Since announcing her presidential campaign, Kamala Harris has done only a handful of interviews — a CNN exclusive here, an Oprah sit-down there. But on Sunday, her media strategy took a surprising turn: Ahead of a suddenly stacked week of scheduled TV appearances, she went on Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper’s podcast where celebrities take off their shoes and unpack their relationship history on fuzzy chairs. Between its Barstool Sports origins and self-proclaimed proclivity for “female locker-room talk,” Cooper’s show is not exactly the obvious choice for a presidential candidate. Seeming to anticipate head-scratching, Cooper opened the episode with a solo video explaining that she “couldn’t see a world in which one of the main conversations in this election is women and I’m not a part of it.” (She also said her team invited Donald Trump to come on the show.) While Harris kept her shoes on, Cooper conducted the 40-minute interview in one of her branded “Unwell” sweatshirts, listening intently as Harris told the “Daddy Gang” about her career-long battle for women’s rights.
In addition to giving her an opportunity to talk directly to Call Her Daddy’s 10 million-person audience, the appearance let Harris lean into her penchant for heartfelt campaigning that focuses on personal stories, many of them from her own life. She talked about her childhood friend Wanda, who came to live with the family after revealing to Kamala that she was being sexually abused at home, inspiring Harris to eventually pursue a career as a prosecutor. She also devoted plenty of time to the conservative attack on reproductive rights, returning to the story of Amber Thurman, the Georgia woman who died after a hospital delayed treating her for an incomplete medication abortion.
But the most moving moment of the episode came toward the end, when Cooper brought up Republican politicians’ fixation on Harris’s purported childlessness. She asked the vice-president about a recent Trump rally where Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders quipped, “My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”
“I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble,” Harris said of Sanders’s swipe. “Two, a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life.” She explained that “one of the things I have really enjoyed about where the discussion has gone” is that people have been talking about how “we have our family by blood and then we have our family by love. And I have both. And I consider it to be a real blessing. I have two beautiful children, Cole and Ella, who call me Momala. We have a very modern family. My husband’s ex-wife is a friend of mine.”
Kamala Harris responds to Sarah Huckabee: “I’m not aspiring to be ‘humble’. This isn’t the 1950s” pic.twitter.com/GCyNup6KNI
— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) October 6, 2024
After talking about how she waited to meet Cole and Ella until she knew her relationship with her now-husband, Doug Emhoff, was serious, Harris added, “Families come in all kinds of shapes and forms, and they’re family nonetheless. There’s so many forces … that are trying to make people feel small and alone.”
Cooper also asked Harris about J.D. Vance calling women who don’t have children “childless cat ladies,” a term Harris called “mean-spirited.” “I think most Americans want leaders who understand that the measure of their strength is not based on who you beat down,” she said. “The real measure of a leader’s strength is based on who you lift up.”
On Monday, once the episode aired, the backlash did come, with listeners complaining that Cooper had suddenly become too political and asking why she didn’t press Harris on topics like Hurricane Helene. Meanwhile, Harris is slated to appear on The View, The Howard Stern Show, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The week promises plenty more from her, but there will still only be one place you can hear the vice-president of the United States say the words “Daddy Gang.”
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