Vice president Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, will sit down on Thursday for their first major television interview of their presidential campaign as the duo travels in south-east Georgia on a bus tour.
The interview with CNN’s Dana Bash will give Ms Harris a chance to quell criticism that she has eschewed uncontrolled environments, while also giving her a fresh platform to define her campaign and test her political mettle ahead of an upcoming debate with former President Donald Trump set for September 10.
But it also carries risk as her team tries to build on momentum from the ticket shake-up following Joe Biden’s exit and last week’s Democratic National Convention.
Joint interviews during an election year are a fixture in politics; Mr Biden and Ms Harris, Mr Trump and Mike Pence, Barack Obama and Mr Biden – all did them at a similar point in the race.
Ms Harris has not yet done an in-depth interview since she became her party’s standard bearer five weeks ago, though she did sit for several while she was still Mr Biden’s running mate.
Ms Harris and Mr Walz remain somewhat unknown to voters, unlike Mr Trump and Mr Biden of whom voters had near-universal awareness and opinion.
The CNN interview, airing on Thursday evening, takes place during her two-day bus tour through south-east Georgia campaigning for the critical battleground state, a trip that culminates on Thursday with a rally in Savannah.
Harris campaign officials believe that in order to win the state over Mr Trump in November, they must make inroads in GOP strongholds across the state.
Ms Harris, during her time as vice president, has done on-camera and print interviews with the Associated Press and many other outlets, a much more frequent pace than the president – except for Biden’s late-stage, media blitz following his disastrous debate performance that touched off the end of his campaign.
Ms Harris’ lack of media access over the past month has become one of Republicans’ key attack lines.
The Trump campaign has kept a tally of the days she has gone by as a candidate without giving an interview.
On Wednesday, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr Trump’s former press secretary, suggested Ms Harris needed a “babysitter” and that is why Mr Walz would be there.
“They know Kamala Harris can’t get through an interview all by herself. There is not a lot of confidence in somebody to become the leader of the free world and ask people to make her president of the United States when she can’t even sit down (for) an interview,” she said.
Mr Trump, meanwhile, has largely steered toward conservative media outlets when granting interviews, though he has held more open press conferences in recent weeks as he sought to reclaim the spotlight that Ms Harris’ elevation had claimed.
