“Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty turned his attention to sports,” Semafor reports.
“The campaign needed to introduce Harris quickly to people who aren’t obsessed with politics. Sports is perhaps America’s last remaining monoculture, and Flaherty and the Harris team decided to book her on sports shows and podcasts.”
“But one by one, the biggest personalities and shows politely turned them down.”
Said Flaherty: “Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us. It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.’”
