Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will sit on Thursday for their first joint television interview since they accepted their nominations as the Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates.
Harris has taken questions from journalists on the campaign trail and been interviewed on TikTok in recent days.
But she has yet to do a one-on-one interview with a major network or print journalist or hold a formal press conference since she ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket.
CNN’s Dana Bash, who co-anchored Biden’s June 27 debate against Republican candidate Donald Trump, will conduct the interview in Savannah, Georgia, as Harris continues her bus tour of the battleground state. The interview will air at 9 p.m. ET, with CNN set to release short excerpts before it airs.
Before Harris picked him as her running mate for the Nov. 5 election, Walz did a string of interviews with major television networks.
Harris and Walz on Tuesday kicked off a bus tour of Georgia, piling into a big blue bus emblazoned with the words “A New Way Forward” as they worked to woo voters in a state Biden narrowly won in 2020, and which could play a decisive role in this year’s election.
Harris, joined by Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.), will make two stops at small businesses and thank volunteers in Chatham County, Georgia, where Democrats have chalked up steady gains in recent years.
At around 5:15 p.m., she is due to speak at a campaign rally in Savannah’s Enmarket Arena, making her the first presidential candidate to campaign in Savannah since the 1990s.
She will be introduced by Katelyn Green, president of student government at Savannah State University, the oldest historically black college and university in the state.
The campaign is reaching out to students across battleground states which could be decisive in November to help boost turnout, but it also faces possible protests by pro-Palestinian voices angered by U.S. arms sales to Israel. One protest by the group Savannah for Palestine is scheduled to begin at 2 p.m., organizers said.
What to Expect in Harris’s Interview
Political commentator Mike Leon told NTD he thinks there are three things to expect in Harris’s first big interview since she became the Democratic nominee.
“I expect the questions will obviously center around her tax plan, what her economic package looks like,” Leon said. “What some of this stuff would like for the homebuyer market in terms of that $25,000 first-time homebuyer credit? What the child tax credit increase would look like? How is the current administration—if it was the Harris-Walz administration—going to tackle the crisis of affordability?”
Meanwhile, Leon said that the two foreign conflicts are significant, and Israel-Gaza is a major factor for young voters he has spoken with or engaged in focus groups with on different shows.
“We need to ask serious questions about how we get out of this conflict? How do we have a ceasefire? How do we get the hostages back home? And then, what do we do going forward with respect to a two-state solution, understanding the plight of the Palestinian people?” he said.
Leon also expects Dana Bash to touch on the immigration crisis, given that Harris was tasked with handling the border situation.
Besides, Brad Polumbo, a Steamboat Institute Blankley Fellow and co-founder of BasedPolitics, tells NTD that economics and inflation, abortion, and the border should be the big issues discussed in the interview.
Off-Script Moments
Harris’ lack of interviews has sparked criticism from opponents, and some concern among supporters, that she is less sharp at off-script moments than she is at rallies or speeches where a prepared speech and a TelePrompter are at her disposal.
Trump frequently holds press conferences and offers interviews to conservative news outlets.
The CNN interview will be watched both for how Harris handles a less scripted environment and for any new details about her policies and goals for a presidency, should she win.
The Harris-Walz campaign held traditional journalists at arms length during the Democratic National Convention last week in Chicago while granting hundreds of social media influencers more access to officials.
Last week, Harris was interviewed by Track Star Show, a TikTok account with over 380,000 followers, about her love of musicians Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis.
NTD’s Chris Beers and Stefania Cox and Reuters contributed to this report.