From Trump's dance party to Harris's Fox News interview, the candidates navigate the campaign’s home stretch
With early voting underway in multiple states and Election Day less than three weeks away, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are recalibrating their efforts to secure victory in November.
While recent polls show Trump improving his position in key swing states, the race remains a coin toss. Without a second debate to generate a potentially campaign-defining moment, each candidate must now resort to bolstering turnout from their base and finding venues where they might still attract new supporters.
'A big shining light'
For Harris, the shifting dynamics of the race have led her to embark on a media blitz, scheduling or sitting for interviews with 60 Minutes, Howard Stern, The View, Fox News and Charlamagne Tha God and negotiating one with conservative podcast host Joe Rogan.
“They’re upshifting at the Harris campaign and they need to,” Mike Murphy, former senior strategist for John McCain’s presidential campaign, told PBS NewsHour. “They have run out of steam a little, and they know it, so you’re seeing her doubling down, increasing aggression, doing all the things that a smart campaign does in this situation to close the race.”
But not everyone thinks Harris should simply make herself available to each and every interview request.
"She's obviously working hard," Democratic strategist James Carville told CNN on Monday. "I'm not a fan of doing interviews with different people because the problem with the interview is you have to answer questions that the interviewer asks you."
Instead, Carville added, Harris needs to keep drawing attention to what Trump is saying as he campaigns, such as calling his political opponents “the enemy within.”
"I think what Trump is saying now is unprecedented and I'm afraid that people just don't know how — I don't know if radical is the word — the things he really is proposing,” Carville said. “She has to put a light on this, a big shining light."
Yet Harris has been doing just that.
“I invite the public to watch his rallies and be the decision-maker on his acuity, and you will see in his rallies how he goes off on tangents, how he is not focused on the needs of the American people with solutions to the issues that concern them the most,” she told reporters on Saturday in Maryland.
During her contentious interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, Harris again highlighted recent comments made by her opponent, saying, "if you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean and belittle and diminish the American people. He’s the one who talks about an ‘enemy within.’”
Dance party
Unlike Harris’s pedal-to-the-metal media barrage, Trump has been more selective of late about speaking to the press, seeking out friendly venues outside of the mainstream media and ducking out of scheduled appearances with 60 Minutes and CNBC in favor of town hall events like the one moderated on Monday by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and a Fox News town hall on Tuesday.
“It may be part of a strategy from the campaign. Maybe they think, God, if we put the former president out here more, if you put him out before adversarial journalists, at least from their perspective, he may say something that could potentially turn off voters,” Republican strategist Shermichael Singleton said Tuesday on CNN. “So maybe we play it smart, put him on Fox and put him at his rallies. That could be a part of a tactical strategy from the campaign and it wouldn’t be a bad strategy.”
Yet Trump didn’t seem to stick with that strategy for long. On Tuesday, he attended an interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago. The conversation quickly turned adversarial when Trump was pressed on the possible economic ramifications of policy proposals. Micklethwait noted that many economists and media outlets like the Wall Street Journal have concluded that Trump’s promise to slap across-the-board tariffs on imported goods and to enact sweeping new tax cuts would balloon the national debt by trillions of dollars.
“What does the Wall Street Journal know?” Trump replied. “They’ve been wrong about everything, and so have you by the way, you’ve been wrong.”
Trump later shared a post on Truth Social by conservative Fox News host Mark Levin, who bashed Micklethwait’s interview as “A perfect illustration of the corrupt media.”
Even the fawning reception from Noem on Monday failed to insulate Trump from negative press. After he stopped taking audience questions in favor of holding a 39-minute listening party to songs from his campaign playlist while he nodded his head and sometimes danced, a slew of articles and commentary followed questioning, as Harris put it days earlier, “his acuity.”