"Call Her Daddy" appearance by Kamala Harris shows candidates looking for votes in nontraditional places
BOSTON – A podcast appearance by Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris is going viral because of an unusual pairing.
On Sunday, Harris was featured on a 45-minute episode of "Call Her Daddy," which was Spotify's second most popular podcast in 2023.
Podcast hosted by BU graduate Alex Cooper
The podcast is hosted by Alex Cooper, a 2017 Boston University graduate. It has millions of listeners – mostly GenZ and millennial women. Typical topics include dating, relationship advice, sex, gossip, and celebrity interviews. Most recently, Katy Perry and Megan Fox were guests on the show.
Cooper, who got her start after her graduation from BU, is known for sharing details of her life unapologetically and uncensored.
The conversation with Vice President Harris centered exclusively around women's issues, with Cooper saying in a pre-interview video that she felt it was the topic she as a podcaster was most qualified to ask about.
The interview has garnered backlash, with many online not wanting politics entering a space that is typically meant for casual fun – with the occasional serious topic (Cooper visited an abortion clinic in the south after Roe v. Wade was overturned).
"I think podcasters are generally seen as less serious and not really supposed to be political, but a podcast is about your opinion," said BU student Fiona Holton, a freshman who listens to the podcast. "It's just somebody talking. Yeah, she has the voice, a good interviewer, BU COM grad. She went for a big fish, and she got it and I think that's great, that's exactly what a podcast should be."
Candidates seeking out unconventional spaces
The unlikely duo – Cooper interviewing someone in the nation's highest office – is a perfect example of candidates seeking out unconventional spaces to find voters in an election that is predicted to be neck and neck, political analysts say.
"Politicians go where the voters are, and what we tend to see time and again is that candidates are willing to go places where other candidates have not, into spaces that might be looked at as…not really serious enough for a Presidential candidate," St. Anselm College Political Science Professor Chris Galdieri said. "That was the same thing that was said about Bill Clinton when he went on Arsenio Hall and played the saxophone in 1992 – that was something of a scandal, or at least there were a lot of folks who looked down on that, and by the end of the nineties it was completely normal for presidential candidates to show up on Oprah, and David Letterman and Jay Leno, and all the other sorts of places that people actually watched."
"Incredibly important voting block"
In appearing on "Call Her Daddy," Harris was targeting young female potential voters, many of whom may not be politically active, he explained. "This is a podcast that is particularly listened to by young women. That's an incredibly important voting block in this race," he said.
Harris also appeared on "All The Smoke" recently, a podcast hosted by former NBA players and run by The Black Effect podcast network.
Trump has been taking a more traditional approach, Galdieri said – focusing on rallies and "friendlier" interview locations like Fox News. Trump did appear on the Lex Fridman podcast last month.
Another reason political candidates may choose these more popular, less traditional media outlets for interviews is because of how they will be received. Harris is going to be interviewed by 60 Minutes on Monday night, an interview offer that Trump rejected.
"I suspect that it will be, you know, a journalistically hard-hitting interview," Galdieri said. "Whoever interviews her on that program won't be overly awed by the fact that they've got the vice president, possibly the next president sitting in front of them. That's not the vibe you get when you go on a talk show, or when you go on podcasts. That's not primarily about the news."