The Harris campaign denied a request from Time magazine to interview Vice President Kamala Harris for its cover story published Monday.
The refusal to participate in the magazine’s story underscores Harris’s lack of media appearances.
Harris has refused to sit for an unscripted interview for 23 days straight since joining the race on July 21. Not since June 24 have the media interviewed Harris on television. The last time the press reportedly questioned her at a solo news conference was eight months ago, on December 2, 2023.
The Time story, with the title “Her Moment,” shamelessly hyped Harris’s candidacy. It grabbed the attention of Republicans, who mercilessly mocked it as bias.
“If you’d predicted this scene a month ago to anyone following the race, they would never have believed you. But Harris has pulled off the swiftest vibe shift in modern political history,” the story read:
Joe Biden is out, Harris is in, and a second Donald Trump presidency no longer seems inevitable. Democrats resigned to a “grim death march” toward certain defeat, as one national organizer put it, felt their gloom replaced by a jolt of hope. Harris smashed fundraising records, raking in $310 million in July. She packed stadiums and dominated TikTok, offering a fresh message focused on the future over the past. Volunteers signed up in droves. Trump’s widening leads across the battleground states evaporated. Over the span of a few weeks in late July and early August, Harris became a political phenomenon. “Our campaign is not just a fight against Donald Trump,” she told the cheering crowd in Philadelphia. “Our campaign is a fight for the future.”
Where has this Kamala Harris been all along? For years, Democratic officials questioned her political chops, pundits mocked her word salads, and her polling suggested limited appeal. Her performance in the 2020 presidential primary was wooden, and her turn as Biden’s No. 2 did little to inspire confidence. Even this summer, as party insiders chattered about possible replacements if Biden stepped aside, “it was explicit from some of the major donors that she can’t win,” says Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, an organization that trains young Democrats to run for office. “They didn’t think people were ready to elect someone like her.”
Judging from the past few weeks, Harris’ own party underestimated her. Maybe the crowded 2020 primary just wasn’t the right race for Harris to showcase her talents; maybe the vice presidency wasn’t the right role. Suddenly, she seems matched to the moment: a former prosecutor running against a convicted felon, a defender of abortion rights running against the man who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a next-generation Democrat running against a 78-year-old Republican. Perhaps above all, she has given Americans the one thing they overwhelmingly told pollsters they wanted: a credible alternative to the two unpopular old men who have held the job for the past eight long years.