It has hardly gone unnoticed that Vice President Kamala Harris is bad in interviews. The question, therefore, shouldn’t be why she so resolutely avoids them — that should be obvious — but why she is so bad in them. Considering Harris is “interviewing” for America’s highest office , an answer is important.
Examples of Harris’s poor performance under direct questioning abound.
In June 2021, for example, after the Biden administration opened the southern border and illegal immigration soared, Harris did an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, who asked if she had plans to visit the southern border. Harris replied, “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.”
When Holt replied that Harris hadn’t been to the border, Harris retorted, “And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.”
Then there was her January 2022 Today Show interview, when host Craig Melvin gently prodded Harris on whether the Biden administration should change course in its COVID-19 strategy. Harris responded : “It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day. Every day, it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.”
Both illegal immigration and COVID-19 were leading issues at the time, so Harris should hardly have been surprised at these questions. Yet she flailed futilely at both.
More recently, in a belated first interview with CNN after receiving the Democrat nomination, Harris was accompanied by her running mate Tim Walz, as though she were a student pilot unqualified to fly solo.
Harris still refuses to venture into the even more demanding format of a press conference. This avoidance comes despite the legacy media being enormously bi a sed toward her: according to Media Research Center, Harris’s coverage has been 84% positive, while Trump’s is 89% negative.
Why, then, is Harris so bad at interviews?
It is quite possible that Harris is under-thinking her interviews. A Harris hallmark has been her disinterest in preparing for such moments. Then she blames her staff. The result has been dysfunctional offices , something that has been noted throughout Harris’s political career. Its manifestation over the last four years has been an incredibly high staff churn .
It is also possible that Harris is overthinking her interviews. Another Harris hallmark is that she is loathe to accept responsibility . Unless it is a slam-dunk opportunity, Harris would rather forgo taking a shot.
California’s Proposition 47 was a prime example. This ballot initiative reduced charges for thefts of goods below $950 and for certain drug offenses. It also ended DNA testing for these reduced crimes. It was on California’s 2014 ballot, and Harris’s office wrote the title and language, but amazingly Harris herself never took a position on it — despite being California’s attorney general and having been San Francisco's DA.
Such responsibility avoidance is at the heart of Harris’s allergic reaction to interviews: what you don’t do can’t hurt you. It’s also the reason why she so often tosses word salads: trying so hard to say nothing, her non-answers veer into incomprehensibility.
Harris could also simply freeze in the moment during an interview. Predisposed to being a deer in the headlights, it would be no wonder that she prefers to avoid crossing the road at all.
Clearly, Harris’s best public give-and-take moments come when she is asking the questions rather than answering them. Examining a witness at a hearing is Harris at her best. But it is also the very opposite of participating in an interview: she is the questioner working off a prepared set of questions, while the other person must do the thinking and the bulk of the talking.
Of course, we, too, may be guilty of overthinking Harris’s interview problem. It could be that she simply isn’t that quick on her feet. Nothing in her past points to her being a deep intellectual. Sure, she’s a lawyer, but lawyers are hardly unique, and 50% of them graduate in the bottom half of their class.
None of these possible explanations for Harris’s interview problem are complimentary. After all, in an interview, you are simply talking about yourself, your policies, and plans — all topics you should know better than anyone else. Yet, it is obvious that prolonged exposure is exceptionally unkind to Harris, something her 2020 presidential flameout demonstrated.
So Harris’s hope is obvious: she wants limited and controlled exposure of herself and maximum focus on former President Donald Trump. This was President Joe Biden’s strategy in 2020, too. And it worked.
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However, Biden had three things Harris doesn’t have: a COVID-19 excuse for his basement strategy, a big lead in the polls, and a comparatively clean slate.
It remains to be seen whether Harris can keep herself away from real revelation, and whether she can get the job of president without interviewing for it.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.
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