Harris' first sit-down interview as nominee airs Thursday with pressure building

Vice President Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are sitting down for a joint interview airing at 9 p.m. ET Thursday on CNN. It’s the first interview Harris is giving since President Biden dropped out of the race in July and Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee.

It’s a high-stakes situation that comes as Harris has faced mounting pressure to do an interview with a major news outlet to share her own policies and take questions on her prior positions.

It’s been more than a month since Biden dropped out of the race, and in the absence of a 1-on-1 Harris interview or press conference, Republicans have accused the vice president of trying to dodge the press to avoid tough questions. “She hasn’t done an interview,” former President Donald Trump said during a news conference earlier this month at his Mar-a-Lago estate. “She can’t do an interview. She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview.”

Prior to becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris had taken plenty of questions from reporters as the sitting vice president. Her team says she’s done 80 interviews this year — in traditional, network media as well as on podcasts and social media.

But in these previous conversations she was generally selling Biden’s agenda. Like most vice presidents, she was a messenger and a deputy. Now, she’s running for the top job, and this CNN interview may be one of the first times she’s pressed to spell out her own policies and answer questions about how, if at all, she would govern differently than Biden.

“I think she’d have to answer more of these questions,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “I don’t think it would be possible to run for president and not answer them.”

Harris will, undoubtedly, face additional scrutiny about her record and positions when she faces off against Trump in the debate expected next month.