Kamala Harris Should Absolutely Go on Fox News — Here’s Why And How

Lenin Nolly/NurPhoto via AP

No network is more consistently critical of Vice President Kamala Harris than Fox News, particularly during its opinion hours. Among other things, her pivot from unabashed progressive, a persona she adopted for her 2020 run for the White House, to hardcore moderate (dare I say Rockefeller Republican?) has been met with deep skepticism by the most influential voices on Fox News.

But with roughly seven weeks left until Election Day and polling that shows her neck and neck with former President Donald Trump, Harris should embrace Fox News, not shun it.

In fact, Harris should do more than that: she should appear on Fox News.

The Harris-Walz campaign has taken a decidedly different approach to media availability than the Trump campaign. Whereas the former president seems to be making an appearance on Fox News on a daily basis, Harris has done minimal interviews or press avails. Her first sit down with her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, was a respectful if not friendly interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. The sum total of her media appearances can be counted on one hand.

Trump has flooded the zone, doing podcasts with nontraditional personalities like Theo Vonn and Adin Ross or streaming events on X Spaces with Elon Musk.

Axios recently highlighted that disparity in a report titled “The Harris-Walz media strategy: Hide from the press.” Alex Thompson and Torey Van Oot counted that Harris has made just three media appearances since supplanting President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee on July 21. Since Harris tapped Walz, the Minnesota Governor has done just four.

On the other hand, Trump has done double the combined amount of press since Harris became his opponent, with 14 such appearances. Vance leaves the other three in the dust, making 59 appearances in that period. Doing the math, the Trump-Vance ticket has done ten times more appearances than Harris-Walz, a ticket that Mediaite’s Isaac Schorr called “historically reclusive.”

One could argue that this strategy has been effective so far. Harris is now up in most national polls after an impressive debate performance. It’s a remarkable turnaround from the nadir of the Biden campaign’s polling that followed Trump’s first assassination attempt and the Republican National Convention.

Still, even this truncated election season is long. Harris can’t survive on a strategy of hermitage forever.

Moreover, Harris has shown that she is more than capable of answering tough questions. In the debate, she rose to the enormity of the moment in an impressive manner that has surprised even her harshest skeptics.

For many Democrats, the very notion of Harris going into the “enemy territory” of Fox News is heresy — and to be fair, she is regularly treated in the harshest way possible, particularly by prime time hosts with the largest audience, with the sharpest opinionated knives coming out in defense of a slate of hosts who are all vocal Trump supporters.

But Fox News is by far the most watched cable news outlet and its audience is not just MAGA or even Republican viewers. There is a healthy dose of Democrats who watch the network, and perhaps more importantly, a recent study shows that it’s the most-watched network in the crucially important battleground states. August’s Nielsen data shows the outsized viewership Fox News enjoys in several key swing states:

Former Republican Congressman Bob Ingles recently argued why Harris should go on Fox News. During an appearance on CNN, anchor Boris Sanchez asked the moderate Republican and Harris supporter if he thought restricting engagement with the press was a winning strategy for Harris.

Ingles invoked Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who has become revered by Democrats for his calm and confident appearances on Fox News:

Well, I’d suggest that she go on networks, particularly that she joined Pete Buttigieg and going into places that you wouldn’t expect Democrats to be. And so that would make sense because she does need to reach out to people who are uncomfortable with Donald Trump. You know, there are a lot of Republicans who are uncomfortable with Donald Trump.

You know, and so if she can just reach out to those through outlets that will give her that opportunity, I think it could be very productive for the Harris campaign and it would begin to show that Donald Trump is the extremist here. He’s the one that denies facts. He’s the one that makes stuff up.

She needs to be the rational adult in the room that still has her faculties about her that isn’t going off into some sort of lack of rationality, maybe based on advanced age or something that Donald Trump is dealing with. But she can be the alternative, the irrational one that cares about people beside herself.

What Ingles is saying here is something I’ve known to be true based on conversations with many of my Republican friends who are currently planning to vote for Trump: None of them consider themselves to be ‘MAGA” or even like Trump as a candidate. In fact, many hold him in very low esteem but will hold their nose and vote purely based on the policies he is proposing. What they are convinced of is that Democrats are socialists in sheep’s clothing. Their understanding of Kamala Harris is built from the caricature they regularly see portrayed on Fox News.

This is precisely why she should appear on the network and show herself as the calm, patriotic, and unifying voice her campaign is premised on. She must explain any evolution in policy, like the border policy and fracking, in a way that makes clear she is not on the extremes. She can continue to make her case that she wants to lead America back to a post-divisive time where we treat all respectfully, regardless of partisan differences.

So what would a Kamala Harris appearance on Fox News look like? Mediaite understands that the network has a standing invitation out to the vice president, the details of which she could quickly negotiate to her benefit. If I’m advising the Harris camp and Fox News on what this event looks like, I’d air it in prime time but opt for a specific set of hosts. Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, and Shannon Bream are the more likely options, but I’d go a different route.

Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy. Yes, he is a traditional Republican and will ask some tough questions. Yet he’s also never disrespectful or mean-spirited, as evidenced by a recent interview he did with Harris spokesman Ian Sams. There is also some history between Harris and Steve’s son Peter Doocy, who is tough but respected within the Biden administration, a fact on display in the bowels of the United Center during the Democratic National Convention when Doocy and Harris had a very congenial back-and-forth with the White House correspondent minutes after her acceptance speech.

The other co-host? Dana Perino. She is fluent in all things White House, having served as Press Secretary under George W. Bush. She is also a news anchor and brings a level of journalistic credibility to the proceedings. She is tough but rarely unfair, particularly in a face-to-face environment. She also has her own history with Kamala Harris, having interviewed her for a Harper’s Bazaar feature way back in 2011.

Now it might be unrealistic to usurp prime time programming with morning or dayside hosts, but this could easily be framed as a special event.

It’s unclear that the Harris campaign has the juice to insist that Fox News abide by her demands. But that’s immaterial to the bigger issue: If she is confident in her ability to be the commander-in-chief and leader of the free world, she should be more than game to face even her harshest critics on Fox News. And I suspect it would go far better than most expect.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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