6 takeaways from Harris' interview on CNN

Vice President Harris sat for her first interview Thursday night since entering the presidential race five weeks ago. It was joint with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, but she did most of the talking.

The interview, conducted by CNN’s Dana Bash on the campaign trail in Georgia, was seen as an important step in what’s been a highly successful – and highly scripted – campaign to this point.

So how did she do? Here are six takeaways:

1. Harris passed the test of doing an unscripted interview

From a strictly performance standpoint, Harris was clear, calm and didn’t get rattled when pushed about changes to her positions on certain issues.

In some past interviews, she came across as defensive, but that wasn’t the case here. She seemed comfortable and in command, which is important for a presidential candidate who people are still getting to know.

She also continued to show a degree of relatability. For example, she talked about making pancakes and cooking bacon for her nieces when President Biden called to inform her of his decision to drop out of the race.

2. Democrats are likely breathing a sigh of relief about how Harris will do in a debate, but there’s some cleaning up to do

Debates are often about optics and not substance, which the first debate between Biden and former President Donald Trump showed. In this interview, when Bash pushed Harris on some position changes, Harris showed she’s mostly able to parry attacks adequately.

Harris and her team will probably want to clean up her response as to why she changed her position on fracking, though, and stick to something clearer. Simply saying, “My values have not changed,” likely won’t suffice. Politicians can change positions, but people expect to hear why in a believable way.

Harris did give a plausible reason for switching from being against fracking to in favor of it.

“What I have seen is that we can grow, and we can increase a clean energy economy without banning fracking,” she said about what is a politically potent issue in Pennsylvania, maybe the most closely watched swing state. She noted that she cast the tie-breaking vote in Congress for expanding fracking leases.

But it took her a while to make that point, and it might not be what most people see in clips of the interview in the coming days.

Instead, when Harris was first asked about the change in this interview, she initially said her position hadn’t changed from 2020. That’s because in the 2020 vice-presidential debate, Harris did say twice that “Joe Biden will not end fracking. He has been very clear about that.”

But that is splitting the hair too finely. In 2019, when she was running for president herself, she said during a CNN town hall focused on climate change: “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking and starting with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands.”

When she joined Biden’s ticket, she abandoned that position and is now pledging to remain in favor of it.

3. Harris shows (again) she’s not an ideologue — and is aiming for the middle

From saying she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet to committing to stronger fracking and immigration policies than she had in 2019, to her position on Israel, Harris is again showing she’s aiming her campaign squarely at the middle.

A larger point on her move to the center on fracking and immigration in particular is that these shifts track with something she’s been consistent on — and something that brought her criticism in 2019: She believes most in solving problems.

“I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems,” Harris told Bash.

She shared that sentiment five years ago.

“[I]s my government solving problems?” Harris told NPR’s Scott Detrow in 2019 of what she sees as most important in public service. “That's how I think about it. And it's the way I've always judged myself, frankly, and my work, which is – are we relevant, right? … It's about, on a daily basis, are we addressing people's real-life problems and solving them? And frankly, if we're not, we need to move over.”

In 2019, that didn’t fly, because progressives wanted a champion, and they were already wary of Harris’ record as California’s attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, which they considered too moderate.

Conservatives in this election have been going after Harris for what they see as inauthenticity, but the thing that Harris has always shown is that she’s pragmatic. She’s been much clearer on where she stands in this campaign than she was in 2019 – and that’s aimed directly at the middle.

That includes while on the campaign trail in Georgia Thursday, saying that one of her top priorities will be helping small businesses and promising to roll out a tax credit proposal for new small businesses next week.

The bottom line is: Harris is a big D Democrat. She might want to move the country to the left of where Donald Trump wants to take it, but she’s signaling that, as president, like former President Barack Obama before her, she would probably be as liberal as Congress and her coalition will allow her to be.

Frankly, this line of attack that her stances keep changing might stick more to Harris if she wasn’t running against Trump.

4. We did get some clearer policy ideas

Asked what she would do on Day 1, Harris said she would look for ways to “strengthen” the middle class and start trying to implement her “Opportunity Economy” plan she laid out last week to bring prices down and try to make homes more affordable.

Specifically, Harris talked in this interview about:

• Extending a $6,000 child tax credit to families for first year of a child’s life, and her

• A $25,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit

She has noted other proposals in the course of this truncated campaign, like wanting to try to pass the John Lewis voting rights bill, which Republicans have blocked, and wanting to revive the border-security bill Biden drafted with conservative Republicans that Trump opposed and the GOP-led House then killed.

Harris has been dinged for not putting forward deep policy proposals, but no candidate campaigns successfully as a walking policy memo.

Campaigns do usually roll out policy papers that include cost analyses and the like, and Harris hasn’t done that, but neither has Trump in a serious way.

Plus, presidential campaigns are really about big ideas and what direction a candidate wants to take the country, especially in this election, when people have such strong and ingrained feelings about Trump.

5. Harris didn’t run from “Bidenomics”

Some might have thought that Harris would try to put distance between herself and Biden’s economic policies, given how negatively Americans view the economy currently – despite fairly strong growth, low unemployment and a decline in inflation in the past year.

Trump is also out with an ad this week hitting Harris on this very topic, comparing what she’s said at different times about what’s become known as “Bidenomics.”

But instead of shying away from it, Harris defended Biden’s economic policies, arguing “mismanagement” from Trump during the COVID pandemic gave them a less-than-optimal hand. She pointed out what she feels the administration has done well, from capping prescription drug costs for seniors and cutting child poverty, to an increase in manufacturing jobs and improving supply chains.

“I’ll say that that’s good work,” Harris said. “There’s more to do, but that’s good work.”

It was a strong defense, showing off how she might rebut the critique at the upcoming debate. But it also shows what a lot of Democrats have been crying out for – someone to make the case on the economy well, instead of how Biden often responded, which came off as him taking the attacks personally and acting defensively.

Harris leaning into the argument that the administration has made progress – whether it works or not – is also a reminder that politics isn’t always about doing something because it’s already popular; it’s trying to actually win the argument, something Democrats weren’t doing with Biden at the top of the ticket.

Polls have shown that voters have given Harris the benefit of the doubt on the economy and haven’t tied her to negative feelings about it the way they did with Biden. We’ll see how public opinion moves, if at all, following the Democratic convention, this interview, Trump’s ad blitz and the upcoming debate.

6. Harris again stayed focused on her agenda and didn’t take the (race) bait on Trump

Bash also asked Harris about Trump’s inflammatory comments about her race and ethnicity. In July, Trump said to a gathering of Black journalists, “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

Here was Harris’ response Thursday night:

HARRIS: “Yeah.”

BASH: “Any—”

HARRIS: “Same old, tired playbook.” [Pause] Next question, please.” [Laugh]

BASH: “That’s it?”

HARRIS: “That’s it.”

Later in the interview, she said: “I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”

During this campaign, Harris hasn’t dwelled on the historic nature of her candidacy. It’s a tricky line for a Black candidate when one is trying to appeal to white voters in the middle. It’s tricky for a woman running for president in a country that has never elected a woman to the White House.

But Harris has been deft at brushing off Trump’s attempts to drag her into controversies he’s created.

Her calm against Trump’s tumult is a side-by-side picture Democrats are banking on.

“The split screen works so well for her and Democrats right now,” said Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist and chief communications officer for MoveOn Political Action. “The chaos vs. stability argument that the Biden campaign was trying to execute against Trump, the Harris team is able to do it with so much more effectiveness.”