On Wednesday evening, just under two hours before Kamala Harris and Mike Pence battled it out in the 2020 vice presidential debate, Pete Buttigieg entered a different type of conflict zone for Democrats: Fox News. Having played Pence in mock debates, the former South Bend mayor and Joe Biden surrogate provided a behind-the-curtain look at Harris’s preparations and hit back hard against criticism of the V.P. candidate.
“There’s a classic parlor game of trying to find a little bit of daylight between running mates. And if people want to play that game, we could look into why an evangelical Christian like Mike Pence wants to be on a ticket with a president caught with a porn star,” the former South Bend mayor replied after Fox anchor Martha MacCallum pressed him on Harris’s “changing” policy record. “Or how he feels about the immigration policy that he called unconstitutional before he decided to team up with Donald Trump.” After adding that he could play “that game” all night, he expressed his belief that Americans want to know if they will be better protected under a Biden administration “than they have been by this president, who’s failed to secure America in the face of one of the most dangerous things ever to happen to our country.”
Buttigieg returned to Fox News after the debate, and on Trump–favorite Fox & Friends, knocked the president’s decision to sit out a virtual debate next week with Biden. “I don’t know why the president’s afraid to participate in a debate,” he said. “All of us have had to get used to virtual formats.”
During the early days of the 2020 primary, an uproar broke out between Democratic candidates regarding whether or not they should even appear on Fox News, as some in the party claimed that doing so serves to legitimize the network. Both Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders participated in town halls hosted by Fox as some Democrats, like Elizabeth Warren, blasted the network. But four years ago, it was significantly less controversial for Democrats to show their faces on Murdoch’s airwaves; Hillary Clinton made multiple Fox News appearances in the lead up to her 2016 loss. And with the election now approaching the two-minute warning, the Biden campaign is doing the same and not shying away from spreading its talking points on Fox News, all while knowing that whatever they say on the Democratic nominee’s behalf might very well be cynically misconstrued as soon as surrogates like Buttigieg are off the air.
Last month, a Biden official explained to the Daily Beast the campaign’s strategy for handling the opposition network. “If you’re watching MSNBC, we have you. It seems like a more worthwhile endeavor to go on Fox, even if the questions are insane,” the official said. Another person close to Biden said that since Fox News is actively boosting the “blatant lies from Donald Trump to aid in his reelection” and continuously seeping its millions of viewers in them, it is all the more important to have surrogates push back on behalf of the former vice president. “They shouldn’t be treated like a real news organization because they lack the standards and ethics of real journalists,” the Biden insider explained. “But that doesn’t mean the campaign doesn’t value voters who watch Fox News, and sometimes it’s important to speak to those folks.”
There are also a few Democratic lawmakers who make appearances on Fox, including representatives Max Rose and Tim Ryan and Senator Chris Coons. According to the Daily Beast, the Biden campaign has encouraged Ryan and Coons to appear on the network to help the top of their party’s ticket. Ryan, who gained significant experience as a Fox News guest during his 2020 presidential campaign, asserted that candidate Biden stands a “1,000 percent” better chance of appealing to the network’s audience than Clinton did the last time around. “I always think it’s important to go on there, and, you know, I’m happy to do it. I mean, there aren’t many persuadables left,” added the Ohio Democrat. “But they’re watching Fox, there’s no question. They’re not watching MSNBC.”
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