A former senior adviser to Kamala Harris thinks it should be Joe Rogan dropping everything to land an interview with the vice president and not the other way around.
Mike Nellis, a former campaign adviser to Harris, said Rogan is missing out on an opportunity to go full-mainstream by sitting down with Harris.
“The exposure with a new audience who is deeply skeptical of him after years of out of context clips would be huge,” Nellis said. “He could pull in a lot of new people who have never listened to a full episode before, and even if he retained a fraction of that audience it would move him more into the mainstream.”
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Rogan, 57, revealed Monday night that Harris, 60, agreed to sit with him for an hour-long interview, but he said he refused to fly to her—as her campaign requested—and instead wanted the convo to take place at his Texas-based studio and span as long as three hours.
While insisting that a presidential candidate come to you a week before Election Day may seem like a significant ask, the 78-year-old Donald Trump did travel to Texas to sit down for a full-length interview with Rogan on Friday.
While nearly every other figure in the media would have jumped at the chance to pick Harris’ brain for an hour at this point in her campaign, arguably the world‘s most successful podcaster decided he didn’t want to compromise.
“They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour,” Rogan complained in a post Monday. “I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin. My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being.”
Nellis thinks that Rogan’s decision is a mistake—not because it’d hurt him with his mostly-male, conservative-leaning listeners, but because he had a chance to bring in new listeners who’d otherwise never give him a shot. He suggested that Rogan could have gotten creative with a one-off venue, perhaps by renting out a UFC gym.
“He would get massive views from his existing audience tuning in to hate watch and a whole new audience of (a) people who love Harris and (b) who are tuning in for the spectacle of it all,” Nellis said. “It would be make him even more culturally relevant.”
A Rogan interview of Harris wouldn’t only benefit the podcaster, however, Nellis emphasized to the Daily Beast previously. He said in an email that the demographics of Rogan’s listeners are an area where Harris struggles most.
“Rogan reaches a large demographic of young men, which includes a key block of movable voters,” Nellis said on Oct. 15. “While Harris isn’t going to win over white male voters en masse, even small shifts within that group could significantly ease her path to victory.”
