Who Won Kamala Harris’s Fox News Interview With Bret Baier?

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Harris “booked a debate on Fox News”

CNN’s Brian Stelter thinks Harris effectively took on Baier in lieu of Trump:

I think Trump refused to debate Kamala Harris again. So Harris did the next best thing. She booked a debate on Fox News, and that’s what this was tonight. She essentially walked into a Trump campaign field office because anchor Bret Baier, who is, you know, a solid journalist, he is also incredibly sympathetic to Trump because that’s what his fans want. That’s what his viewers want. His viewers want him to represent the Trump point of view. So, it was almost as if you had a Trump surrogate interviewing Kamala Harris.

And look, adversarial interviews are a good thing. We should root for them. We should want more of them. You know, you’re so fantastic at adversarial interviews where we challenge newsmakers and we get the answers out of them. But yes, this was a Rorschach test. Some people think Baier was mansplaining. Other people think Harris was filibustering. I think at the end of the day, this is all about one word. The word “tough.” It showed that Harris was tough. She went into the so-called Fox den, and that’s how Harris’s campaign’s promoting it tonight.

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It was one of Harris’s best media performances of the campaign

Opined Mehdi Hasan on X, responding the above pushback from Harris on Baier’s downplaying of Trump’s “enemy within” rhetoric:

I wouldn’t go on Fox and I often say Dems shouldn’t go on Fox. It’s a propaganda network. But this is the best media performance that I’ve seen from Harris for a while, she does way better here, way more passion talking Trump, than when facing softballs from Colbert, etc.

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It was a “trainwreck of epic proportions” for Harris

So argues Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Over and over again, Baier tried to get Harris to answer for her record and her changing positions. And over and over again, Harris refused to offer any specifics and attacked Donald Trump …

There is no doubt whatsoever that Team Kamala made as big of a strategic error in doing this interview as Team Biden made in doing the debate with Donald Trump. Harris lost her cool almost immediately after being challenged on her record, and grew louder and higher-pitched as she grew more desperate to vent her pre-planned clichés rather than deal with the specifics of Baier’s questions. 

This was, in short, a trainwreck of epic proportions.

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Did Harris reach her target audience (Republican women)?

As the New York Times points out, the Harris campaign strategy has been reaching out to those women, and this interview was a big opportunity to do that. But it was also a limited one:

Harris campaign officials believe that talking about the current landscape of abortion restrictions in the United States is a winning strategy with female voters, particularly liberal and liberal-leaning ones. But Mr. Baier did not bring up the issue, and the vice president did not guide him there. Instead, both of them stayed focused on immigration and border security — a topic that, according to recent polls, is near the top of the list of concerns among female voters.

At several points, Mr. Baier asked the vice president if the families of women killed by undocumented immigrants were owed apologies from Ms. Harris and the Biden administration. He read off their names from a list, one by one, and played a clip from the mother of one of the victims, who blamed the administration’s border policies for the loss of her daughter. At every turn, Ms. Harris paused to express her condolences. But she repeatedly redirected the conversation back to Mr. Trump’s work to sabotage a bipartisan border bill that would have amounted to the toughest restrictions in years, and pointed out that she was the only candidate running who had prosecuted criminals, including members of cartels.

An argument for the strategy having worked, anyway:

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She brought “a few snippets of reality” to Fox News viewers — and it could make a difference

Margaret Sullivan writes at the Guardian that Harris at least interrupted Baier’s “grievance theater” to make some important statements that Fox News viewers might not get to hear very much:

First, that she is unafraid and is willing to speak to all voters. …

Second, Harris did manage to introduce a few snippets of reality to dedicated Fox viewers who probably haven’t been exposed to some of the most troubling criticisms of Trump. “That he’s unfit to serve. That he’s unstable. That’s he’s dangerous,” was how she characterized what millions of Americans are feeling. “And that people are exhausted … “

No doubt, the vast majority of regular Fox viewers have their minds made up — they’re sticking with Trump. No matter his mental decline. No matter his felony convictions. No matter the threats he makes or the threats he poses. But there may be a small percentage of the millions who tuned in who — despite all the noise and interruptions — managed to hear a reasonable, intelligent and stable alternative to Trump. Maybe some of them live in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, where the interview was recorded, or in Wisconsin or Michigan.

In this coin flip of an election, even that tiny adjustment might make all the difference.

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It probably won’t make a difference

At Slate, Alexander Sammon writes that the Baier-Harris debate revealed more about the Trump Team’s strategy than Harris’s views, in how Baier focused on what the Trump campaign seems to think are its two best (fearmongering) issues — immigration and trans people. Sammon also notes that the overall interview was unlikely to change anyone’s minds:

The subsequent 20-odd minutes were peppered with gotchas and interruptions, spliced with outside video segments meant to undercut the vice president’s answers. Whenever Harris began to say something other than exactly what Baier had clearly hoped his setup would deliver, he interjected to put her back on the back foot. (He also repeatedly demanded Harris apologize to the mother of a child who was killed by an out-of-status immigrant.) The final five minutes were almost unintelligible, marked almost entirely by crosstalk, as Baier refused to let Harris speak uninterrupted.

Of course, Harris wasn’t only fighting on the laughably slanted floor of Fox News. She was also doing battle against the station’s chyrons, which were equivalently dismissive of her answers—one read “Going Nowhere Fast”—as well as an assembled spin room, members of which spent the back half of the hourlong block praising Baier and condemning Harris’s “thin” answers and “rough” moments. …

Harris is no friend of Baier and no debate team zealot. She held her own but had few truly memorable moments. The idea that the event might have resulted in voter persuasion in either direction seems very remote. Even if an undecided 6 p.m. Fox News watcher (does such a thing exist?) tuned in for only the interview, and shut off the program before any of the postgame commentary, the interview itself was muddled enough as to afford little clarity, levity, or personality.

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Fox News couldn’t lose

At the Washington Post, Philip Bump argues that while the deck was stacked against Harris during the interview, what came after was, by design, worse. Immediately after the interview aired, the on-air pile on began, and continued for hours across multiple Fox News shows — which each host putting the most negative possible spin on what happened:

[T]his is how Fox News operates. Contradictory voices are sidelined or buried; efforts by those not on the political right to reach the channel’s audience are inevitably hampered by the channel’s infinite ability and interest in recontextualizing things to fit its political objectives. Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel, the saying used to have it, though the modern iteration might instead quantify the amount spent on right-wing pundits.

It’s unlikely that the interview will have much effect on voters. Avid Fox News watchers aren’t going to be particularly sympathetic to Harris in the first place, given that they watch the channel avidly. Harris can claim something of a moral high ground as she tries to appeal to Trump-skeptical Republicans; here she was at least showing a willingness to engage her opponents in conversation. (Imagine Trump on MSNBC!)

But there was never a chance that she was going to beat Fox News at its game. After all, Fox is always and relentlessly playing that game, a game centered on boosting Trump and tearing Harris down. For the network and its hosts, the point wasn’t Baier’s interview. It was what they could do with that interview to win their game.

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It wasn’t enough for Harris just to show up

National Review’s Noah Rothman noted on X during the interview that “Harris is definitely better when her back is up” and that “the friendly interviews are a worse format for her than the adversarial ones.” He also didn’t think she moved the needle as she needed to:

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Harris neutralized a few talking points

At Politico, Adam Wren says the interview helped Harris win the day, noting that by doing the “aggressive sit down,” she was effectively “disarming a talking point that she doesn’t participate in such high-stakes media hits”:

Harris praised her interlocutor, Bret Baier, as a “serious journalist,” a contrast from Trump saying Fox News was “owned” by her spokesperson Ian Sams. And she took a step to defuse last week’s self-own that her presidency would not be much different that Joe Biden’s.

“My presidency would not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” she told Baier. Harris survived the interview with no apparent gaffes — going on offense on a day Trump seemed mired in a defensive crouch.

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She had no answers on immigration

At the Washington Examiner, Byron York lambastes each of Harris’s responses to Baier’s questions about immigration. He argues that the interview proved she doesn’t have any answers:

So what to make of Harris’s defense of her border policy? The key takeaway is not that she did not answer the questions, even though she did not. The key takeaway is that there are no answers that would help Harris politically. The facts are what they are. What happened from 2021 to 2024 cannot be undone. Some Democrats are happy that Harris was feisty and pushed back on Baier’s questions. They think it makes her look strong. But the substance matters here. Remember the far-reaching effects of the influx of millions of illegal border crossers. They are what they are, and Harris cannot dodge responsibility for them.

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Harris did well enough to do more right-wing media

The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger definitely wants Harris to go on Rogan now:

Baier minimized Harris’s chances to hit the strong points she wanted, often literally holding up his hand to her in an effort to get her to stop talking. Harris had to hustle hard to wedge them in. Occasionally, she couldn’t. Still, she accomplished what she wanted to in that setting: Puncturing the right-wing caricature of her, regularly pumped out to Fox’s primetime audience, as an insipid airhead with no ability to think on her feet. …

Going on Fox was a risk. (Though we continue to maintain it would have been smart for Harris to do this all along!) But it also turned out to have rewards. And the Harris campaign should recognize that and react accordingly. There’s a whole world of vaguely to explicitly right-wing shows and podcasts out there. Over the next three weeks, she could have her pick of the litter. These are places mainstream media and Democratic messengers simply do not reach—but Harris could. Why let Trump wholly command their narratives? And why not continue to drive the contrast with Trump’s own risk-averse media strategy?

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Baier proved he was a “hack”

According to an unnamed former Fox News producer (as well as one former Fox News host):

Peter Wehner thought it was a career low:

Bret Baier has rarely looked as bad (or tendentious) as he did in his interview with Kamala Harris. On the flip side, this was one of her best interviews. She dominated Bret. All in all it was quite a bad day for MAGA world’s most important media outlet.

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Baier did a “great job” showing how “totally incompetent” Harris is

That’s Trump’s take, and he also congratulated Baier for his “tough but very fair” interview — which is essentially a case for the opposite being true.

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Both sides got what they wanted

That was one of the points made by Slate’s Josh Levin, who hosts the podcast Slow Burn: The Rise of Fox News and spoke with Eric Wemple about the interview afterward:

The clips are clearly going to circulate more than the full interview. When you think about it that way, the whole thing definitely feels more like a branding exercise — a performance of seriousness by Fox News, a display of toughness by Harris.

Baier, who began spinning the interview immediately after it aired, acknowledged that Harris probably got the clips she wanted:

This post has been updated.