Over the weekend, a gaggle of media establishment figures lost their collective crackers at the news that Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with podcaster Alexandra Cooper for an episode of “Call Her Daddy.”
The general tenor of this “how dare she” reaction is a version of the constant refrain the Harris campaign has heard since the vice president announced her candidacy in late July.
Following the generally jovial digs into the “Kamala is Brat” phenomenon came the aggressive suggestions about what Harris needed to do, the topmost being the requirement to sit down immediately with top TV anchors and other national news outlets.
When she didn’t meet those expectations, the chorus of complaints shifted to her inaccessibility. An August sit-down with CNN’s Dana Bash, with her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz beside her, was painted as a Milk Bone toss to a ravenous wolf pack – an amuse bouche too insubstantial to sate.
Harris has submitted to probing questions by mainstream journalists since then, including at a mid-September event sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists. That received less coverage than a live-streamed celebrity-studded lovefest hosted by Oprah Winfrey and did nothing to quiet that noise.
The Democratic candidate has since agreed to radio interviews, appearances on local news and other podcasts, but “Call Her Daddy” makes another level of outreach. Cooper’s podcast was Spotify’s second-biggest in 2023 — surpassed in popularity only by “The Joe Rogan Experience” — and averages around 5 million listeners for episodes that don’t feature a presidential candidate.
Cooper refers to her following as her “Daddy Gang,” courting their tastes with topics that range from dating and sex to, lately, conversations about mental health and reproductive rights.
Some of the commentary class’ kneejerk reaction to Harris' decision to pitch Cooper was disdain. Sunday's Politico Playbook column inveighed against the “Call Her Daddy” announcement along with the rest of Harris’ scheduled appearances this week, declaring that Harris is “still largely avoiding the media.”
Harris’ media schedule this week includes her participation in a special Monday night edition of “60 Minutes,” with Bill Whitaker conducting a one-on-one interview.
Tuesday she’ll drop by “The View” as well as appear on “The Howard Stern Show” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” On Thursday, Univision hosts her in Las Vegas, NV., for a town hall. The Spanish-language network’s event with Donald Trump, originally scheduled to take place on Tuesday in Miami, was rescheduled to Oct.16 because of the intensifying weather conditions posed by Hurricane Milton.
Citing “60 Minutes” and Univision’s town hall as exceptions, the Politico column reads, “Let’s be real here: Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about, even as voters want more specifics from Harris. Instead, expect most of these sit-downs to be a continuation of the ‘vibes’ campaign Harris has perfected.”
That turned out to be an inaccurate prediction. The "Call Her Daddy" conversation was not the contentious tête-à-tête the chattering class has come to expect after decades of cable news bloviating somehow came to represent meaningful political coverage. Instead, the general consensus is that Cooper’s interview is admirably executed if not especially probing, guided by questions designed to elicit considerate answers.
In contrast, Whitaker posed his version of questions Harris already fielded during the debate and in previous interviews, except this time it's "60 Minutes" doing the asking . . . triggering the same indirect responses that were low on specifics. Many candidates employ a similar strategy, and by now Harris should have more concise answers to offer. Then again, if she keeps getting the same lines from different network anchors, there's little incentive to change up her replies.
Whitaker elicited the most natural reaction within that 20-minute segment by bringing up Harris' admission that she owns a gun. But Oprah Winfrey coaxed that out of her first, which offers a hint as to why Cooper's style resulted in a dialogue that didn't feel like a perfunctory performance. Cooper may not have pushed back on Harris' responses, but she did grant her the opportunity to speak about the policies that are most pertinent to the "Call Her Daddy" audience in human terms.
One must cite the hypocrisy in expecting Harris to do things Trump is not doing and has never done, which is to subject himself in equal balance to interviews with major broadcast network journalists and cable news channels that aren’t Fox, Newsmax, OANN or other right-wing media satellites.
In recent months, Trump has appeared on Theo Von’s, Logan Paul’s and Lex Fridman’s podcasts, and played nice with Fox News hosts including Greg Gutfeld, while backing out of the same “60 Minutes” special that features Harris.
Yet, when Trump stepped into the cloud of criticisms regarding Harris’ lack of media availability by setting up a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, every cable news channel raced to cover it, and few of the journalists from legacy media outlets asked questions of any value. This is not a one-time failure in this election cycle, but an ongoing issue that hasn’t been remediated since the 2016 presidential contest.
What has realigned is the information ecosystem. The successful rise of “Call Her Daddy” is part of that, much to the ire of hard news journalists and reporters.
Objectively speaking, I would prefer both presidential candidates subject themselves to heat tests by more hard news figures like Whitaker who, to his credit, tried to get real answers from Harris instead of accepting her pivots. I also recognize that Trump’s political ascendance erased every informational norm, including how the audience follows politics.
Certainly, this presidential campaign season has been atypical, even compared to 2016 and 2020. The news and information space is fractured and diluted. One of the key issues threatening our democracy is the citizenry's refusal to agree on a shared set of facts backed by empirical data.
The cable news audience plays into that problem, divided between liberal (MSNBC) and right-wing slants (Fox News), along with whatever CNN is supposed to be. Those viewers already know who they’re voting for.
Meanwhile, Harris has had just over 100 days to build policy platforms that can withstand some level of expert analysis and scrutiny, marshaling her campaign with lightning speed and mounting a campaign tour to revitalize a Democratic base that was resigned to failure. Courting a press that has not been as willing to sane-wash her flubs as it has done for Trump came second to all that, which may not be desirable, but is understandable. (Even days ago, a CBS Weekend News segment characterizing Trump’s second rally in Butler, Penn., as having what anchor Jericka Duncan described as “a unifying message” without its coverage showing anything to back that up.)
Meeting disaffected voters where they are instead of expecting them to show up to their parents’ newscasts, however, is simple pragmatism.
Podcast listeners are commonly understood to have tuned out hard news in favor of like-minded communities, which includes Cooper’s primarily Gen Z Daddy Gang listenership. The “Call Her Daddy” host tailors her discussions to address that demographic’s main concerns which, as Cooper says in her introductory explanation/defense of why she agreed to interview Harris, focuses on “women and the day-to-day issues that we face.”
Harris’ 40-minute “Call Her Daddy” episode was recorded last Tuesday and edited before the Playbook column came out, which must have made both Cooper and the campaign smirk.
Cooper, in her way, fulfilled a main demand that reporters have accused Harris of leaving unaddressed: It helped an underserved audience get to know Harris in a more personal way while drilling into her key policy positions on reproductive rights, skyrocketing housing costs and Trump's claims to be a protector of women.
Of note were segments where Harris discussed what legislators’ abortion ban exceptions to “save the life of the mother” means in practical terms, using the story of Georgia’s Amber Thurman, who was denied care for blood poisoning after leaving Georgia to seek an abortion until it was too late for doctors to save her. “She’s almost dead before you decide to give her care,” Harris fumed.
She also points out that she is the first sitting vice president to visit a reproductive health clinic, in a way that reminds listeners of her significance as a woman running for president without specifically referring to her gender.
And in her rebuttal to Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' dig at Harris' supposed childlessness, telling a Trump rally crowd that her kids keep her humble before adding, “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” Harris dropped a quotable bit we hadn't heard before.
“I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble,” she told Cooper. “Two, a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life.”
Cooper also gave Harris space to talk about her upbringing in a way that adds context to those policy positions, which some conservative voices might downplay as softball pandering. Some of those same voices have praised Trump’s tour of the podcasting and YouTube “manoverse,” as the New York Times calls it, as a brilliant strategy to court the young male vote.
For a better understanding of why this biographical touch matters, on Monday NPR political reporter Elena Moore posted these audience stats from Edison Research on X: Edison Research: 76% of Cooper’s audience is under 35.
For those asking why Harris went on Call Her Daddy, NPR obtained audience data on the show from Edison Research:
— Elena Moore (@ElenaMMoore) October 7, 2024
- 70% women
- 76% under 35 (93% under 45)
- 48% Democrat / 24% Republican / 20% Independent
- 34% live in the south / 24% west / 22% northeast / 20% midwest https://t.co/OaoIZyrDo1
Almost of quarter of her listeners identify as Republican, with a fifth identifying as Independent. Her geographical breakdown is even more telling, with 34% percent of her listenership hailing from southern (read: red) states and 20% living in the swingy Midwest.
A common critique of Harris’ decision to appear on “Call Her Daddy” is the data-informed assumption that Harris has the votes of young women locked up. Within Cooper’s audience, surely, are a few persuadable undecideds who may determine which way this close election breaks.
Between this and the fact that, as Cooper explained in her introduction, she generally declines interview offers from politicians, this interview allowed Harris to reach potential voters who don’t watch CNN or MSNBC, where she was interviewed by Stephanie Ruhle — or “60 Minutes” for that matter.
It’s the same reason a visit to “The View” is key to reassuring suburban women and a pass-through “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” has more personal introductory value than a wonky policy deep-dive on Sunday morning public affairs shows.
For that matter, it also explains why Harris appeared on “All the Smoke,” a podcast hosted by former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, as well as fielding questions from NABJ member journalists. It explains why she chatted with Spanish-language podcaster Stephanie Himonidis Sedano for an episode of “Chiquibaby Show” weeks before her Univision town hall, and spoke with an anchor from Philadelphia’s local ABC-affiliated news station WPVI before facing CBS News’ Whitaker.
Harris is telling voters who she is in the broadest way possible by circumventing the so-called “traditional” media wall to address specific constituencies inadequately served by mainstream news.
The public is justified in wanting substantive answers from both candidates seeking their votes. Harris is spinning her version of fulfilling that mandate, meeting potential voters on their turf, and consenting to participate in enough legacy news interviews to counter accusations of inaccessibility.
It’s not what broader media may want, but it is an informational reality brought on by a decline in journalistic trust accelerated by Trump eight years ago. Similar to the way Harris’ team is drawing on his promotional playbook to turn the tide in her favor, maybe her critics should examine what worked about Cooper’s approach to craft more useful conversations with and about those seeking power.
