We were denied the sight of Kamala Harris trying to consume Da Bomb Beyond Insanity hot sauce while explaining her border policy.
The popular YouTube show Hot Ones — where celebrities struggle to finish off chicken wings topped with increasingly volcanic levels of sauce — rejected the Harris campaign’s request to come on the show, said Team Harris leaders during a debrief interview with Pod Save America this week.
“Hot Ones as an example,” podcast host Dan Pfeiffer said as he asked about Harris media opportunities that didn’t happen. “Like there never in time has there been a candidate better suited for a podcast than Kamala Harris on Hot Ones.”
“I think, if I remember correctly, on Hot Ones, that they didn’t wanna delve into politics,” said Harris campaign staffer Stephanie Cutter, who noted that the show wouldn’t have taken Donald Trump either. “Anybody that took him would take us. It was more some of the, like, like Hot Ones, which is a great show, they didn’t want to do any politics, so they weren’t going to take us or him. So that was the issue. But we got on plenty of them and the bottom line is she was willing to do just about anything and have a conversation with anybody regardless of where they sat.”
The team was also asked about Harris not going on the top-rated podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, following Rogan saying that he wanted to have the Democratic presidential candidate on but that her team insisted he fly to New York for an interview lasting only 40 minutes.
The Harris team said they were willing to do Rogan’s show in Austin during a visit to nearby Houston for a campaign event with Beyoncé, but then they found out he was interviewing Trump that day instead.
“I hate to repeat this over and over, but it was a very short race with a limited number of days and for a candidate to leave the battleground and go to Houston is a day off the playing field in the battleground [states],” Cutter said. “As it turns out, that was the day that Trump was taping his Joe Rogan [episode], which they had never confirmed to us. We kind of figured that out, in the lead up to it … She was ready, willing to go on Joe Rogan. So, we had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team. They were great. They wanted us to come on. We wanted to come on. We tried to get a date to make it work, and ultimately we just weren’t able to find a date.”
Added David Plouffe: “We offered to do it in Austin. People should know that. Didn’t work out. I think maybe they leveraged that to get Trump in studio. And then we were obviously not going to be back in Texas but offered to do it on the road.”
As for whether going on Rogan’s show would have helped Harris, who struggled to draw young men in the election, Cutter said, “It would have broken through [the media clutter], not because of the conversation with Joe Rogan, but because of the fact that she was doing it — and that was really the benefit of it. Will she do it in the future? Maybe. Who knows? But it didn’t ultimately impact the outcome one way or the other. But she was willing to do whatever it takes.”
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