Harris clashes with Fox as she tries to peel away some GOP voters

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — Kamala Harris didn’t get her second debate with Donald Trump — so she went on Fox News instead.

The vice president clashed heatedly with the pro-Trump network’s top anchor Bret Baier on Wednesday night in the kind of adversarial, unscripted scrum that Republicans have long accused her of avoiding.

Harris and Baier squabbled and interrupted one another, as he exposed her policy flip flops and reversals and she rammed home her talking points. The contentious clash, conducted in swing state Pennsylvania, had more in common with the vice president’s sole debate showdown with the former president than forensic, formal interviews where she’s often stumbled.

“May I please finish, you have to let me finish,” Harris said early in the interview, using a technique she has employed against male rivals in congressional hearings and debates in the past.

The vice president’s trip to Fox News showed how she’s trying to conjure new turning points in a contest with no clear leader and with most swing states regarded as toss-ups. Trump’s decision to decline a second debate with his rival has meant that the final weeks of the campaign lack big scheduled moments that could change the race.

In the end, on Wednesday, both Harris and Fox News probably got what they wanted.

The vice president looked combative after daring to walk into the conservative media lair and struck a contrast with Trump, who is largely avoiding television news interviews in which he will be cross-examined. She singled out his extreme rhetoric and threats to use the military on “enemies from within” — in a way the channel’s viewers rarely see. Her performance bolstered her new campaign tactic of raising fresh alarm about a second Trump term that she said in a speech earlier Wednesday would see the ex-president sit in the Oval Office “plotting retribution, stew in his own grievances and think only about himself and not you.”

Harris also did some damage control after saying in an interview last week that there wasn’t much she would have done differently from the unpopular commander in chief over the past four years. “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” Harris said. “Like every new president that comes into office, I will bring my life experiences and my professional experiences and fresh and new ideas.”

Fox, meanwhile, got hours of post-interview content for its commentators. Its post-debate analysis, for instance, seized on Harris’ non-answer to one of Trump’s charges — how many undocumented migrants let into the country on her watch. As the network spooled highlights of the interview, it ran a chyron that read “Kamala continues her tirade against Trump.” Baier pressed Harris on issues important to the conservative audience, including tragedies of young American women murdered by undocumented migrants — for whom the vice president expressed deep sympathy — and her previous support for using taxpayer dollars to fund gender-affirming care for transgender inmates, including undocumented immigrants. (She said she would follow the law on such policies as president).

And in case Harris changed the minds of any of its viewers, Fox followed her appearance with searing rebuttals from Trump’s older sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and his former ultra-hardline political adviser Stephen Miller.

The tightrope that Harris was walking as she sought to show steel and presidential mettle was evident from critiques of her performance on social media that often played into tropes directed at strong, Black women.

But before the interview, Harris spokesman Ian Sams explained her thinking. He noted Fox’s high ratings include some undecided voters and Democrats. And he said that Harris wanted those viewers to hear from her directly.

Another day of courting distinct voting blocs

The Fox interview capped another day Harris used to try to peel away potentially small numbers of voters who could make a difference in tightly fought battlegrounds less than three weeks before the neck-and-neck election.

After courting Black male voters on Tuesday, she traveled to the Keystone State to try and appeal to Republicans who are disaffected with Trump’s anti-democratic behavior. Appearing with Republican former lawmakers and officials driven out of their party by Trump, the vice president noted that finding her in such company would normally be surprising.

But she added, “Not in this election, because at stake in this race are the democratic ideas that our founders and generations of Americans before us have fought for. At stake in this election is the Constitution of the United States.”

Democrats believe there may be significant numbers of GOP voters, including some who voted for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, who could be persuaded to vote for Harris next month. If only a few thousand Fox viewers or traditional conservatives swapped sides, it could push some swing states in the vice president’s direction. Still, the risk for Harris is that her display in her first formal Fox interview could alienate some of those voters. And the 100 or so Republicans who appeared with her on Wednesday in Bucks County, a critical Philadelphia suburb, in many cases represented the GOP’s past — left behind in the populist transformation engineered by Trump.

Trump plays into Harris’ claims he’s unhinged

At that Pennsylvania rally, Harris reinforced her newly tough tone against Trump, blasting him as “increasingly unstable and unhinged.” She’s also been raising questions about his age and faculties – turning the tables on the 78-year-old ex-president who often used the same strategy against Biden when he was in the race.

In many of his recent appearances, Trump has seemed to play into Harris’ claims. On Wednesday, for instance, he doubled down on his false claims that Haitian migrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio. He said in a Univision town hall with undecided Latino voters that the refugees, who are in the country legally, were “eating other things too that they’re not supposed to be.”

The Republican nominee also proclaimed himself “the father of IVF” in his latest attempt to distance himself from the chaos in women’s reproductive health after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which he built, overturned the constitutional nationwide right to an abortion. Harris later told reporters that the comment was “bizarre,” as she seeks to use subsequent state-level abortion restrictions to widen the gender gap that could help her beat Trump.

And as Democrats increasingly highlight the perceived threat to American democracy from Trump, the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance, insisted that the former president did not lose the last election. “I’ve answered this question directly a million times: No. I think there are serious problems in 2020,” the Ohio Republican said. “So, did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use, OK?”

Trump, meanwhile, insisted in a Univision town hall, that January 6, 2021 – one of the most notorious days in American history – was a “day of love” and that there was “nothing done wrong at all.”

Any one of Trump’s recent comments would have disqualified a conventional candidate. But it is a mark of how he’s transformed American politics that his support base is impervious to scandalous or outlandish behavior.

And there is no doubt that Trump, for all his crudeness and tearing at the constraints meant to rein in demagogic leaders, is the authentic voice of tens of millions of Americans.

Harris is also hampered by a daunting political environment. She’s a member of an unpopular administration at a time when many Americans are still feeling the after effects of the high inflation that the White House often downplayed and are frustrated by still high prices for rent, cars and groceries.

It’s taken her several months to arrive at the assurance that she’d strike a strong contrast with Biden’s administration, which she unveiled in the Fox interview. In itself, that’s a reflection of her struggles as a presidential candidate. And her difficulty at the start of the Fox interview to effectively parry some of Baier’s questions on immigration showed that the issue remains a weakness and may be a significant impediment to her efforts to win over GOP defectors.

Still, the fact she braved the interview at all might help her with undecided voters. And if nothing else, her appearance served to highlight how the conservative media machine and Trump’s are all but indistinguishable from one another.

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