surge of illegal immigration that has taken place since Biden took office. Republicans deride her as the "border czar," which, though it is not an official title, was used as shorthand by several news outlets to describe the role Biden gave her in March 2021.

Bash may ask Harris to clarify what her current role is when it comes to the border, why rates of illegal immigration spiked after Biden took office, and why Harris now supports at least some funding to construct a border wall between the United States and Mexico.

Harris has been more forthcoming on the economy than most other matters. She has released plans for a federal "price gouging" ban, set a goal of building 3 million new homes, wants to create a $25,000 down payment assistance program for first-time homebuyers, and supports a $6,000 tax credit.

She could be questioned about any of these ideas. Critics have dubbed the price gouging ban a new form of price control , and the Trump campaign says Harris is trying to cover for her own role in fueling inflation by helping pass trillions of dollars of new government spending.

To drive at these matters, Bash might ask Harris how she differs from Biden when it comes to the economy, and how the price gouging ban will work in practice.

One of the areas in which Harris has opened up space between herself and Biden is the war in Gaza. While both Biden and Harris met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 25, Harris was more forceful in her remarks to the press on the suffering in Gaza.

Harris pledged not to "look away in the face of these tragedies" and said "we cannot allow ourselves to be number to suffering, and I will not be silent."

The sentiment was clear, but how that may manifest itself with respect to foreign policy was not.

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Bash could ask Harris how she would seek a Gaza ceasefire if elected, what future she sees for the embattled strip, and how she plans to negotiate with Hamas and with Netanyahu beginning early next year.

A final question could be: How many more interviews will you conduct between now and November, and when will you schedule your next one?