As Donald Trump continued to spread his message through the podcast manosphere in the months leading up to the 2024 election, one refrain rang out from liberals everywhere: Get Kamala Harris on Hot Ones!
Now, thanks to a painful post-mortem round table from her top campaign staff on Pod Save America, we know that they not only tried to get Harris on that popular YouTube show—where celebrities answer questions while eating increasingly spicy hot wings—but that the Hot Ones team apparently turned her down.
As Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for Barack Obama put it during Tuesday’s “exclusive” episode: “Never in time has there been a candidate better suited” for Hot Ones than Harris.
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But it never happened because the show “didn’t want to delve into politics,” Stephanie Cutter, who ran messaging and media strategy for Harris, said on the podcast.
She said the Harris team got that reaction nearly “across the board” when trying to book the Democratic nominee on the same types of non-political media that happily welcomed Trump.
“I don’t think he had the same problem,” Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, adding that Trump “certainly was able to tap into some cultural elements in ways that we couldn’t.”
Pfeiffer, for his part, marveled at “the idea that it would be more politically problematic to have on Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president of the United States, than Donald Trump, a man who’s been convicted of a crime and tried to violently overthrow the election.”
That point led Cutter to reveal that the Harris campaign did reach out to Hot Ones about having their candidate on, but were rebuffed.
“Hot Ones, which is a great show, they didn’t wanna do any politics, so they weren’t going to take us or him,” the Democratic political consultant said. “So that was the issue.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Hot Ones for comment.
In its more than 350 episodes over nearly a decade, Hot Ones has never hosted a political candidate for office. Leading up to the 2024 election, guests included musician Pharrell Williams, comedian Ali Wong and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon, with episodes generally racking up over a million views on YouTube.
During the Pod Save America episode, Harris‘ team also confirmed that, contrary to previous reporting, the candidate was willing to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast in his Austin, Texas, on the day she was visiting that state for her rally with Beyoncé. But because Trump was recording his episode that day, they weren’t able to make it work.
“She was ready, willing to go on Joe Rogan,” Cutter said, acknowledging that it “would’ve broken through“ but insisting that it ”didn’t ultimately impact the outcome" of the race “one way or the other.”
