Fans were previously rooting for Kamala Harris to sit down on the popular YouTube ‘Hot Ones’ but it looks like there was a bigger reason why she didn’t.
Thanks to a recent roundtable discussion from her campaign team on the podcast Pod Save America, we found out that they actually tried to book Harris for that popular YouTube show where celebrities answer questions while munching on super spicy wings. But it turns out the Hot Ones team said no. During Tuesday’s “exclusive” episode of Pod Save America, host Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work as Barack Obama’s communications director, said, “There has never been a candidate more perfect for Hot Ones than Kamala Harris.”
However, it didn’t happen because the show “didn’t want to get into politics,” according to Stephanie Cutter, who handled messaging and media strategy for Harris, as she mentioned on the podcast.
She explained that the Harris team received that kind of response almost “across the board” when they tried to book the Democratic nominee on similar non-political media that were more than happy to have Trump on.
“I don’t think he had the same problem,” Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, adding that Trump “certainly was able to tap into some cultural elements in ways that we couldn’t.”
Pfeiffer, for his part, marveled at “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.”
That led Cutter to share that the Harris campaign did try to reach out to Hot Ones to get their candidate on the show, but they were turned down.
“Hot Ones, which is a great show, they didn’t wanna do any politics, so they weren’t going to take us or him,” the Democratic political consultant said. “So that was the issue.”