Facing off against former President Trump in a margin-of-error showdown with less than three weeks to go until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is stepping up her conversations with the media during the final stretch on the campaign.
That effort ramps up a notch on Wednesday, as the vice president is scheduled to sit down in battleground Pennsylvania with Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier for an interview that will run on ‘Special Report’ at 6 p.m. ET.
Harris will speak with Fox News following an afternoon campaign event in Bucks County, a crucial swing county in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs.
Baier said the Democratic presidential nominee is expected to sit for approximately 25-30 minutes at around 5 p.m. ET, about an hour before ‘Special Report’ airs live.
‘We are going to run it uninterrupted, unedited, all the way,’ Baier said on the eve of the interview.
The vice president’s first formal interview on Fox News will give her a chance to speak directly to viewers across the ideological spectrum who normally don’t watch the rival cable news networks CNN and MSNBC.
‘Special Report’ is regularly among the most-watched programs on cable news, and the show’s Common Ground segment features political leaders from across the aisle discussing the issues of the day with the goal of finding compromise.
‘We have a lot of eyeballs. We have Democrats, independents and Republicans,’ Baier said. ‘We have the biggest cable news audience. And this is probably going to get a lot more eyeballs. I think tough but fair is what I pitched it as. And I think that’s what they’re going to see.’
Harris largely avoided interviews after replacing President Biden atop the Democrats’ 2024 ticket in mid-July. Her first formal sitdown interview – with CNN – didn’t occur until late August. But she has ramped up her media appearances in recent weeks, including interviews with CBS News’ ’60 Minutes,’ ABC’s ‘The View,’ late night talk show host Stephen Colbert, radio personality Howard Stern, and numerous podcasts. Most of those encounters were perceived as friendly interviews.
But the interview with Baier on Fox News may feed the perception that the vice president in the closing stretch of the campaign is open to facing tough questions.
‘She knows there are going to be hard questions. She can handle those,’ seasoned Democratic strategist and communicator Chris Moyer told Fox News. ‘Going through that process and handling that, you’re kind of going behind enemy lines a little bit.’
Moyer, a veteran of multiple Democratic presidential campaigns, argued that ‘doing well in that is a good boost for the campaign, and voters like to know that they’re going to elect somebody who can handle not just the friendly interviews.’
Harris becomes the first Democratic presidential nominee in eight years to sit for an interview on Fox News – 2016 standard-bearer Hillary Clinton spoke with Chris Wallace.
But leading Harris surrogates – including Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg – have made high-profile appearances on Fox News this summer and autumn.
And Democratic vice presidential nominee, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, was interviewed on ‘Fox News Sunday’ the past two weekends.
Aides to the Harris running mate reached out to Fox News to schedule his second appearance.
‘Folks deserve to hear where we stand on this. Vice President Harris and I have an agenda for, you know, a new way forward, a manufacturing agenda. I was just in Michigan this week. And I think folks are still undecided out there. And I appreciate you. You ask good, hard questions and your viewers get a chance to hear,’ Walz told ‘Fox News Sunday’ host Shannon Bream this past weekend.
The Harris sitdown with Baier comes the same day that Fox News will run a townhall with Trump, with the former president fielding questions on issues such as abortion and child care from an all-female audience.
The program, recorded on Tuesday in battleground Georgia, will air Wednesday at 11 a.m. ET on ‘The Faulkner Focus.’
Fox News’ Brian Flood contributed to this report