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NEW YORK (AP) – When Vice President Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with podcaster Alex Cooper, the conversation didn’t start by dissecting policy positions. The goal, Cooper told the Democratic nominee, was to “get to know you as a person.”

And that was fine with Harris, who said she’s on the popular podcast “Call Her Daddy” because “one of the best ways to communicate with people is to be real.”

Well past the halfway point of her surprise presidential campaign and with voting already underway, Harris is still pitching herself to Americans who will determine this year’s presidential election.

On Tuesday, her media blitz takes her to studios across Manhattan as the Democratic nominee tries to reach as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. It’s a sharp turnaround after largely avoiding interviews since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, and an acknowledgment that she needs to do more to defeat Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Harris began the day with the ladies of ABC’s “The View,” and was later scheduled to speak with longtime radio host Howard Stern and tap a show with late-night comedian Stephen Colbert. The trio of appearances came after Harris gave interviews to CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which aired Monday night, and Cooper’s podcast, which aired Sunday.

“Call Her Daddy” is often funny, with honest talk about sex, but Harris and Cooper started talking about their mothers.

Harris said her mother’s first instinct was always to comfort her eldest daughter when she ran into problems. Instead, she asked, “What did you do?”

Although that might sound cold, the vice president said, “she really taught me, think about where you had agency in that moment, and think about what you had the choice to do or don’t Don’t let things happen to you.”

Interactions like those Harris’ team are prioritizing for the vice president in the final four weeks before Election Day. She has yet to give a newspaper or magazine interview, but her staff is considering additional podcasts where they believe Harris can reach voters who don’t follow traditional news sources.

Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said Harris must energize people who have tuned out politics because they believe “all the politicians are the same, they all say the same thing, they don’t know not for the life of me, I can’t relate to them at all.”

“They want to like you and trust you,” he said.

On The View, Harris was pressed about how she would govern differently from Biden, even as she said she couldn’t name a single decision from the past four years that she would have made differently.

“We are also different people and I will bring those sensibilities to the way I lead,” he said.

Jennifer Harris, the White House’s former senior director of international economics, said Harris had a steeper hill to climb because of how he became the Democratic nominee.

“We didn’t have a good long primary to meet Kamala Harris in the way most voters are familiar with,” he said. Harris has to find a way to demonstrate the instincts and principles “that will guide any number of hundreds of specific policy questions that will arise during the presidency.”

While Harris has revealed some policy proposals during her two and a half months at the top of the ticket – and she is using her Tuesday appearance on “The View” to discuss new plans to lower costs for those who care about children and elderly parents, her campaign says – she has given top billing to speeches about her “economic philosophy,” such as the one she delivered in Pittsburgh two weeks ago.

There, Harris pushed back against Trump’s claims that she promotes “communist” ideas. He embraced capitalism and positioned himself as a pragmatist who would “take good ideas wherever they come.”

“As president, I will be based on my core values ​​of fairness, dignity and opportunity,” Harris said. “And I promise you, I will be pragmatic in my approach.”

Senior campaign officials have largely shrugged off criticism from some quarters that Harris has not articulated more policy positions. Instead, they say small but critical numbers of undecided voters say they want to know more about Harris before deciding, and the more those voters see Harris, the more which they like.

If only policy papers won elections, Harris’ allies say, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would finish her second term or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren would be in the middle of a re-election battle.

Even Trump this time has expressed a deeper policy vision than either of his previous two campaigns, though he has worked to remove any connection to the conservative “Project 2025” vision for the next Republican president and produced by former aides and advisers.

Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden said defining Harris in the eyes of voters is the central challenge of the campaign.

“This race is really quite simple in that the next few weeks are about who is going to fill in the blanks on who Harris is,” he said.

Being vice president gives some basic name recognition. In October 2019, while Harris was one of many candidates in the Democratic presidential primary, an AP-NORC poll found that about 3 in 10 Americans did not know enough about her to form an opinion. That share dropped to about 1 in 10 Americans by early 2021, when she and Biden took office, where it remained until earlier this summer.

Now, almost every American knows enough to have at least a superficial opinion—whether positive or negative—of Harris.

But that doesn’t mean that views on Harris are settled, or that Americans know as much as they’d like about her. Harris’ favorable numbers moved slightly during the summer, which suggests that the opinion of her may be somewhat malleable.

Other polls indicate that while some voters are still looking for more information about Harris, Trump’s views appear to be more stable. A quarter of likely voters said they still felt they needed to learn more about Harris, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after his debate against Trump, while about three-quarters said they were more or less already know what they need. to know about her.

Trump, on the other hand, was more of a known quantity. One in 10 likely voters said they felt they needed to learn more about Trump, and about 9 in 10 said they already knew more or less what they needed to know.

Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, also spends more time conducting interviews to help people get to know him better rather than going deep on policy. In an appearance on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” Monday night, Walz talked about the “surreal” experience of being on the ticket, his background as a high school teacher and football coach, and even how he ranks Harris in his phone contacts – like the “dry cleaner.”

On “Call Her Daddy,” Cooper told Harris that people are “frustrated and tired of politics in general.”

“Why should we trust you?” she asked.

Harris replied by saying “you can look at my career to know what is important to me.”

He continued: “I care about making sure that people are entitled to the freedoms they are owed and that they get those freedoms. I care about lifting people up and making sure you are protected from harm.”

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Megarian reported from Washington. AP writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.