Washington
CNN
—

Vice President Kamala Harris faces the next test in her presidential campaign on Thursday, her first impromptu interview with a major media outlet since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.

Harris hopes to build on the momentum she generated early in her campaign — and avoid the kinds of unforced errors that plagued her first presidential bid in 2019 and her early days as vice president. It’s also a chance for the newly anointed candidate to sharpen the contrast with Republican nominee Donald Trump, connect with undecided voters and emphasize her credentials to lead from the Oval Office at a tense time for the United States at home and abroad.

Harris will appear alongside her vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, in a CNN primetime special airing at 9 p.m. ET from Georgia, where she is on a bus tour designed to put back on the ballot a swing state that the GOP thought it was close to securing in November. The interview is the key chapter of the campaign between last week’s Democratic convention in Chicago and the presidential debate scheduled for Sept. 10 in Philadelphia.

The Dana Bash interview has taken on greater significance because of the compressed race Harris has run since becoming her party’s nominee and because of the way it has become a bone of contention between the warring campaigns. It’s the latest long-awaited moment in a wild race in which Trump became the first major-party nominee to be convicted of a crime and the former president survived an assassination attempt. President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the CNN debate in Atlanta, meanwhile, set off a crisis that ended his re-election bid.

Major television interviews like Thursday’s have also played a major role, with the president agreeing to several interviews in an attempt to halt his slide, but this only exacerbated concerns about his age and his ability to serve a full second term.

By not yet scheduling a major interview, Harris has opened herself up to complaints from Trump and some nonpartisan observers that she is trying to avoid scrutiny, raising the stakes for potential gaffes that will be seized upon by the Trump campaign. A strong performance from the vice president, however, would present a new challenge for Trump, who has struggled since Harris transformed the race by narrowing his lead in battleground states and raising half a billion dollars.

While Harris has generated intense enthusiasm at the star-studded Democratic convention in Chicago last week, and at joyous gatherings among Democrats previously demoralized about Biden’s reelection prospects, she has yet to enter a forum where her responses and policies can be scrutinized. Her speeches have been packed with what she wants to do as president — from easing the economic burden on Americans to unleashing a housing boom to winning the 21st century’s geopolitical battle with China. But the vice president has been less than specific about how, exactly, she would execute some of those aspirations, or how she would finance them in a deeply divided Washington.

The interview will be watched to see whether Harris creates space on key issues with Biden, as she markets herself as a change candidate despite serving as vice president in an unpopular administration. Harris has already gone further than her boss by promising to combat the high grocery prices that have plagued millions of Americans. The populist turn may be politically smart, but it has been panned by many economists.

The interview has become an obstacle for the vice president because Trump’s aides have been egging her on for weeks, apparently assuming that she will flunk tough questions, ignore policy details and lack sharp political instincts. In a statement on Wednesday, Trump’s campaign mocked Harris, saying she had “mustered up the courage to sit down for a *joint* interview — after 39 days of hiding from reporters.” While she has yet to sit down for a major interview, Harris has fielded questions from reporters traveling with her.

After years as a prosecutor, attorney general and California senator who excelled in high-profile hearings, Harris has often seemed more comfortable asking probing questions than answering them. She lacks the decades of policy experience that helped former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, for example, turn interviews into policy seminars. And unlike Trump, she doesn’t bombard interviewers with torrents of falsehoods, outrageous statements and bombast, meaning he can often distract from what he’s actually saying.

Republicans’ confidence that Harris could be exposed in a television interview stems from a one-on-one conversation she had with NBC’s Lester Holt early in her vice presidency about her role as an envoy to Latin American countries, sources of much of the illegal migration to the U.S.

Asked why she hadn’t yet visited the southern border as vice president, Harris pointed out that she also hadn’t been to Europe since taking the job. Her discomfort has fueled years of Republican attacks, and the interview still hangs over her tenure as vice president. In that interview, Harris seemed ill-prepared — a scenario unlikely to repeat itself, given that she’s deep into debate prep. In more recent interviews, such as on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in October and with CNN’s Anderson Cooper in late June when she defended Biden, she’s seemed far more at ease.

Ahead of Thursday’s interview, Republicans are also demanding answers about why Harris dropped a number of positions she held during her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign, including “Medicare for All.” Her campaign has also indicated that she no longer opposes fracking — a key issue in Pennsylvania, where Trump has highlighted the commonwealth’s carbon energy industry.

The Trump campaign and conservative media on Wednesday portrayed the presence of Walz, the governor of Minnesota, in the interview as a crutch for the vice president. But it’s not unusual for presidential candidates to appear with their vice presidential nominees. Trump sat with his vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, in a friendly interview on Fox News last month that ended with a “fan questions” segment. The former president also did a joint interview with newly-named vice presidential nominee Mike Pence in his Trump Tower penthouse on “60 Minutes” in 2016. The future vice president tried to play down the extreme views of his handpicked candidate, while Trump repeatedly interrupted him.

Harris had a joint interview with Biden in 2020, when she was running for vice president. Democratic nominee Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine also did the same in 2016.

Partisan squabbles over the interview aside, there are many reasons why it makes sense for presidential candidates to subject themselves to tough interviews. Someone who hopes to run the country should feel obligated to explain what he plans to do, even if it might please his campaign managers to limit appearances to risk-free, partisan media outlets and empathetic social media influencers. The more interviews a politician does, the more practiced he becomes. A more robust media plan might have helped Harris hone her skills before she debated Trump.

Successful presidencies are also built on political capital garnered during the campaign. The days when presidential campaigns were based on weighty policy speeches may be over, and time is short in this compressed race for such events.

Yet previous presidential candidates have proven their credibility by entrusting voters with their policies. In 1960, for example, Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy laid out an agenda on the campaign trail on issues such as civil rights, housing, and foreign policy that became the basis for policy achievements in his presidency and Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent administration.

Thursday’s interview comes as Democrats debate whether Harris should focus primarily on policy issues or on drawing character contrasts with Trump. She tells voters they have a “fleeting” chance to move past his cacophony.

Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s former White House communications director, said Harris should use the opportunity to make clear who she’s fighting for and pledge to protect voters from what she sees as Republican attacks on their freedoms.

“I think she should not get too carried away with the idea that this is a policy test for every potential part of a Harris administration, and rather use it as an opportunity to get her message across,” said Bedingfield, now a CNN commentator.

But Leon Panetta, former CIA director, defense secretary and White House chief of staff, told CNN’s Brianna Keilar that candidates should discuss issues they believe in to show they can move the country on a better path.

He added: “You have to know very well the answers to specific questions because that will test whether you are just talking in general terms or whether you really want to introduce specific policies.”