Chuck Todd, NBC News chief political analyst, said Wednesday that Vice President Harris should set aside one day a week for media interviews and said it was a “mistake” to wait so long after launching her campaign to sit down with a reporter.
Harris’s first sit-down interview, which will air Thursday night on CNN, comes more than a month after she launched her campaign.
Harris allies have responded to criticism about the lack of interviews with the press by noting the short time frame she has to campaign and saying Harris wants to prioritize meeting prospective voters around the country.
However, Todd said the lack of media appearances makes the interview a high-stakes event, calling the strategy behind the decision “the first big mistake of the Harris campaign since she took over as the Democratic nominee,” in a piece published Wednesday on NBC News.
“They have now raised the stakes for her first sitdown interview,” Todd wrote of the Harris campaign. “More words and phrases will get scrutinized simply because the campaign and the candidate are behaving as if doing these interviews is about as interesting to them as visiting the dentist’s office.”
Todd encouraged more candidates, including Harris, to adopt former President Trump’s approach in 2016 to embracing “all media as good for him, whether he thought the interviewer was a friendly, a neutral or an opponent.”
Todd noted that by doing so many interviews, each conversation was less significant.
“When he said something outrageous or controversial during one sit-down, he’d do something entirely newsy (and just as notable) in another that would essentially dilute the impact of all of his interviews,” Todd wrote in his piece.
Todd encouraged Harris to adopt a similar strategy of saturating the market. He proposed that she designate one day a week to giving five or six interviews, that way, even if she slips up in one, she has another chance to communicate her message in another. The approach would also decrease the scrutiny and pressure for each interview.
“What the Harris campaign ought to do is set aside one day a week for media interviews and saturate the landscape. As we all know, there’s no one place to go anymore to get near 100% media saturation,” he wrote.
“If she did five or six round-robins one day a week with a sprinkling of all types of media outlets, no one interview would be likely to overshadow any one news cycle, and she’d most likely have a chance to reach more diverse audiences on a regular schedule,” he continued.
The Hill has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment.