Vice President Kamala Harris, in her first major interview since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she rose to the top of the Democratic ticket, pledged Thursday to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet if she wins the election, saying that would reflect her interest in hearing a variety of views.
“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” Harris told CNN in an early excerpt of an interview that was set to air in full later Thursday night. “I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who was a Republican.”
There is a long history of presidents appointing members of the opposite party to their Cabinet, but it is not something Biden or former president Donald Trump did over the past eight years.
Harris, who is Black and Asian American, brushed aside Trump’s false recent assertion that until she “happened to turn Black,” she had not embraced that part of her identity.
“Same old, tired playbook,” Harris said. “Next question, please.”
In the early excerpts, Harris also addressed criticism that her positions have shifted significantly on major issues including climate change and immigration, saying several times, “My values have not changed.”
It was unclear from the excerpts how forcefully Harris intended to repudiate policies she embraced during the 2020 Democratic primaries, including her support for a sweeping “Green New Deal” and for a border policy significantly more lenient than the approach recently adopted by the Biden administration.
“I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real,” Harris said. “That it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines.”
She added: “My value around what we need to do to secure our border — that value has not changed. I spent two terms as the attorney general of California prosecuting transnational criminal organizations.”
The interview, part of a prime-time special called “The First Interview: Harris & Walz A CNN Exclusive,” also marked Harris’s first joint interview with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who sat next to her in the first clips that aired.
Harris and Walz taped the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday afternoon during a campaign swing through the battleground state of Georgia. The interview took place at Kim’s Cafe, a Black-owned restaurant in Savannah.
The interview comes at a crucial moment in Harris’s campaign, marking a new phase as she attempts to build upon the momentum of rallies and an energized convention and works to prove how she deals with less-scripted settings.
She had faced growing pressure to sit for an in-depth interview, after sometimes struggling with such sessions during her tenure as vice president. Harris is likely to face her next major unscripted moment at a debate against Trump scheduled for Sept. 10 in Philadelphia. Trump has struggled to find his footing in a reshaped race, and his allies hoped the interview and the debate would persuade voters that Harris struggles in spontaneous settings.
The CNN interview took on outsize importance because of the compressed campaign schedule, and the fact that Harris has not faced the kind of scrutiny that presidential nominees typically face during a grueling primary campaign.
“She hasn’t done an interview,” Trump said during a news conference earlier this month. “She can’t do an interview. She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview. But I look forward to the debates.”
Harris told reporters nearly three weeks ago that she wanted to “get an interview scheduled before the end of the month,” and this was the first opportunity for her to respond to questions about her new role in the race.
Bash, who conducted the interview, was one of the moderators in the presidential debate between Trump and Biden, who stumbled so badly during the faceoff that he was forced to leave the race. Bash recently interviewed Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, and has also interviewed Harris in the past.
In the interview, Harris suggested that her perspective had broadened in recent years.
“Four years of being vice president — I’ll tell you, one of the aspects, to your point, is traveling the country extensively,” she said. “I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems.”
Republicans have noted that Thursday’s interview was conducted jointly with Harris and Walz, saying that showed Harris could not handle it alone and needed Walz for support. But while Harris has not done many one-on-one interviews, it is not unusual for a new presidential ticket to sit for a joint appearance shortly after a party convention. Trump, in fact, did so in 2016 with his then-running mate, Mike Pence, and Harris did one with Biden in 2020.
Still, Harris has had an uneven relationship with the media in her nearly four years as vice president. Her aides say she is a naturally cautious politician, but also that she is acutely aware of the intense spotlight that never leaves her.
She is a history-making figure and was initially viewed as Biden’s natural successor to lead the Democratic Party when he selected her as running mate. Several news organizations assigned reporters to track her tenure, confronting her with a strange level of scrutiny for a vice president wading into a new job.
Harris’s first year was marked by an exchange with NBC’s Lester Holt in which she awkwardly downplayed the urgency of visiting the U.S.-Mexico border, as Republicans and other critics had urged her to do.
That moment vexed White House officials, and for months after the Holt interview, Harris looked at such engagements warily.
Harris increased her media engagement in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the national right to an abortion. Bash was the first to interview Harris after that decision, as the vice president said the administration would do everything in its power to protect medication abortion.
Harris also was Biden’s chief defender in the hours after the rocky June 27 presidential debate.
“What we saw tonight is the president making a very clear contrast with Donald Trump on all the issues that matter to the American people,” Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper at the time. “Yes, there was a slow start, but it was a strong finish. And what became very clear through the course of the night is that Joe Biden is fighting on behalf of the American people.”
During her presidential campaign, Harris has spoken with reporters under the wing of Air Force Two after the release of American captives from Russia, and she routinely talks to journalists in off-the-record sessions at the back of her vice-presidential plane.
Still, those engagements typically last a handful of minutes and provide few opportunities for follow-ups.