The vice president probably wishes she could crawl under a rock. She has a while to ride out this storm.
And now Kamala Harris got a final dose of reality that could send her over the edge.
Kamala Harris’ failed bid to connect with mainstream and non-political media continues to make headlines, as her campaign team revealed this week that the popular YouTube show Hot Ones rejected her request to appear during her presidential campaign. The reason? The show wanted to avoid politics altogether.
Harris aides shared the embarrassing anecdote during an appearance on Pod Save America, where they dissected what went wrong during the campaign.
“Hot Ones, which is a great show, they didn’t wanna do any politics, so they weren’t going to take us or him,” senior adviser Stephanie Cutter admitted, according to the New York Post.
“So that was the issue.”
The show, known for featuring celebrities eating progressively hotter chicken wings while answering questions, apparently didn’t see Harris as a good fit. But it wasn’t just Hot Ones.
Cutter acknowledged that Harris’ team faced similar challenges trying to book other non-political media appearances.
In stark contrast, then-candidate Donald Trump managed to break through on these platforms, leveraging his larger-than-life personality and cultural appeal.
“I don’t think he had the same problem,” said Harris’ campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon.
She conceded that Trump “certainly was able to tap into some cultural elements in ways that we couldn’t.”
Perhaps the most striking comment came from Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer, who insisted Harris was “better suited” for Hot Ones than any other candidate in history. Pfeiffer took the rejection as a political slight, remarking:
“The idea that it would be more politically problematic to have on Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president of the United States, than Donald Trump, a man who’s been convicted of a crime and tried to violently overthrow the election.”
The Harris team also addressed why their candidate skipped The Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s most popular podcast with a massive young male audience—a demographic where Harris notoriously underperformed.
Despite an invitation, the campaign ultimately passed, and senior adviser David Plouffe floated a bizarre theory about Rogan’s motives.
“So what’s clear is we offered to do it in Austin, people should know that,” Plouffe said. “It didn’t work out. Maybe they leveraged that to get Trump in studio, I don’t know.”
The campaign’s reluctance to engage with Rogan, who boasts a politically diverse audience, now seems like a missed opportunity, especially given Trump’s ability to dominate such cultural spaces.
Meanwhile, Harris’ inability to resonate with non-political platforms highlights a broader problem: her difficulty connecting with everyday Americans outside the D.C. bubble.
Whether it’s being outshined by Trump’s media-savvy moves or being passed over by shows like Hot Ones, Harris’ struggles to connect culturally underscore her campaign’s uphill battle—and her own political challenges.
Stay tuned to Prudent Politics.
