Kamala campaign chair defends spending 6 figures to build set for interview on sex-themed podcast
Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon defended spending a reported six figures on Alex Cooper’s sex-themed podcast, “Call Her Daddy,” Tuesday in order to reach “lower propensity voters.”
The Harris campaign and Democratic Party burned through $1.5 billion throughout the vice president’s 15-week campaign, causing the Democratic National Committee to be at least $20 million in debt and fire hundreds of employees. Dillon said the six figures spent on Cooper’s podcast was “really important” in order to reach voters who had distanced themselves from politics.
“We had to reach very hard to find voters. So we were trying to yes, spend more resources on digital, not for the sake of that but because we’re trying to find young people, we’re trying to find these lower propensity voters that were tuned out to politics, so much of the electorate pre-Kamala Harris and post, had opted out of political engagement, had opted out of wanting to talk through or hear the partisan environment so we had to work super hard to find them,” Dillon said. “And doing so made us make really key choices, ‘Call Her Daddy’ was a really important choice to make and the hurricane which you’re alluding to and why we had to make some adjustments on schedule, the hurricane impacted two weeks of our ability to reach people. We put her on the Weather Channel because that’s what people are watching.”
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Dillon said the majority of the money spent by the campaign was intended to reach voters and introduce Harris, while claiming President-elect Donald Trump had “coordinated” super political actions committees (PACS) behind him that the Harris campaign lacked.
Harris sat down with Cooper for an Oct. 6 interview as she began her media blitz with mostly friendly outlets in the weeks preceding the Nov. 5 election. Along with the money spent on Cooper’s podcast, the campaign also reportedly spent more than $15 million on “event production,” with $1 million going to Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions on Oct. 15, according to the Washington Examiner.
A seven-minute clip of the 44-minute long interview has only reached 905,000 views as of Tuesday, standing significantly lower than Trump’s interview with prominent podcaster Joe Rogan that has reached 51 million. Democratic strategist and media expert Lis Smith told former Obama adviser Tommy Vietor that the interview did not become too successful due to the vice president and Cooper focusing too heavily on policy.
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