In the 24 days Kamala Harris has spent as first de facto and then the definitive Democratic presidential nominee since President Joe Biden withdrew from reelection, the vice president has sat down for zero interviews and publicly spoken to the press for a total of 70 seconds. During that minute-long gaggle after a Michigan rally last week, Harris said she hoped to schedule, maybe, a single interview by the end of the month. After four years of Democrats lambasting former President Donald Trump as an existential threat to our fragile democratic experiment, the press seems positively indifferent to the notion that a candidate who has not received a single national primary vote in either 2020 or 2024 is heading to a presidential election without even one on-the-record interview with one of its own.

In other words, Harris knows all she has to do is ride out the shortest campaign in modern history and that the media will evidently cover for her.

Sure, CNN’s John Berman admirably pushed back on the Harris campaign when it lied about her schedule in response to queries about her evasion of the media, and the Washington Post editorial board said that Harris must speak with journalists “if she hopes to prevail.” But evidently, that’s not really true. Somewhat innocuously, if not irritatingly, the Democratic hagiographers in the corporate media have peddled the party line that Republicans are “weird,” Harris is “brat,” and her candidacy marks the greatest thing since sliced bread. More maliciously, most in the media have ignored that Harris is a radical who presided over a quadrupling of the influx of illegal immigrants into the United States and an average annual inflation rate of nearly 6% and advocated nationalizing some 30% of the economy before that.

But Harris is running out the clock because she can.

The president announced he could concede to the palace coup 25 days ago, announcing both his withdrawal and his endorsement of Harris on July 21. Harris has spent these past three-and-a-half weeks eschewing the press with the feeble excuse of the flurry of kickstarting a presidential campaign with fewer than 100 days until Election Day, and the Democratic National Convention next week has bought her essentially another fortnight of the media playing ball and pretending it’s normal for a party to depose the democratically elected candidate with a second-stringer who can’t lob softballs from Rachel Maddow, let alone beach balls from the Pod bros.

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After the DNC, Harris only has four weeks before early voting begins. The most crucial state of the Electoral College map, Pennsylvania, leads the calendar with early voting beginning on Sept. 16. Missouri allows select voters to begin casting early ballots the day after, and Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia all begin accepting early votes on Sept. 20.

Biden gave his party fewer than half as many days to replace him than even Lyndon Johnson did in 1968, and that was in an alien era when Election Day was no misnomer rather than our current reality of a 50-day election season. Only 57 days will have elapsed between Biden backing Harris as his coronated replacement and the start of early voting, and to date, Harris has spent nearly half of those days avoiding answering but one question from the press. And the perfectly compliant media may be fine with accommodating Democrats, but they ought not delude themselves into believing they’re enabling anything remotely democratic.