A more media-friendly Kamala Harris runs for president

Harris is a relative newcomer to Washington’s small-town media scene, but arrived with decades of experience as a California public figure and long relationships there.

Former California aides recalled that she appeared on television often enough to know local San Francisco news camera crews by name and sought to build relationships with influential Bay Area media figures.

John Diaz, the former head of the editorial board at the San Francisco Chronicle, recalled that she attended one of her first editorial board meetings flanked by established San Francisco politicians. While Diaz said she hardly needed the support of the paper in her race for district attorney, he said it suggested how important Harris’ allies thought it was for her to receive the support of institutional media.

“It was as if she needed training wheels, which clearly she didn’t,” Diaz said. “But I told those politicians that they’re welcome to sit and watch, but the candidate has to speak for herself.”

That moment showed up in the copy in a positive light: In the Chronicle’s endorsement of Harris over the Democratic incumbent, the paper wrote that she had “the support of a disparate group of politicians and established leaders from around the city.”

Diaz said he was impressed by how she reacted to critical pieces about her tenure as district attorney and California attorney general over the years. “There were times when we criticized her over various issues. And she never stopped talking to me. She never stopped being accessible.”

Former staffers told Semafor that Harris took particular care to ensure reporters from nonwhite media outlets were invited to all of her events and had access to her. She also fostered personal relationships with publishers of Black local media outlets, including Danny Bakewell Sr., the publisher of LA Sentinel; Hardy Brown, the founder of the weekly Black Voice News; and Amelia Ashley-Ward, the publisher of the Sun-Reporter, San Francisco’s oldest Black newspaper.

Success in California politics depends more on intraparty Democratic relationships, fundraising and TV ads than on positive coverage in the state press. And strong institutional support within the state Democratic Party made it easy for Harris to beat her opponent in 2016 and arrive in the US Senate. But it gave her little time to get to know Washington, or the national media who would be covering her, before she launched her campaign for president.

After a strong initial showing, the then-senator was unable to break free of the pack, and her errors became the subject of intense media scrutiny. Infighting within her campaign and embarrassing personal anecdotes about serious mismanagement were the subjects of some of the most well-chronicled and damning articles of the 2020 primary. In the Times, 50 current and former staffers painted a brutal picture of the campaign that blamed Harris, her sister, Maya Harris, and her campaign manager for blowing through money, refusing to commit to a strategy, and creating a flawed organization that failed to adapt quickly enough.

Harris didn’t think she was getting a fair shake. Towards the end of her campaign, two people familiar told Semafor that Harris privately observed that it seemed like the networks were pigeonholing her by mostly assigning to Black embeds and staff to cover her.

After her elevation to vice president, Harris’ difficulties with the media continued into the early part of her tenure. Covid-19 protocols required that she cut down in-person engagements with the public, including the press, and take measures like masking and social distancing.

Harris’ disastrous interview with Lester Holt about immigration in June 2021 — in which she admitted she hadn’t been to the southern border, fueling Republican attacks that continue to this day — set the tone for a more cautious approach from her media team for the first year. That fact was compounded by her desire not to upstage the president, who rarely gave interviews. But Harris’ limited media appearances allowed her missteps to linger in the news for longer.

Her team also made some bizarre decisions, such as fighting behind-the-scenes with Vogue over a cover shoot with the vice president. (It hasn’t damaged the relationship: Staff at Condé Nast recently spotted Anna Wintour wearing her Biden/Harris scarf around the office in recent days, and Vogue endorsed Harris for president this week.)

After another round of embarrassing stories about office mismanagement and another staff exodus, Harris and her team seemed to realize she needed to reset her media strategy. In late 2021, she brought in Lorraine Voles, a former aide to Vice President Al Gore, who adopted a mindset that more Harris appearances would lessen the impact of the VP’s bad moments. Her team also believed that getting more reps in with the media would make her more skillful and at ease in higher-stakes media appearances. So she began increasing her interviews — first with local media during trips and then, quietly, national political media.

Each year, Harris increased the cadence of her interactions with journalists — particularly in more casual, off-the-record settings — so they could better get to know her and the policy areas she was working on.

For example, Axios reported that in 2023, she hosted a dinner for Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski at the Naval Observatory. It wasn’t a one-off: She’s held similar off-the-record dinners with other cable news personalities, including Kristen Welker, the White House correspondent for NBC; White House reporters for Univision and Telemundo; and all of the reporters — for a while, all women — in the front row of the Brady briefing room.

At political inflection points throughout Biden’s term, she’s tried to connect personally off-the-record with the press corps to explain the administration’s views: A few weeks after the draft Dobbs decision was leaked to Politico, she held an on-background session with reporters, an opportunity for her to go deep and demonstrate her understanding of abortion policy. And on the flight to Munich to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, just days before Russia invaded Ukraine, she went to the back of Air Force Two to brief reporters on the Biden White House’s thinking about the situation.

Her office has also worked to cultivate close relationships with alternative digital media sources. Staff from gossip site The Shade Room snagged an invite to her holiday party. Off-record meet-and-greets with the media at the VP’s office were not just for the New York Times; Harris’ staff also made sure to invite the authors of what one attendee described as “fairly niche abortion Substacks.” This approach comes from Harris herself, who has remarked that she hears from younger family members that they get their news from podcasts and alternative media sources.

Harris’ media diet is less well-defined than that of other top Democrats, like Barack Obama, who preferred the splashy magazine profile, or Biden, who seems to mostly be interested in a few cable news shows and Times columnists. She certainly isn’t as obsessive as Trump, a biased and relentless media critic who as president sought out conservative television pundits for both messaging purposes and for actual counsel on policy.

These days, Harris keeps the ritual that many Democratic Washington politicians do: casually tuning into Morning Joe on the treadmill and elliptical, and makes a point to turn on morning broadcast news. She keeps up with some news and social media content on her phone and keeps the TVs in her office and on Air Force Two tuned to CNN. Like many politicians, most news she consumes comes in the form of clips included in the dense daily briefing books prepared by her staff.

While Harris herself keeps much of the press at an arm’s length, her family members have also served as her liaisons to the media. Popular radio host Charlamagne tha God told me in 2019 that he kept in regular contact with Maya Harris, to whom he sent policy questions. Meena Harris, the vice president’s niece, is a TikTok star in her own right with over 2 million followers, and her company owns the feminist satire site Reductress. She also maintains a relationship with the pundit class, including MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart and CNN’s Bakari Sellers. Sellers, an early 2020 primary backer, said he got a call from Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff in recent days as she was shoring up support for her presidential bid.

Harris is not known to consume media out of love of the game, like Obama, or out of an obsession with its coverage, like Trump. Harris wants to understand what’s going on but isn’t particularly personally interested in nitpicking stories, aides said.

“In almost a decade of working for her, I never once had her send me a news clip and complain about something or comment on it at all,” Brian Brokaw, who ran Harris’ campaign for California attorney general, said. “She’s one of many politicians I’ve known who said she doesn’t read the clips, and I actually believe her.”

With just 100 days until the presidential election, Harris will need to introduce herself to voters as quickly as possible. That will mean running a campaign in the national media. It’ll put Harris’ efforts to deepen her relationships with Washington and alternative media to the test.

Harris’ team is still scrambling to craft its media strategy on the fly, but the campaign is treating the new candidacy as a reset. While Biden’s team would only commit to two debates with Trump, Harris’ team is open to more. People close to the campaign privately say the reset allows Harris’ team to have a clean slate with the campaign press corps, which had formed an antagonistic relationship with Biden’s comms staff.

Her youth, compared to Biden, also offers some immediate benefits for media strategy. Within hours of her candidacy, Biden’s digital team had recut some direct-to-camera ads that it began running on YouTube and had leveraged a tweet from the pop singer Charli XCX to signal Harris’ connection to younger voters. She appeared in pre-taped videos at Comic-Con and on RuPaul’s Drag Race. National Democrats often use connections to popular culture to their advantage, but to this point, they hadn’t been able to, because of Biden’s age.

Sellers said that in his recent conversations with Harris, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, he had only one piece of advice for them: Don’t be afraid to take risks.

“You got to go big, go bold,” he said.