Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina said on MSNBC Sunday that the Kamala Harris campaign team is being forced to make tough decisions in advance of the election.
"[I]n politics you have three things: you have time, you have money, and you have volunteers," Messina said. "And the one thing of those three you can’t go get more of is time. So there’s really difficult decisions being made in Wilmington right now about what you do with her time, what you do with the surrogates' time."
"It’s why you see these campaign people on TV and they look absolutely exhausted, because everyone is telling them they’re a band of idiots, and they should do it their way, and they have to make really, really difficult decisions," Messina said of Harris' campaign staff.
MSNBC SHOWS ENTIRE PANEL OF ARAB-AMERICAN VOTERS REFUSING TO BACK HARRIS
The Harris campaign has faced criticism for its relative lack of interviews, with former President Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, sitting down for at least 88 interviews since the Harris-Walz ticket was formed in early August, compared to at least 48 unscripted interviews for the Democratic presidential ticket thus far.
Messina explained that in a presidential campaign, multiple teams are vying for the attention of the candidate.
"There’s competing things," Messina said. "[T]he press team wants her on these TV interviews, the fundraising team wants her to do one more big event in X city. The battleground states are saying, ‘We’ve gotta have her three more times in Michigan.’ And so making those decisions becomes the most important thing."
TRUMP-VANCE TICKET HAS DONE COMBINED 88 INTERVIEWS SINCE AUGUST COMPARED TO 49 FOR HARRIS-WALZ
The latest Fox News polling shows Harris ahead by 6 points among voters from the seven key battleground states (within the margin of error for that subsample), and the candidates are tied at 49% each among voters in close counties (where the Biden-Trump 2020 margin was less than 10 points).
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Fox News' Brian Flood, David Rutz and Yael Halon contributed to this report.
