Blame the abrupt nature of her rise to the top of the ticket or the fundamental nature of the vice presidency, but Kamala Harris is still working to introduce herself to the American people just weeks before Election Day.
Crafting the strategy to do just that is Brian Fallon, one of Harris’ most trusted aides and the campaign’s senior adviser for communications. He’s a longtime messaging maven for the party, having served as a top aide to Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton and as a co-founder of the legal advocacy group Demand Justice.
In an interview with thePlaybook Deep Dive podcast, Fallon laid out how the Harris campaign was approaching the final sprint to the election, including its efforts to overtake Donald Trump on the issue of the economy and why he thought there might still be one more presidential debate.
Fallon also suggested that Harris might make some moves in a bid to cut into Trump’s strong support among young men.
“Without previewing any particular shows or outlets that we may end up appearing on,” Fallon said, “I think it’s fair to say that we are going to take an all-of-the-above approach to her appearances, because we think that there’s all kinds of different audiences that are very open to learning more about her.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive Producer Kara Tabor and Senior Producer Alex Keeney. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here:
One thing that Vice President Harris does differently than President Biden is how she engages with Donald Trump. At the DNC, she kind of framed him as an unserious person with possibly serious consequences. It feels like she is trying to make Trump seem small — not a dangerous, terrifying dictator who has big plans to dismantle democracy. Did this idea come from her?
You’re right to notice that there’s sort of a duality to how we address him, because I think that’s the way that the voters hold both thoughts in their minds about him: that he’s an unserious man in many ways, but who represents a serious threat to democracy if he gets elected and to fundamental freedoms that people take for granted. And she talks about them in equal measure. Like you mentioned at the debate, she talked about how if you tune into his rallies — she had the idea to literally encourage people to watch one of his rallies — and she talked about how he will invoke Hannibal Lecter, sharks and how windmills cause cancer.
But what’s really lurking behind his candidacy is this Project 2025 agenda, which our polling shows the public is very aware of. The name recognition of Project 2025 is extremely high and people are pretty familiar with its contents and people sharply disagree with what’s in there. So it rings true to people when we talk about the serious consequences. And with a lot of the persuadable voters that remain undecided — talking about his threats to weaponize the Justice Department, talking about how he wants to purge career civil servants in favor of loyalists throughout the government — these are things that really resonate. So she’ll continue to talk about these qualities of his in equal measure.
As journalists, we obviously care about media coverage and how much access reporters have to her. She is tracking well behind Trump and JD Vance in press conferences and interviews. What is the strategy here?
Number one, people should not read too much into what some have described as a shortage or a lack of interviews in the first six weeks of the campaign.
But it took a long time before we got the first one.
But keep in mind all the things that she had to do as a candidate that was suddenly thrust to the top of the ticket: She had to merge a Wilmington operation that was built for a different candidate entirely and make it hers; she had to go through what would normally be a six-month process to vet and choose a running mate — she had to do that in basically three weeks; she had to plan a convention from scratch and plan a set of remarks for the convention that would be really her first high-profile opportunity to introduce herself to the public; she had to get ready for and succeed on the debate stage, which after the convention, was the next most important setting — 70 million eyeballs and we took prep for that seriously. And so she had a lot of work that she had to do in a very truncated schedule just to get the campaign off the ground.
Now we’re entering a phase of the campaign where the running mate is chosen. The convention has happened.
The last debate has happened.
We still think we might get another debate. We could talk about that. The one and only debate agreed to so far has happened.
Now we’re entering a phase of the campaign where we still have the imperative of needing to introduce her to a good swath of the electorate. We know that the more that people get to see her and hear from her directly, the more they like her. So we have every desire and intention to continue to put her in settings that won’t command the same number of eyeballs as, say, the convention or the debate, but that can get her out there and in front of audiences that can be as large as possible.
So are we talking about one of these a week? Two?
I think we’re going to do a mix of things in terms of a lot of battleground state media, whether it’s local television, like we did ABC 6 in Philadelphia last week, or a lot of radio. She did a nationally syndicated Spanish language radio program, Chiquibaby, earlier this week. And I think we’ll mix in national press outlets. I think we’ll do a lot of, you know, digital-first sort of opportunities, podcasts, late night shows, daytime talk shows.
If you want to get a sense of the types of engagements she’s likely to do in the remaining 50 or so days of the campaign, look at what she was doing in the first seven months of this calendar year prior to the ticket switch. Because Kirsten Allen, who has run her communications office on the official side, had her doing a heavy rotation of daytime talk shows, national print interviews with magazines, national sit-downs with television outlets like 60 Minutes late last year, cable hits — she did like 80 plus interviews in the first seven months of this year. And so that is a default setting for Kamala Harris in terms of media engagement. And I think what the remaining 50 days of this campaign will look like is something closer to that.
You mentioned doing another debate. You’ve tweeted about this. Vice President Harris has talked about it. But former President Trump has said there will be no more debates. Do you guys feel like that’s the end of that possibility?
We don’t think that’s the last word on this.
Why not?
Because he has said that before and then changed his mind, including on the ABC debate that did end up happening. He pulled out of that at least once, maybe twice, depending on how you count it. At the end of the day, I think his team realized that he needed to debate. And, you know, he has a hard time turning down an opportunity to appear in front of that many people. We very much would like to have another debate in the month of October. The vice president has said that. She said that she thinks that they owe it to the voters. It would be very strange if there was only one debate. You know, historically, there’s three.
There’s been two so far. And one ended with Biden getting kicked out of the race.
And then think about the fact that we do have a vice presidential debate on the books on Oct. 1, hosted by CBS. It would be very strange for the last word in this campaign to be a vice presidential debate.
So we think it’s appropriate to have a bookend there after the vice presidential debate, but before Election Day, where the vice president and former President Trump have the opportunity to take the stage again.
I think that it will be hard for him to maintain that position as the scrutiny on this issue ramps up. I think he’s widely perceived to have lost that debate. The vice president gave a commanding performance at that debate. So we’re going into this eyes wide open to the fact that it would be impossible to live up to the expectations that will be created for her on account of how strong her appearance was last time.
At the debate, Linsey Davis asked Harris why she’s changed her mind on different policies, such as fracking, immigration, assault weapon buybacks, etc. The vice president didn’t really answer. She said that her values haven’t changed. Has she told you what over the last 3 ½ years has led her to change her mind?
I think she said it. And I think what she’s conveyed is that the experience of being vice president for the last 3 ½ years has shown her the ability to make good on priorities that she’s had for a long time throughout her career in ways that didn’t necessarily require hewing to the positions that she may have staked out in 2019. It has convinced her of how you can forge bipartisan consensus on some of these issues if you tack towards practical solutions.
So tack to the center?
Well, I’ll give you an example. People want to talk about her past support for “Medicare for All.” Under this administration, they have reduced the cost of premiums for folks under the ACA. And so that is strengthening the ACA as the method for making good on her value of making health care a right, not a privilege for those that can afford it.
The Green New Deal. They passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which has made historic investments in a clean energy future and created over 300,000 clean energy jobs. And they’ve achieved that without needing to push the Green New Deal as the one-and-only solution.
Were the positions she took in 2019 more a product of where I think a lot of the Democrats thought the party was at the time, which was further to the left? Were her 2019 policies the real her or are we seeing that now?
I think in that campaign and in that period of time, the Democratic Party wanted to stand in stark contrast to Donald Trump and outlined positions that showed the depth of our disagreement with Donald Trump. I think that these were statements reflecting strongly held values that not just she but other Democrats at the time held.
But then when you’re in it, when you’re in the role of governing, you have to make good faith efforts to try to achieve progress. And oftentimes that requires working with people across the aisle and even within your own caucus sometimes, because a lot of these things, like the Inflation Reduction Act, required compromises with more moderate members of the caucus like Joe Manchin.
A Times/Siena poll noted that there is a 51-point gender gap in swing states Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for young voters aged 18 to 29. Your campaign has talked about meeting people where they are. Have you been in discussions internally about her going on podcasts that cater to young men? Joe Rogan, Theo Von, places that Trump and allies of his have gone on?
Without previewing any particular shows or outlets that we may end up appearing on: I think it’s fair to say that we are going to take an all-of-the-above approach to her appearances because we think that there’s all kinds of different audiences that are very open to learning more about her.
Even before she became the candidate at the top of the ticket, she was doing an economic opportunity tour, and really the audience for that economic opportunity tour was young men and in particular young men of color. And the message of entrepreneurship, increasing access to capital and giving you the tools and the resources to be able to start your own business was a project and a priority of hers that grew out of a bunch of dinners and meetings that she was convening with Black business leaders about how to speak to the aspirations and the ambitions of young men.
She did about five stops, I think, on that tour before she ended up becoming the candidate at the top of the ticket and that went over quite well. That’s a message that I think she can bring to those audiences on the stump, but also in media appearances. So without committing to any particular outlet or host that she might do an interview with — absolutely, I think that we’re looking at things like that.
Are we going to be surprised by some of the choices that you guys make?
Maybe, because again, we feel like it will be a show of confidence on our part about the reach that we think she has.
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Why do you think there is this intense gender gap? Obviously, there’s a gender gap for Trump in women, but she has that same issue just mirrored with young men.
Well, I don’t think that’s the final word on what her standing will be with young men, because she is just being introduced to the country. She’s been vice president for 3½ years. But the vice presidency is, historically, a counterintuitively poor platform from which to be a nationally known figure, because by definition, you’re in the shadow of the person who you share the ticket with. And so she’s not been well known. In the 7 or 8 weeks since she’s been the candidate, the more people have gotten to know her, the more they like her and the more open-minded they are to her.
You mentioned merging the Wilmington operation and making it her own. We’ve reported and other outlets have reported the tensions that have been created when you’re trying to merge all of those things. How’s it going?
It’s a truly seamless, well-integrated operation.
Seamless?
Yes. There has been a mix at this point of people that came up as Obama people, that came up as Joe Biden people, that came up as Hillary Clinton, people that are all rowing in the same direction now. And people that were longtime die-hard Vice President [Harris] people and people that are totally new to her. And that Wilmington operation is humming and making it work.
So we’re not going to hear any more stories of tensions and people feeling layered over and all of those things?
No, there’s no time for that at this point. And truly, the operation, in a very brief amount of time, the roles have become clear and the mentality has flowed from the top. Jen [O’Malley Dillon] has done a very good job. Jen runs a meeting like nobody else I’ve ever encountered in terms of how much ground she covers in a 30-minute meeting, how much she wants to hear from people and how much she drives hard issues to a conclusion and to a decision point. She’s extremely decisive, extremely no-nonsense and she is somebody that does not suffer fools and that is a credit to her.
David Plouffe is now a staple on all the deliberative meetings that the campaign has. I feel like every time David opens his mouth, I learn something that I hadn’t thought of — just super incisive, a consumer of data and really talented at taking data and applying it to everyday tactical scenarios that you have to make a decision on.
Stephanie Cutter, who was my very first boss in politics, is helping map out all of those big moments in media engagements that we’re just talking about. And then she has in Sheila Nix and Lorraine Voles two people that understand what makes her tick every day and have channeled that and imparted that to folks that are newcomers to the operation.
You mentioned the VP debate with Tim Walz and JD Vance. What should we expect? Because in her debate it seems you guys came up with the baiting strategy. What should people expect on Oct. 1?
First of all, we were planning for a JD Vance debate for a little while. And so he’s a very sharp, skilled debater. As you mentioned, he’s done like 70 Sunday shows. I feel like he does the “Full Ginsburg” every weekend and it’s not usually not helpful for their campaign. It’s usually defending himself from his latest controversial comments. But he’s out there all the time and he’s very good at evading a question or putting an interviewer back on their heels or expressing moral indignation at a question’s premise.
And Walz says he’s not good at debates.
And [Vance is] a Yale-educated guy and so he’s slick and he’s going to be a formidable debate opponent for Gov. Walz. I think fundamentally, VP debates always turn not on the individual positions or past comments that the running mates have made. They’re proxy debates. And so the contrast that’ll be on display fundamentally is the contrast at the top of the ticket, just through the proxies of these running mates. And so JD Vance, on the one hand, a very skilled debater, very good at swashbuckling with questioners. But he’ll have to defend the Trump record. And that’s a hard assignment for anybody to carry out. And you’ve seen JD Vance struggle with this. He’s sometimes gotten ahead of Donald Trump and filled in positions for him and then had to go back and change it or contradict it. And so it’s a tough assignment to have to defend the Trump record. And so in that sense, I don’t envy JD Vance and that’s what I would expect Gov. Walz will focus on.
You’ve been here before yourself: September before an election, feeling kind of good, working for a woman candidate, thinking that you guys are about to make history. How different does this feel? Does it feel different at all?
It feels different in the sense that this has never happened before in modern campaign history. This is a situation where the campaign is being built at the same time that the airplane is flying.
People always say that but you actually are having that experience in real time.
The other thing that I think is true is that the candidate herself has created this mindset among the staff that no matter what the polls say, we are running as the underdogs. And there is a very sort of upstart quality to the campaign, both because of its surprising origin story of what happened in July and the ticket switch and then all these challenges that we’ve had to execute that usually might take a year’s worth of planning and have had to be done on two weeks’ notice. And just the fact that Donald Trump is a formidable candidate who’s won once and come very close a second time and has a very stubborn level of support.
The underdog mentality is one that she truly, genuinely does feel and brings to every meeting and brings to every conversation with the staff. And so in 2016, at this point in the calendar, was there a feeling that we have work to do but we felt like we were in the driver’s seat? Yes, there was. In this campaign, it feels like we’re fighting for every inch and no one is taking anything for granted. The schedule reflects that we’re campaigning everywhere.
What was she going to call him on the debate stage when she goes “this …”?
She was just gathering her thoughts.
Oh, was she? Because the internet seems to think she was going to use her favorite curse word, which happens to be “motherfucka.”
I saw that clip resurfaced recently. But I think she was just gathering her thoughts, Eugene.
Are you sure about that? “This … former president?”
I think that moment that you’re referencing was a sort of symbol of the fact that even though we very much wanted the mics to be unmuted, she did quite well with the muted mics in terms of being expressive and in terms of capturing her genuine reactions in the moment through nonverbal means.
At the debate, who came up with the strategy to bait him?
That was less of a strategy than… I mean, if you look at all the moments that people say, “Oh, that was done to get under his skin,” all of them corresponded with a substantive point that she was making. Like when she talked about watching his rallies and you’ll hear him talk about Hannibal Lecter and people leaving early, the next words out of her mouth were, “What you don’t hear him talking about is his plans for you.” And so that was a substantive point that she was making.
But she knew she was going to piss him off by talking about his rallies.
The other point where she talked about not everybody gets a $400 million gift from their father to start off in the business world and then ends up filing for bankruptcy six times, she was making a point about emphasizing how she can relate to middle-class life and he can’t. And so there was a point beyond getting under his skin to all of those exchanges.
In a way, even though we didn’t have the mics unmuted, what she was able to do was create a similar effect, which was to level the charge at him that he then felt compelled to answer. It just didn’t happen in a direct exchange, but she still sort of simulated that same effect with the strategy that she deployed and the credit for that performance goes entirely to her. I mean, a good prep process can be helpful, but it’s candidate performance at the end of the day. That is what is the difference between success and failure.
So the baiting wasn’t something she practiced?
No.
But I think if you look at her —
At all?
No, I think that most of the prep sessions are spent in a similar way as what I imagine the Trump folks do. They discuss it as “policy time,” I think. And that’s really what most prep is for any campaign. You’re not doing mocks 100 percent of the time. You’re going over the points about the effect of his 20 percent tariffs, the economic impact of that has been estimated to be $4,000 in increased costs for the average family per year. And then the performance of it all is something that only the candidate can control in terms of how they do it. How she handled it on the debate stage was a credit to her and her preparation. And she kicked his butt.
The Teamsters this week declined to endorse either Trump or Harris. They typically endorse the Democrat in this. Almost 60 percent in their straw poll of Teamsters wanted Trump. When Biden was in the race, just 36 percent of them favored Trump. Why does that constituency see Harris so much less favorably than Biden?
Well, I think there’s some questions about how scientific the polling is. I will say this: First of all, we’re extremely proud to have the support of the vast majority of labor organizations in this country, whether it’s UAW or NEA or AFT.
With respect to the Teamsters — even though the national made the decision that they made to do the non-endorsement — in the wake of that you’ve seen locals come out strongly representing hundreds of thousands of Teamsters in key battleground states like Wisconsin and Nevada, Pennsylvania. So you’ve seen huge expressions of support from the rank and file in the form of the locals that have announced in just the last 24 hours. And the other point I’ll make on this is she knew full well when she went into that meeting on Monday at the Teamsters headquarters that it was quite likely that she would not get the endorsement. And she was briefed on that. She knew what the politics were at the leadership of the Teamsters Union.
But the underlying lack of interest from the Teamsters kind of speaks to a larger question of how Harris is going to win back those working-class white voters in places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Does she think she can make up those numbers with other groups or how much does she need the folks that make up something like a Teamsters union?
Well, I will make a prediction. I think that it’s quite possible that by the end of this election cycle that she will be more trusted than Trump on handling the economy.
She has a lot to make up there.
Well, there’s a lot of indicators already that she is narrowing the gap, if not running even with him, according to some polls. She polls very strongly among likely voters on that question. And people are still getting to know her. And the benefit that we have is the upside potential with her. The more that voters get to know about her background and her plans, the more they like her. Whereas with Trump, the more that they’re reminded about what his presidency was like, the more that they’re reminded about how extreme some of his future plans are and what the Project 2025 Agenda would do.
But more and more people like him now than they did in 2020 or 2016.
We think on the economy, to the extent that it is one of, if not the top, issue among some of the key voters that you’re framing the question around, we think that we have some really favorable comparisons to drive between her and him on the economy. But it requires introducing a lot of new information to people. And so by the time we’re done litigating the case both in paid media and in just having her out there doing appearances and at rallies and whatnot, by the time we’re finished making the case, this is why I feel like we have a winning hand once we get the opportunity to prosecute the case with the public. She is of the middle class and Donald Trump isn’t.
Born from the middle class, but she’s not middle class anymore.
Well, she had a middle-class upbringing and she’s been weaving that part of her bio into her appearances at every opportunity, including her convention speech, including at the debate.
Including in the interview I did with her this week.
Yeah, talking about being raised by a working mother and growing up in a neighborhood that was modest and it took until she was in high school for her mother to be able to afford to buy their first home. And so she can relate to the experience of people that are feeling the pinch of high prices right now. Whereas Donald Trump never could. He never had that experience.
Number two, she’s got plans that one economic authority after another is saying it’s going to be better for the economy than his. And so I think we just have to have the appropriate amount of time to make that case and break through with that message. And the more we do that, the more she eats into the advantage that he currently has on that all important issue of the economy. I think she can overtake him by the end of the campaign on that issue.
Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina and the Republican gubernatorial candidate, apparently said years ago that he wants slavery to come back. He called himself a “black Nazi” online. There’s lots of other wild things online from his past. He said he’s staying in the race. I’m curious if you guys think that is helpful for you guys in North Carolina.
So I’ve not studied the most recent revelations, but even before today, Mark Robinson is somebody that is known in North Carolina as an extreme candidate. Josh Stein, on the other hand, is a strong candidate for us in that race. Solid record as the state’s attorney general. And a lot of indicators have him in the lead even before this.
If you win North Carolina, win Georgia, does that help solve what a lot of Democrats say could be a Pennsylvania problem, that she’s maybe not as great in Pennsylvania as she is in the other blue wall states?
So we don’t think about it in those terms. We don’t think about it in a zero sum sort of way.
Not publicly, at least.
No, but truly we’re competing to win everywhere. And we’re probably spending more time in Pennsylvania than anywhere else.
I was just there with her this week.
Yes. And she’s campaigning in rural parts of the commonwealth. She’s campaigning in red counties where we could expect Trump to win, but eating into his margin might be the difference in winning statewide in going to those places, which she’ll continue to do. She was in Savannah, Georgia, a couple of weeks ago. When we were in a photo line there, somebody pointed out that it hasn’t been since Bill Clinton that a Democrat campaigned in a general election in Savannah.
And so we’re going to go to markets and we’re going to go to interior counties and we’re going to go to red, red parts of the map where a Democrat might not win. But it serves two purposes to go there: One is you can erode the margin of victory, which could help translate to a statewide victory. But second, it also sends an important message symbolically: that you’re campaigning everywhere, that you’re trying to be a president for all Americans and that’s been a key theme of hers. It’s why I think we’re attracting a lot of support from Republicans and we’re going to continue to emphasize that on the trail.
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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Chiquibaby, a Spanish-language radio program Harris recently appeared on.
