On the liberal podcast Pod Save America, multiple Harris lieutenants complain that Harris was pilloried for her light media schedule while President-elect Donald Trump largely eschewed traditional media. The s-word did much of the work in their discussion.
“Do you have, like, she did more traditional media than Trump did, as you point out, basically none,” host Dan Pfeiffer began.
“Trump did none,” replied Stephanie Cutter. “Literally none,” Pfeiffer replied.
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“And got no s*** for that,” added Jen O’Malley Dillon, who served as chairwoman of the Harris campaign.
“Got s*** from the interested party, you know, the media that wasn’t getting their interview,” Cutter clarified. “But voters don’t give a s***.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” O’Dillon said. “We got s***. I’m saying Trump got no s***.”
“Oh yes,” Cutter said. “We got a ton of s*** that she wasn’t doing enough media.”
“He got no s***,” Pfeiffer interjected.” O’Dillon concluded it was a “double standard.”
It’s understandable that a campaign in the heat of battle might feel this way. There are several reasons the Trump-Harris media comparisons don’t work, however.
The first is that Harris was the lesser-known candidate. Opinions about Trump are entrenched at this point. It was Harris who was looking to reintroduce herself to the electorate.
Always seeking to be unburdened by what has been, Harris did not want either her vice presidency under President Joe Biden or her unsuccessful 2019 presidential campaign to be the starting point of the voters’ understanding of her. She also wanted to be selective about showcasing her record as a California prosecutor.
That required Harris to create new impressions during a shortened campaign. She needed the interviews more than Trump did, assuming she could do them effectively. Neither she nor her team appeared to share this assumption.
Secondly, Trump has been ubiquitous in the media for nearly a decade. He has been a celebrity since at least the 1980s, giving interviews on all kinds of topics before he was involved in national politics. Virtually everyone has seen him do traditional media interviews. They have also seen him do hostile interviews.
Third, there’s a basic asymmetry between Trump and Harris’s relationships with the legacy media. Harris received generally glowing coverage, especially in the beginning of her campaign, and could count on generally sympathetic interviews outside of Fox News. None of that applies to Trump. There’s a big difference between Trump sitting down with the National Association of Black Journalists and Harris doing so.
Fourth, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance kept the busiest traditional media interview schedule of any of the four major-party candidates. Many, perhaps most, of these were at least somewhat adversarial.
“I have said, ‘Go into the enemy camp,’ and, you know, the enemy camp is certain networks and a lot of people don’t like to. ‘Sir, do I have to do that?’ He just goes, ‘OK, which ones?’ CNN, MSDNC,” Trump said of Vance in his victory speech earlier this month. “He’ll say, ‘Alright, thank you very much,’ he actually looks like, he’s like the only guy I’ve ever seen, he really looks forward to it. And then he just goes and absolutely obliterates them.”
Fifth, Trump and Vance were considerably more nimble and entrepreneurial in their use of nontraditional media whereas Harris was afraid to appear on Joe Rogan. This helped the Republican ticket reach the lower-propensity voters that were the key to winning. Now it is Harris’s team that is doing election postmortems on podcasts hosted by people who date back to when the Democrats were on the cutting edge of new media.
The media environment is undergoing major changes and the winning ticket took advantage of it. The losing ticket did not.
Sixth, Harris’s cautious media strategy reinforced the perception that she did not want to clarify her views. She preferred ambiguity about how many of her 2019 progressive policy stances remained in effect. This lack of transparency came after months of concealing Biden’s condition from the public until the fateful June 27 debate that necessitated her taking over at the top of the Democratic ticket in the first place.
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Harris’s deputies now complain that 107 days wasn’t enough time to make their case or roll out their candidate. But it was clear for much of that time period that they hoped to take advantage of an abbreviated schedule. They also argued at the time they were waiting until voters started paying attention, after Labor Day or even later.
Both candidates sought favorable media attention. Trump’s success despite a smaller advertising budget and more contentious relationship with much of the press and Harris’s failure is noteworthy, but not the product of a double standard.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
