Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon expressed outrage over the “narrative” that they were fearful of conducting interviews leading up to the election.
Harris did not conduct her first 2024 campaign sit-down interview until Aug. 29 — a month after announcing her candidacy — and largely avoided interviews before engaging in a friendly media blitz throughout October. O’Malley Dillon, on “Pod Save America,” complained that President-elect Donald Trump was not held to the same “standard” as Harris and denied that the vice president only conducted limited interviews.
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“I mean, look, I am not a media hater by any measure, and I think that, you know, we women don’t get far in life talking about double standards, so that’s not the point. But I do think a narrative —107 days, two weeks fucked up because of a hurricane, two weeks talking about how she didn’t do interviews, which, you know, she was doing plenty, but we were doing it in our own way,” O’Malley Dillon said. “We had to, you know, be the nominee, we had to find a running mate and do a rollout. I mean, there was all these things that you kind of want to factor in.”
Hurricane Helene hit Florida on Sept. 26 and went through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, taking the lives of at least 223 people, according to NBC News. Hurricane Milton hit Florida on Oct. and killed at least 24 people, CBS News reported. The hurricanes likely will cost over $50 billion in damage each, according to government and private experts, CBS News also reported. The storms dominated much of the news cycle leading up to the election.
“But real people heard in some way that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump that I think that was a problem,” she continued. “And then, on top of that, we would do an interview and … the questions were small and processy.”
Harris campaign adviser Stephanie Cutter chimed in to call the questions “dumb.”
“They were not informing a voter who was trying to listen to learn more or to understand,” O’Malley Dillon added.
Voters and pundits criticized Harris for how she answered questions on the campaign trail over her perceived lack of authenticity and specificity. The vice president was widely panned after she told “The View” co-hosts in October that “not a thing comes to mind” about how she would govern differently than President Joe Biden.
“And I’m not here to say that, you know, the whole system was focused on us incorrectly. I’m just saying, like, again, of the things we need to explore as we move forward as a campaign and as a country, that does a disservice to voters,” O’Malley Dillon said. “And, you know, I think back and think we should have signaled more of our strategy early on about podcasts and who we were trying to reach, but we had a limited amount of time to reach the people we were trying to reach, and we were trying to go to them.”
“But being up against a narrative that we weren’t doing anything or we were afraid to have interviews is completely bullshit, and also, like, took hold a little bit,” she continued. “And we just, it gave us another thing we had to fight back for that Trump never had to worry about.”
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