Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on Thursday gave their first sit-down interview since President Biden withdrew from his reelection campaign July 21.

The interview with Dana Bash of CNN was recorded Thursday afternoon in Georgia and broadcast the same evening. Here are some takeaways:

Harris continues pivot to the center

The interview provided more evidence of Harris’ turn toward the center — both in tone and in policy — in the month-plus since she was elevated to the top of the ticket.

The biggest new promise during Thursday’s interview: appointing a Republican to her Cabinet if she is elected. Presidents often do this, but it seldom amounts to a true team of rivals.

Then-President Obama, for example, chose former Rep. Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican, as his Transportation secretary, a relatively low-profile and less partisan post. But the selection did send a message that Obama was willing to work with Republicans and might even boost their hometown transportation needs, one of the most valuable political chips a president has.

More significantly, Obama also retained former President George W. Bush’s Defense secretary, Robert Gates, for more than two years, a meaningful gesture for a country that was growing weary of its involvement in two wars.

Neither President Biden nor former President Trump appointed opposition members to their Cabinets. Trump, in recent days, has announced plans to seek policy advice from former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist who suspended his presidential campaign to endorse Trump. But both Gabbard and Kennedy have been outspoken critics of the Democratic Party.

Gabbard left the party in 2022 to become an independent. Kennedy withdrew from the Democratic primary last year to forge an independent bid, accusing both parties of corrupt leadership. He tried to meet with both nominees before issuing his endorsement last week but was rebuffed by Harris.

Harris, on her shifts in positions: ‘My values haven’t changed’

The moves to the center from Harris have drawn accusations of flip-flopping.

Harris previously called for a fracking ban, universal healthcare and decriminalization of border crossings. She is disavowing those positions and promoting a conservative, bipartisan border bill — endorsed by President Biden and killed under pressure from Donald Trump — as a central campaign promise. Last week’s Democratic convention painted her as a tough prosecutor in California, another shift from her emphasis on police reform when she ran in 2019 for the party’s presidential nomination.

“The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris said Thursday.

As an example, she pointed to the Green New Deal, a series of expansive measures favored by progressives to combat climate change. She no longer supports it, but said that “the climate crisis is real. That it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”

Harris sometimes came across in the CNN interview as evasive. She did not directly explain why she changed her views on a fracking ban, but said that she made the shift in 2020, during the general election, and has not wavered since.

Trump took issue with that. “She’s admitting she’s still as dangerously liberal as ever,” his campaign said after an interview excerpt was released.

Trump has his own baggage with flip-flopping. He has held multiple positions on abortion over the years, before promising to appoint Supreme Court justices who overturned the legal right to the procedure. And he reversed his support for banning TikTok this year after receiving large campaign donations from the company’s investors.

How will voters react? The two candidates’ supporters haven’t complained. All that’s left is a small slice of uncommitted voters, who tend to pay less attention to politics until the election draws nearer.

Some awkward moments

Harris sounded shaky answering the first question, a softball about what she would do on Day One if elected, reverting to slogans.

She said she would “strengthen the middle class” and offer “a new way forward,” while praising Americans for being fueled “by hope and by optimism.” She got more specific after that, referring to her economic plan that would probably require congressional approval for policies such as expanding the child tax credit and offering more money for first-time home buyers; such efforts would take much longer than a day to accomplish.

Why hasn’t she done this stuff already?

Harris answered one of Trump’s biggest critiques, why she hasn’t fulfilled her campaign promises over the last 3½ years, while sitting in the vice president’s office.

“First of all, we had to recover as an economy,” she said after discussing Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic when he was president.

She pointed out that inflation has been brought down below 3% but acknowledged that prices are still too high for many Americans. Inflation is a top concern of voters, according to polls. So Harris has been careful to acknowledge the hardship and has promised to do more, even as she defends the administration’s economic record.

She also went on offense, pointing out that the Biden administration has capped prices on insulin and other prescription drugs for senior citizens.

Trump made the same promise, she said. “Never happened,” she said. “We did it.”

More interviews to come?

Harris’ sit-down interview came more than five weeks after Biden dropped out of the race, leaving her the nominee.

Now that the pressure is off, she may do more. That would serve voters, many who say they don’t know Harris well enough.

It could also help Harris politically. She was able to reveal more of her personal side, describing the emotion of seeing her grandniece watch her at the convention, for example.

This was hardly riveting television. But the more she speaks in less scripted settings, the more practice she gets and the less effect a single gaffe or misstatement might have.

Loved ones of students killed in school shootings slammed Vice President Kamala Harris after unearthed comments from 2019 surfaced this week, detailing that Harris supports removing police officers from schools. 

“My brother was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting because of liberal policies like the one Kamala is pushing here… I wish there had been a police officer there to protect him. Students need more protection, not less!,” school safety advocate JT Lewis posted to X. Lewis’ younger brother, six-year-old Jesse Lewis, was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut that left 26 children and staffers dead. 

Lewis was reacting to unearthed footage of Harris in 2019, when she was a California senator, declaring her support of removing police officers from schools in an effort to “demilitarize” campuses. 

“What we need to do about … demilitarizing our schools and taking police officers out of schools. We need to deal with the reality and speak the truth about the inequities around school discipline. Where in particular, Black and Brown boys are being expelled and or suspended as young as, I’ve seen, as young as in elementary school,” Harris said in 2019 in South Carolina, when she served as a California senator running for president during the 2020 cycle. 

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Harris joined the 2019 Presidential Justice Forum at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, in October of that year before she dropped out of the 2020 race and was announced as President Biden’s running mate. A college student asked Harris how she would go about expunging the records of juveniles to allow them to attend college, including expunging “a criminal offense,” not “just a marijuana expungement.”

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The Connecticut House of Representatives passed the state’s largest gun control initiative since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in a 96-51 vote. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

“That’s a great question and a great point, because when we talk about reform of the criminal justice system, we’ve got to understand that the juvenile justice system is in dire need of reform, and I know that. And I’ve seen it,” Harris responded, touting her 2020 campaign’s “plan of action” on criminal justice reform. 

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“I will end solitary confinement of juveniles, which includes what we need to do to talk about and have a commitment for less incarceration of juveniles. And have guidelines in terms of exactly what those, those numbers should be, because right now, in so many states, children are being incarcerated for … a child being incarcerated for a couple of days is traumatic, much less the weeks, months and years that we’re seeing that happen,” she explained. 

Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris presidential campaign earlier this week inquiring whether she still supports removing police officers from schools, but did not receive a reply. 

Crews use heavy equipment to tear down the 1200 building of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Friday, June 14, 2024, in Parkland, Fla. On February 14, 2018, a gunman entered the school and killed 17 people. (Miami Herald)

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Other family members of school-shooting victims joined Lewis in their condemnation of Harris’ 2019 comments, including Ryan Petty and Andrew Pollack, two dads who lost their respective teenage daughters in the tragic Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018. 

“Wreckless. Radical. Kamala wants to make schools less safe. Your kids aren’t safe with Kamala Harris in office,” Petty, who lost his 14-year-old daughter Alaina Petty in the 2018 shooting, tweeted in response to the Trump War Room posting footage of Harris’ comments. 

People visit the memorial for the victims of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people, on the fifth anniversary of the massacre on February 14, 2023. Seventeen people were killed, and another seventeen were injured after a 19-year-old former student opened fire at the school on February 14, 2018. (Photo by Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images) (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)

“This is sickening. My daughter was killed because Parkland didn’t have enough security. We need more school resource officers — not fewer!” Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow Pollack was killed in the same shooting, posted on X. 

Harris’ comments declaring support for the removal of officers from schools were made ahead of 2020’s summer of protests and riots in response to the killing of George Floyd during a police interaction on Memorial Day of that year. Floyd’s death reignited calls from activists to defund the police, which had a cascading effect across the country as liberal cities moved to slash police budgets, and school boards also voted to sever ties with police departments. 

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Researchers with the outlet Education Week found in 2022 that at least 50 school districts between May 2020 through June 2022 had removed officers from school campuses or slashed budgets for school officers. The plans to remove officers from schools, however, were short-lived in many jurisdictions, as violence broke out on campuses when students returned to the classrooms following the pandemic and its lockdowns. 

In the face of violence, such as a shooting at a Denver high school, or repeated fights within the Alexandria, Virginia, school district, education officials from coast to coast backtracked on removing officers, welcoming them back to campuses in an effort to curb crime.

Vice President Harris has not sat down for an interview or held a press conference since emerging as the Democratic presidential nominee. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Harris officially accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in Chicago last week. She rose to the top of the ticket after President Biden dropped out of the race last month amid mounting concerns over his mental acuity. 

When Hillary Clinton referred to Donald Trump’s 34 criminal convictions during last week’s Democratic National Convention, a loud chant of “Lock him up!” arose from the crowd. Clinton, the target of countless “Lock her up!” chants stoked by Trump eight years ago, permitted herself a nod and a smile.

There’s no gainsaying the hunger of many in the crowd at Chicago’s United Center, and of Democrats across the country, to see Trump behind bars. They wish it for many reasons: as condign punishment for his crimes against democracy, the subject of a new federal indictment filed Tuesday; payback for his exploitation of the criminal justice system for his own ends; petty vengeance against an obnoxious antagonist; and a means of ridding the country of his toxic presence.

The yearning to see Trump brought down is one component of the wave of enthusiasm that has so dramatically boosted Kamala Harris’ candidacy over the last month. In fact, Harris has stoked that desire in at least a limited way. Her standard stump speech includes the sure ovation bait, “I took on perpetrators of all kinds. … So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Speaker after speaker at the convention likewise brought up Trump’s list of proven and alleged crimes. They also repeatedly invoked Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation agenda suggesting Trump intends to convert the Department of Justice to an instrument of political retribution against his enemies.

But for Harris, a top official in the government carrying out two of Trump’s prosecutions, her supporters’ lust to see Trump locked up is a tricky topic. There is a fine but crucial distinction between calling out Trump’s criminal conduct and calling for him to be “locked up.” To date, she has been able to walk that tightrope effectively.

When the vice president confronted the same chant at political rallies in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania earlier this month, she was quick with a response that was markedly different from Clinton’s: “We’re gonna let the courts handle that. Our job is to beat him in November.”

Politically and ethically, that was precisely the right answer.

It’s right partly because of the clear contrast with Trump. It immediately puts Harris on the opposite side of the spectrum from Trump’s animating spirit of petty nastiness.

More than that, calling for the imprisonment of one’s political opponents — particularly when, as with Clinton, they have not been charged with or convicted of any crime — is a defining trait of a banana republic. And as the scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have persuasively documented, Trump’s first term pulled the United States sharply in that direction.

In addition, even the slightest tangible sign of official support for incarcerating Trump is likely to breed complications in the actual cases. Trump would seek to leverage it to support his claim that the charges against him amount to a political railroading.

Most important for the current campaign, Harris’ careful retort to the crowd brandishes her institutionalist credentials. Our democracy is designed to depend on neutral arbiters — namely, the courts — to deprive citizens of liberty, not the say-so of a ruler. That principle is especially fundamental to a prosecutor — the professional experience Harris is leading with as a candidate — who must not confuse her zeal with the law’s judgment.

It’s particularly fitting for Harris to insist on confidence in the courts. Their reputation — especially the Supreme Court’s — has declined precipitously in the Trump era based on the growing perception that they can be bent to the will of the powerful.

Harris is announcing to the country that although she is seeking power, she believes her power should be constrained by the checks and balances that Trump openly flouted — even if her supporters might wish it otherwise for the purposes of punishing an adversary.

Harris’ stance is not a given. Unlike Clinton in 2016, Trump is a convict as well as a criminal defendant in three additional cases. Harris could take the position that now that a jury has decided his guilt, a judge should impose a certain sentence — or that he deserves to be convicted in the other cases against him. But that too would put her in the role of telling the courts what they should do. Avoiding that appearance is more important — and more commendable — than revving up Trump haters.

Harris has been performing other delicate balancing acts in her young campaign: talking tough on borders but welcoming legitimate asylum seekers; affirming Israel’s right to exist but calling for an end to hostilities in Gaza; embracing President Biden while presenting herself as the change candidate.

Of course, one problem with walking a high wire is that your opponent can try to knock you off. And we can expect Trump and his surrogates to continue to suggest that Harris is trying to “lock him up” for political purposes.

But as a longtime prosecutor, Harris is well practiced at leveling harsh accusations while insisting on the indispensable institutional role of juries and courts in the ultimate decisions. That experience should continue to serve her well.

Harry Litman is the host of the “Talking Feds” podcast and the “Talking San Diego” speaker series. @harrylitman