The real reason Kamala Harris needs media scrutiny

The reason for this avoidance is no mystery, of course: Harris wants to win. Her unscripted moments as vice president and as a 2020 candidate often hurt her politically. President Joe Biden’s late decision to step aside gave the Harris campaign a unique opportunity to minimize media scrutiny of her policy views by running out the clock. But in the process, the public is losing something important — commitments from Harris that could help constrain her in office.

It’s worth going back to the basics. Why should a candidate for office need to regularly answer questions publicly, anyway? Sure, it’s a small-d democratic “norm” — a long-standing expectation of the American political process. But that’s not much of an argument in a time when norms are regularly set aside in a ruthless quest for political advantage.

Or perhaps, norm or not, Harris should submit to normal media questioning because the electorate demands it. The New York Times’s Patrick Healy argued that Harris “needs to start proving herself outside her comfort zone” to win voters’ trust. Does she? Harris has pulled into a national polling lead despite being less accessible to the media than Biden was before dropping out. Enough voters might prefer a candidate to whom they have had relatively little exposure when the alternative is Trump.

A final reason might be that even if Harris can cruise to the White House in a lightning campaign while avoiding policy questioning, her governance would suffer for it. As the Economist put it, “governing is better if its winning mandate contains a programme.” True, but a vague mandate is better than no mandate at all, and Harris’s campaign has clearly calculated that exposing her to the media in a traditional way is a path to defeat.

The only compelling argument against Harris’s media-shielding strategy, then, is that she must answer questions so she will be constrained if she wins. The real damage might not be to abstract political norms, or to her campaign, but to the American people once she is in office.

For example, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), told the Dispatch that the Harris campaign told him it was “precisely aligned” with his “term limits” plan that would kick Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court in an unconstitutional power grab.

Harris ought to be asked about this claim by Whitehouse — the same way Trump has been forced to respond to Project 2025 and other ideas developed by his co-partisans — so the public can keep her in check. If Harris says Whitehouse’s claim is accurate, it might hurt her electorally. But if she disavows Whitehouse’s bill, then opponents can use that statement against her if she pushes something similar to tamper with the judiciary during her presidency.

Think of the media not as a co-participant with candidates in the electoral process, but as a representative of the American people against political candidates. When reporters ask politicians about abortion, for example, and the politicians offer moderate-sounding assurances, the media is helping to box candidates in — making sure they don’t seize more power than voters meant to hand them.

Of course, this doesn’t always work: Politicians renege on commitments. But when they do, their campaign comments can be fodder for political accountability, allowing the opposition to paint them as dishonest.

The mainstream media has significant power to shape the behavior of Democratic presidential candidates, as the frenzy that expelled Biden from the race showed. If liberal outlets could embarrass Biden into stepping aside, they could also embarrass Harris into engaging in a modicum of policy discussion.

But it’s important to be clear-eyed about the reason such discussion is urgent and necessary: To box Harris in, extracting commitments not only of what she would do, but of what she wouldn’t. Of course Harris is not interested in having her mandate limited in this way, but with political guardrails eroding, that’s precisely the purpose of a free press.