Vice President Kamala Harris’ combative interview on Fox News delivered an average of 7.8 million viewers Wednesday, the Democratic presidential nominee’s most-watched TV news appearance so far.

The Democratic presidential nominee’s conversation with the conservative-leaning network’s chief political anchor Bret Baier delivered the largest audience for his program, “Special Report,” since 2020, according to Nielsen data. (The preliminary figure was 7.1 million).

The audience also surpassed Harris’ interview on the CBS news magazine “60 Minutes,” which was watched by 5.7 million on Oct. 7, and her chat with anchor Dana Bash on CNN alongside running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, which drew 6.3 million viewers on Aug. 29.

Harris’ appearance was highly anticipated as she is subjected to negative commentary by the vast majority of Fox News commentators throughout the day.

Earlier on Wednesday, Tyrus, a professional wrestler who regularly appears on the Fox News programs “Gutfeld!” and “The Five,” predicted that Harris’ Republican opponent former President Trump is on track for one of the largest electoral vote victories in history, even though nearly every poll shows the two candidates are in a tight race.

Harris’ performance on “Special Report” was lambasted by hosts Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity in the hours following the interview.

But the Harris campaign agreed to appear on Fox News in an effort to reach undecided voters who have misgivings about Trump. Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel, has cited research data showing it reaches a large number of voters who identify as Democrats or are not affiliated with a political party.

Walz appeared on “Fox News Sunday” for the last two weeks.

Harris has been criticized by commentators on Fox News and other outlets for only agreeing to appearances on media outlets supportive of her candidacy, even though she appeared on “60 Minutes” while Trump canceled his scheduled sit-down on the same program. Trump also said he would not participate in a presidential debate moderated by Baier and his Fox News colleague Martha MacCallum.

Baier aggressively questioned Harris on the current administration’s immigration policy and pressed her to define her differences with President Biden, who dropped out of his reelection campaign in July.

The confrontational exchanges on “Special Report” offered a stark contrast to a town hall-style program shown earlier in the day on Fox News with Trump. The event taped in Georgia on Tuesday was in front of an audience largely supportive of the former president, who faced no hostile questioning.

Baier interrupted Harris a number of times during their interview, which led to criticism among some pundits. The anchor said later that he was trying to keep the vice president from running out the clock with long answers.

The Harris campaign agreed to a 25- to 30-minute taped interview held in Washington Crossing, Pa., and it was aired in its entirety without editing. After the interview aired, Baier described how Harris aides vigorously signaled him to wrap up once the time limit was reached.

But some allies and critics of Harris believed the appearance was a success because it showed the candidate was willing to stand up to tough queries.

“Combative interviews can be good,” Jon Favreau, host of “Pod Save America,” wrote on X. “Going on Fox can be good. You just have to be prepared (she was) and stand your ground (she did!).”

“The left is angrily denouncing Bret Baier for interrupting Kamala Harris and being rude,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson wrote on X. “That tells me all I need to know. Kudos for Harris going on Fox News.”

Vice President Kamala Harris will virtually attend the historic Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, the Archdiocese of New York confirmed to Fox News Digital. 

“VP Harris will appear via a pre-recorded message,” the communications director for the Archdiocese of New York, Joseph Zwilling, told Fox News Digital on Thursday. 

Harris will be the first presidential candidate in 40 years to not physically attend the Catholic charity event – since 1984 when failed presidential Democratic candidate Walter Mondale skipped. Former President Trump will attend and address the sold-out audience during the event Thursday. 

Harris’ snub of the historic Catholic charity event irked New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan on his podcast this week. 

KAMALA HARRIS PLANS TO SKIP HISTORIC AL SMITH DINNER DESPITE LONG-STANDING TRADITION

“This year will be imbalanced because, sadly, Kamala Harris isn’t coming,” Dolan said on his podcast Wednesday. “It’s a shame because the nature of the evening is to bring people together. The nature of the evening is civility, patriotism, humor. It’s not a campaign speech. It’s not a campaign stop.”

He did add during the podcast that Harris was slated to appear via “Zoom.” 

“She’s sending a Zoom,” Dolan said during the podcast. Adding: “We have it already… I haven’t looked at it. There’s an embargo on it.” 

MORNING GLORY: WHY IS KAMALA HARRIS SKIPPING THE AL SMITH DINNER IN NEW YORK CITY?

The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner was launched in 1946, and has raised millions of dollars for charities supporting women and children, and has since grown to become a political and cultural hallmark of election seasons. The dinner is named after the first Catholic presidential candidate, Al Smith, who served as the 42nd governor of New York and ran for president as a Democrat in 1928. 

This year’s dinner will be emceed by comedian Jim Gaffigan, who has portrayed Harris’ running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in sketches on “Saturday Night Live” this fall.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan speaks during a prayer service for Ukraine at Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Volodymyr. (Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign for comment and confirmation that Harris will virtually attend the event, but did not receive a reply. 

The campaign previously told Fox News that the vice president would not physically attend the event, focusing her time on campaigning in the battleground state of Wisconsin instead. 

TRUMP CAMPAIGN PREVIEWS AL SMITH DINNER REMARKS AMID HARRIS’ ABSENCE: ‘WON’T BE DISAPPOINTED’

“The Vice President is going to be campaigning in a battleground state that day, and the campaign wants to maximize her time in the battlegrounds this close to the election. Her team also told the organizers that she would very much like to attend their event as President. This would make her one of the first sitting Presidents to attend,” the campaign said. 

The campaign previously told Fox News that the vice president would not physically attend the event. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Trump attended the dinner in-person in 2016, as did then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and attended 2020’s virtual dinner due to the pandemic. 

Former President Trump reacts during a Univision Noticias town hall event on Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

CLINTON AND TRUMP TRADE JABS AT AL SMITH DINNER

“It will be an honor to attend the SOLD OUT 79th ANNUAL AL SMITH DINNER on October 17th in New York. It will be great to see so many wonderful people there, including Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan. We know the Spirit of Al Smith, the first Catholic Nominee of a Major Party, and John F. Kennedy, the FIRST Catholic President, will be in the room with us that night,” Trump posted on Truth Social last month. 

Cardinal Timothy Dolan sits between, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria on Oct. 20, 2016, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

“It was a virtual event in 2020, and I was delighted to speak to our Catholic friends that day and, of course, it was a HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL evening in 2016 when we were there in person with Crooked Hillary Clinton. The reviews of my remarks were TREMENDOUS. It’s sad, but not surprising, that Kamala has decided not to attend. I don’t know what she has against our Catholic friends, but it must be a lot, because she certainly hasn’t been very nice to them, in fact, Catholics are literally being persecuted by this Administration. Any Catholic that votes for Comrade Kamala Harris should have their head examined,” he added. 

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

Life may be full of uncertainties but there’s one thing you can count on come election day, as surely as the sun rises over the Sierra and sets over the Pacific.

Donald Trump will lose California. And it won’t be remotely close.

In 2016, Trump was buried in a 25-point Hillary Clinton landslide. In 2020, he lost to Joe Biden by 29 percentage points.

There’s no love lost between Trump and California. If you ranked the 50 states in terms of his personal regard, it’s a good bet California would finish dead last. The GOP nominee loathes Gov. Gavin Newsom — a feeling that’s mutual — and his depiction of life in the Golden State makes the seventh circle of Hell sound like a resort vacation.

But Trump didn’t just trash California on his ego trip last weekend to Coachella. If elected, he vowed to punish the state — which is to say its more than 39 million residents — by withholding federal disaster aid should California’s leaders refuse to give more water to farmers and cities. (That would come at the expense of the environment and others denied their share.)

The remarks echoed a threat Trump made last summer, holding forth at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course, where the former president explicitly singled out Newsom. “If he doesn’t sign those papers,” Trump told reporters, “we won’t give him money to put out all his fires.” It was unclear what papers Trump referred to, but there was no mistaking his strong-arm sentiment.

And yet …

Trump may have been clobbered twice in California, but he did receive more than 6 million votes in 2020 — the most of any state. On Nov. 5, millions of Californians will again cast their ballots for Trump, notwithstanding his obvious antipathy toward the state and its Democratic-leaning voters.

To Ken Khachigian, that makes perfect sense.

“Kamala Harris is monumentally unqualified to be president of the United States and I just couldn’t imagine putting in her hands being the leader of the free world,” said the longtime GOP strategist. “I don’t think she’s capable of being much more than a county supervisor in California.”

Khachigian has served in two Republican administrations and spent a lifetime in and around politics, which he recounts in his recently published autobiography, “Behind Closed Doors: In the Room With Reagan & Nixon.”

“I think she’s on the far left,” Khachigian said of the vice president. “Donald Trump believes in basic Republican principles of fewer taxes, less government, tougher on crime, stronger national defense, strong foreign policy.

“So based on those issues,” he said, “that’s the case for California voting for Donald Trump.”

He dismissed Trump’s threats — or intimations of blackmail, if you will — saying California’s Republican lawmakers wouldn’t stand for disaster relief being cut off if Trump, indeed, tried to do so. “I think that’s just posturing,” Khachigian said. “A lot of that is just Donald Trump being Donald Trump.”

Nor does he worry, Khachigian said, about Trump using the National Guard or military to punish political nemeses like California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, as Trump suggested he might in a Fox News interview.

“We have safeguards in our system against lunatic things,” Khachigian said. He paused. “Look, I’m not going to defend every single thing [Trump has] ever said in his lifetime. … There’s a lot of things people say in overstatement. … Overstatement is the mother’s milk of politics.”

Mike Madrid sees things differently. A former political director of the California Republican Party, he went on to co-found the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. (He also has a new book out, “The Latino Century,” on the rising influence of the nation’s largest ethnic voting group.)

Madrid says California voters should take Trump at his word. “We have to learn from history, from what he’s done in the past,” Madrid said, noting Trump has already shown his willingness to play politics with federal disaster assistance.

Politico’s E&E News recently reported the ex-president “was flagrantly partisan at times in response to disasters and on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile.”

In one instance, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after a devastating series of 2018 wildfires. Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, said Trump changed his mind after being shown 2016 election returns that showed the strong support he received in Orange County, among the areas that burned.

While Trump eventually relented after “some of the adults in the room pushed him,” Madrid wondered whether “those adults [will] be in the room” if Trump returns to the White House a second time. “Or is the second administration going to be just purely about vengeance and pettiness?”

More fundamentally, Madrid said, “There’s something extremely irresponsible as a citizen to dismiss what a public official is saying by divining your own intent as to what that means or does not mean. All we can do is take people at their word. That’s what this whole system is based off of.”

There’s an expression that gained wide currency the first time Trump ran for president, suggesting the media took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.

Voters should do both.