Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will participate in a sit-down interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday, the network announced on Tuesday.
The broadcast will mark the first joint interview with Harris and Walz since he joined the campaign and the first time Harris will sit for an in-depth, on-the-record conversation since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed her to be the Democratic presidential nominee.
The interview is expected to take place while Harris and Walz are traveling through south Georgia on Thursday on a bus tour of the battleground state. It is scheduled to air on CNN at 9 p.m. Eastern on Thursday.
Bash, a veteran of the network, was one of the moderators of June’s presidential debate between Biden and former president Donald Trump. Biden’s halting debate performance that night has largely been seen as the impetus for the broader conversations within the Democratic Party that led to his decision to bow out of the 2024 race.
Harris has faced growing pressure to participate in an on-the-record, in-depth interview since she emerged as the Democratic presidential candidate last month and, last week, became the party’s formal nominee. Since taking the mantle from Biden, Harris has been pressed to take part in a comprehensive interview to face difficult questions on a number of issues, including her major policy pivots. She told campaign reporters nearly three weeks ago that she wanted to “get an interview scheduled before the end of the month” — and CNN’s interview will come in two days ahead of her own deadline.
Harris has participated in sit-down interviews with Bash during other key political moments in recent years. She told Bash during a 2020 sit-down that Trump and then-Attorney General William P. Barr were living in “a different reality” by denying the existence of systemic racism. Harris sat with Bash for her first one-on-one interview with the network since being sworn in as vice president and gave the CNN anchor the first vice-presidential interview after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. In the latter interview, Harris made news when she said that she never believed Trump’s Supreme Court justices would preserve the landmark abortion law.
Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser, said in a statement, “Since it’s all the American people can get, we will expect that CNN holds them accountable for their past failures and the constant disavowal of years of dangerously liberal policies they’ve supported right up until their pollsters took over a month ago.”
On the bus tour, the Harris campaign has said that Harris and Walz “will meet directly with voters in their communities.” The swing through south Georgia is expected to conclude with a rally in the Savannah area featuring Harris on Thursday night.