Why Kamala Harris Went on ‘Call Her Daddy’

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images

Last Friday, the news broke that Vice-President Kamala Harris would appear on the hugely popular podcast Call Her Daddy, hosted by 30-year-old Alex Cooper. At first, people were baffled by the news: Was a Democratic presidential candidate really going to appear on a podcast that was once best known for coining a fellatio technique? Yet when the episode finally dropped on Sunday, touching on topics from reproductive rights to Harris’s career as a prosecutor to Republicans’ criticism of childless women, many were pleasantly surprised. “Sorry haters. The Call Her Daddy interview was well conducted. Questions delivered were smart and straightforward,” CNN’s Audie Cornish tweeted.

Although there were many things about the interview that were unorthodox — Harris uttered the phrase “Daddy Gang,” while Cooper dressed casually in a sweatshirt with “Unwell,” the name of her podcast network, splashed across the front — the discussion between Harris and Cooper was sober and thoughtful, even a little dry. It was also perfectly consistent with the kind of interview Cooper is now known for. The conversation was, in many ways, the culmination of years of calculated rebranding by Cooper, transforming herself from a raunchy sex podcaster to a multimedia mogul.

Since its launch in 2018, Call Her Daddy has evolved into a cultural juggernaut, becoming one of the most popular shows in the world and consistently ranking second only to Joe Rogan’s on the U.S. podcast charts. It has the largest female audience of any podcast in the world, and Cooper is among the highest-paid podcasters on the planet, reportedly netting $100 million in an exclusive deal with SiriusXM earlier this year; she’s also launched her own podcast company featuring hosts including Alix Earle and Madeline Argy. Her frank, conversational interviewing style has garnered her interviews with celebrities from Miley Cyrus to Zayn Malik to Ariana Madix (who gave Cooper her first interview after the Tom Sandoval breakup). She’s been hailed as “the next great American media mogul” and compared to Oprah.

A former college-soccer star, Cooper launched Call Her Daddy with her then-cohost and -roommate Sofia Franklyn. On the podcast, the two graphically recounted their sexual exploits as 20-something single women in New York, and topics from early episodes ranged from blowjob tips to urging women who are “fives and sixes” to compensate for their physical shortcomings by overperforming in the bedroom. Their NSFW banter caught the attention of Barstool CEO Dave Portnoy, who signed the pair to his network.

Although the show was tremendously popular, Cooper quickly tired of the vulgar sorority-girl brand. When I interviewed her in 2023, she told me she “resented the character that I had built.” In 2021, Franklyn left the show over salary negotiations, and Cooper took the reins, ending their partnership and their friendship.

Following Franklyn’s departure from the show, Call Her Daddy gradually took on a more mature and measured tone. Cooper started using the show as a platform for discussing her mental health as well as her evolving feminist views. (“When I was in college, the feminist movement felt very, ‘We hate men,’” she told me in 2023. “Then I learned that that wasn’t what it was.”) After Roe v. Wade was overturned, Cooper released an episode about an abortion clinic in North Carolina, which she says she viewed as a turning point for the show and her overall brand. “The goal was just for people to feel something from it, without it being shoved down their throat,” she told me about the episode. “I have the biggest female podcast in the world. So I think that was very organic for me to get behind.”

Cooper’s interviews are often intimate — in one with Gwyneth Paltrow, she asks her to compare how exes Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck were in bed — but they are rarely hard-hitting. (Critics of the show have accused her of providing subjects with questions in advance, which Cooper has denied.) This has made Call Her Daddy a go-to safe space for celebrities looking to burnish their image, with the show occupying something of a gray area between a therapy session and a traditional sit-down interview. “I’m trying to make someone look good by asking all of the questions instead of just the ones that I want to immediately know, to give them a chance to explain themselves,” she said in our interview. This summer, she parlayed her massive audience into a gig doing color commentary at the Olympics.

Aside from the abortion episode, Call Her Daddy has largely sidestepped political discourse. Cooper almost never delves into her own political views and doesn’t usually invite political figures on as guests, something she acknowledged in the introduction to the Kamala interview. “At the end of the day, I couldn’t see a world in which one of the main conversations in this election is women, and I’m not a part of it,” she said. “I am so aware I have a very mixed audience when it comes to politics. So please hear me when I say my goal today is not to change your political affiliation.” In February, she told the New York Times that she turned down the opportunity to interview both Vice-President Harris and Joe Biden. “Go on CNN, go on Fox,” she said. “You want to talk about your sex life, Joe?”

She’s clearly changed her mind. During the Harris interview, Cooper didn’t ask the vice-president about her sex life (or about her personal life at all, really — what I wouldn’t have given for the opportunity to get Harris to dish about her early-aughts relationship with Montell). There were many questions that Cooper could have asked that she did not: Both women, for instance, have had their accomplishments denigrated and downplayed by men in power and have been subject to sexist vitriol, which could have made for fascinating common ground. But trying to make Harris seem interesting — or at least trying to probe deeper into her motivations at all — was not what Cooper was attempting to do here. Cooper’s goal appears to have been to firmly entrench her brand as the comfy-cozy girl next door, someone who makes listeners and world leaders alike feel like they’re best friends doing a first-date post-mortem in her living room. And Harris’s goal — to reach Cooper’s enormous audience of Gen-Z and millennial female voters, a demographic that can make a huge difference in an uncomfortably close election — was not at odds with Cooper’s here. In this respect, both sides succeeded tremendously — even if the interview itself may have verged on a snoozefest.