Recovering journalist and Nashville-area public affairs expert Clint Brewer said the different approaches taken by both presidential campaigns regarding media exposure stem from both parties’ candidates’ abilities when handling the media on a national scale.
Acknowledging how Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have had “selective” and “controlled” interactions with the media as opposed to former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senator JD Vance (R-OH) being widely available to the press, Brewer said both campaigns have to “play with what they’ve got” in regards to media exposure.
Brewer said the differences stem from the candidate’s overall backgrounds of handling media exposure in their previous roles before being nominated as president and vice president.
“You’ve got the vice president who has largely been publicly sequestered by the Biden administration, was kept out of the spotlight, was not handed any big initiatives other than the border, which she’s tried to say she wasn’t handed. She didn’t have a lot of practice at being a national figure for the three and a half years and then you’ve got Governor Walz who’s a governor of a state and it’s a nice state, but it’s not a place where the national press is running to do stories all the time,” Brewer explained on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Brewer explained how Harris and Walz are both “statewide politicians” while Trump and Vance are more national figures from a media standpoint.
“So what do [the Democrats] have? They have, essentially, the vice president who is a former U.S. Senator and before that, what she really was was a very practiced statewide politician in California. And you’ve got Walz who’s a sitting governor. From a media standpoint, from a messaging standpoint, from how they handle themselves in public standpoint, you’ve got two statewide politicians. It’s not a knock. It’s not a criticism. It’s just a fact of what they’re practiced to do,” Brewer said.
“And you look at that and they don’t have the muscle memory that Trump and Vance have on the national stage. Vance has been a national figure since before he was elected…He was a cultural figure before he ever put his name on a ballot. President Trump has been a cultural figure for the better part of the last 40 years,” Brewer added.
When it comes to Trump and Vance, Brewer pointed out how the candidates are “contradicting” what Republican tickets have done in the past, which was to avoid the press and instead talk with “everybody” in an effort to appeal to a larger base.
“What the Republicans are doing is playing with the team they have, and they are flooding the zone. They will talk to everybody, which is so contradictory to what Republican tickets have done in the past,” Brewer said.
Regarding Harris and Walz, Brewer said the Democrats’ campaign is simply based on “vibes” to appeal to their existing base.
“From a messaging standpoint, the Harris campaign is the vibe campaign. They’re simply trying to hit the cues that are going to appeal to their constituencies that they know they have,” Brewer added.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz” by Tim Walz.
