Why Kamala Harris Bailed on Joe Rogan
In the closing weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris had an opportunity to appear on the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the country. Ultimately, she declined the interview.
Former President Donald Trump certainly made the most of his three-hour conversation with Rogan. The video version racked up 38 million views on YouTube in just three days. Rogan ultimately endorsed Trump the night before the election.
It would be naïve to think that Rogan—who has drifted toward the right, despite his support for Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2019—was ever going to endorse Harris. And it’s probably the case that most of Rogan’s viewers, who skew younger and male, would be more positively inclined toward Trump than Harris.
Even so, 40 million is a lot of viewers. If Harris could have made a positive impression among some small subset of those Rogan fans, the interview would have been worth doing. Moreover, the interview would have helped her counter the argument that she is stiff and impersonal—if, that is, she did a good enough job. In other words, Harris had much to gain from a successful appearance.
It’s possible that Harris just wasn’t up to the task of making conversation with Rogan for three hours. If she declined for that reason, then that was her choice; indeed, Rogan himself thinks she opted not to do the interview because her team disliked the time commitment and the lack of editing.
But a different explanation was given by Jennifer Palmieri, an advisor to Doug Emhoff, the vice president’s husband. Palmieri told The Financial Times that Harris’ team ultimately turned down Rogan because of “concerns at how the interview would be perceived within the Democratic Party.”
“There was a backlash with some of our
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