Why Kamala Harris Went on <em>Call Her Daddy</em>
Very few podcasters would apologize to their fans for clogging up their feeds by interviewing a presidential candidate. But Alex Cooper—the host of a podcast variously described as “raunchy, “sex-positive,” “mega-popular,” and “the most-listened-to podcast by women”—is an exception. “Daddy Gang,” she began her latest episode, “as you know, I do not usually discuss politics, or have politicians on this show, because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in.”
Her guest was Kamala Harris, and Cooper had decided to speak with the Democratic nominee because “overall, my focus is women and the day-to-day issues that we face.” Their 40-minute conversation covered Harris’s upbringing, the rollback of abortion rights, the high cost of housing, and Republican attacks on “childless cat ladies.” This wasn’t a hard-hitting accountability interview, but it did contain a substantive policy discussion—not that you would guess from some of the more overheated right-wing attacks, which seemed to think the pair were braiding each other’s hair. After a summer of largely avoiding interviews with mainstream news outlets, the Harris campaign—like Donald Trump’s—is seeking out friendly podcasters that are popular with normie audiences. As a journalist, I wish both campaigns were doing more tough interviews. But as a pragmatist, I realize that hard-news shows do not command the audiences they once did. Also, most Americans who consume a lot of news already know how they’re going to vote. Nailing down undecided voters—including those who don’t currently plan to cast a ballot—is vital. And if that means going on podcasts hosted by YouTube pranksters turned wrestlers (as Trump did) or ones with past episodes like “Threesomes, Toxic Men and OnlyFans” (as Harris did), so be it.
If you haven’t heard of Call Her Daddy, please accept my condolences for being old, or male, or otherwise uncool. (I was in the first group until I binge-listened in preparation for the Harris interview.) The show had the second-biggest audience among podcasts on Spotify last year, after The Joe Rogan Experience. Recent guests include Miley Cyrus, Avril Lavigne, Katy Perry, and Simone Biles. Young women love “Father Cooper” and listen to what she says.
[Read: Kamala Harris’s biggest advantage]
That Cooper chose to begin with an apology is interesting—not least because it suggests that Team Harris courted her, rather than the other way around. In February, Cooper told The New York Times that she had resisted overtures from the White House to have Joe Biden as a guest. “Go on CNN, go on Fox,” she said. “You want to talk about your sex life, Joe?”
Although Harris didn’t talk about hers, she did talk about tampons, agreeing with Cooper that many of the male politicians who make abortion laws seem to have only the sketchiest understanding of female biology. In fact, this campaign has featured 100 percent more tampons than I expected, because the online right has been trying to make the nickname “Tampon Tim” happen for Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz. (As governor of Minnesota, he signed a law that would provide free menstrual products in both boys’ and girls’ school bathrooms.)
Harris also spoke about how she was the first vice president to visit a reproductive-health clinic, allowing her to argue that Republican abortion restrictions, by forcing those clinics to shut down, also limit women’s access to pap smears, contraception, and breast-cancer screenings. She discussed the death of Amber Thurman, who developed blood poisoning after having to leave Georgia to seek an abortion shortly after a state law tightly restricting the procedure took effect. Republican proponents of that law had claimed that terminations could be permitted to save the life of the mother, Harris said, anger creeping into her voice: “You know what that means, in practical terms? She’s almost dead before you decide to give her care.” Whoever coached Harris out of being the word-salad-monger of the 2019 Democratic primary, or the snippy flubber of her disastrous 2021 interview with Lester Holt, deserves a raise.
The people criticizing Harris’s Call Her Daddy appearance have claimed that it was demeaning and unserious—or, at best, pointless. Young women are deemed to be in the tank for the Democrats already—the gender gap in this election is real. But Cooper reaches an audience that does not follow politics closely, and her own background is more small-c conservative than you might imagine from the podcast’s empowered-raunch vibe. She was raised Catholic, in Pennsylvania, and her story follows a familiar pattern for Gen Z and Millennials: After spending her 20s keeping “dick appointments,” as she has put it, she met a film producer who later proposed by turning their house into a scavenger hunt full of moments from their relationship, and the couple had a big white wedding in Mexico.
Call Her Daddy, which began as part of the notoriously fratty Barstool Sports network, has mellowed along with Cooper. Its listeners are neither anarchist feminists nor aspiring tradwives, but the great middle of American Gen Z straight(ish) women, who think sex before marriage is fun but also dream of settling down with Mr. Right. This group definitely leans Democrat, but Cooper’s Barstool connection means there will be conservatives listening too, as well as many women who might not vote at all. The Republicans are struggling with this group of voters, seeing them as more radical than they really are, while some evangelical leaders even hope the abortion bans will be a disincentive to premarital sex. But most young women intuitively understand that their sexual and economic freedom are linked: They make their own money, so they can date who they want.
Cooper’s apology also intrigued me because she followed it up with some self-deprecating pablum about her unfitness to ask questions about fracking and border control. Trump has just completed his own podcast tour, talking with influencers, such as Logan Paul, Lex Fridman, and Theo Von, who are popular with young men. Let me shock you: These guys did not seem worried about their knowledge of the Middle East or the finer points of drug policy. But women are not supposed to get above themselves, even though the entire interview-podcast circuit runs on feigned expertise and overly confident opinions. Cooper’s self-deprecation is a reminder why Harris has tried to downplay the historic possibility of being the first female president—because she knows that many voters still find female ambition unsettling.
[Read: What the Kamala Harris doubters don’t understand]
Still, this interview is the most barbed I’ve seen Harris allow herself to be on the topic of her own ambition. Cooper asked her about Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s comments that “Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” because she doesn’t have biological children. How did that make the vice president feel? “I don’t think [Sanders] understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble,” Harris replied. Also, she went on, “a whole lot of women out here … have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life, and I think it’s really important for women to lift each other up.” Pressed on J. D. Vance’s claim that the Democrats were dominated by “childless cat ladies,” Harris said: “I just think it’s mean.”
Trump’s continued electoral success has inspired many pundits to claim that there are no longer any standards of decency in American public life—and that politicians can therefore say what they like. In reality, parts of Harris’s story are likely to resonate with voters. Harris’s stepchildren came up in the interview Harris did last week on All the Smoke, a sports podcast hosted by two former NBA players. “I love those children—they are my children,” Harris said of her husband’s kids, adding that she had worked hard not to undermine their mother. One of the hosts, Matt Barnes, sympathetically noted that he is a stepfather to three children. At a time when the GOP really wants to be talking about the economy and the border, the attack line about Harris’s family life is what’s coming through on podcasts for Gen Z women and (predominantly male) sports fans.
My hunch is that lots of parents do secretly think it’s weird not to want kids, but they also know people who have been devastated by infertility, and so find it graceless to imply that nonparents are hollow droids. And in any case, Harris has a ready answer to the implicit charge of being a heartless shrew—on Call Her Daddy, she once again talked about how her stepkids call her “Momala.”
As the campaign enters its last month, Harris is taking on more interviews and public appearances. This week, she has a Univision town hall, and will be on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, The View, Howard Stern’s radio program, and 60 Minutes. In other words, after targeting Gen Z women, she’s turning to the other key parts of the Democratic base: Hispanic voters, coastal liberals, suburban women, sexually liberated Boomers, and people who care about foreign policy. It’s a smart tactic—and the mirror image of the campaign choices that Trump made months ago.