In the past month, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has sat down to conduct just one full-length interview with a reporter, a joint appearance with her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Within that same period of time, Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have done 37 interviews. In a country with a press fixated on the public interest, this would be a crisis. Someone running for a position through which they control the country’s nuclear arsenal is barely exposing herself to the press. In fact, many of Harris’s policy pivots are happening via aides telegraphing them to reporters. This means that she doesn’t have to even sit down and explain why she has shifted from one view to another.

But much of the media has decided that none of this matters because she’s up in the polls. The New Republic, for instance, featured a piece stating bluntly in its headline that she “doesn’t need policy to win”.

Writer Peter Rothpletz, who currently works for ex-CNN personality Don Lemon, noted that some of the few policy proposals Harris has put out were coldly received in the press, such as her intention to take on food price gouging. “Harris should hang out in the coconut tree and not release any economic plans that can’t fit within a Venn diagram. To win, Harris doesn’t need policy,” he advised. “She just needs vibes.”

Vibes seems to be the word of choice for those in the press who are covering for Harris’s lack of transparency or substance. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Nia-Malika Henderson dismisses the idea that policy matters at all in this election, saying that “in a contest between white papers and vibes — which is really just cooler shorthand for emotion and feeling — vibes usually carry the day.” She even goes backwards in history to make her case, stating that Hillary Clinton lost her 2008 race to Barack Obama “not over miniscule policy difference but over vibes”.

Her revisionist history lays bare what’s wrong with the claim. While Obama was a master storyteller and had a strong emotional bond with his fanbase, he ultimately took Clinton down by pinning her to her support for the war in Iraq — a more than “miniscule” policy disagreement that motivated millions of young people to support him over his Democratic rival.

But the wider problem here is that the press is writing a self-fulfilling prophecy. Policy, what a president will actually do with the awesome power they receive from voters, doesn’t matter. What matters is how cool they are and how they make you feel. Vox’s Rebecca Jennings praised Walz for taking “on the role of the internet’s collective Midwestern dad”, while serving as a “candidate with genuinely good vibes”.

All of this can be considered a success for Harris’s press team. They want their candidate to win the election, and she is up in the polls. But the question is why the press is going along with it, when its job is not to help Harris win the election. Really, the media’s job is to hold her accountable — to make sure that she is stress-tested before she ever steps foot into the Oval Office. So far, she seems to be coasting off memes and on-background policy walk-backs delivered by her staff. Maybe that is a winning campaign strategy; time will tell. But it’s a tremendous failure of the American press corps to be going along with it.

---

Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, The Intercept, and the Center for American Progress.

ZaidJilani

---