Here’s a fact check.

What Was Said

“Four years ago, when we came in, we came in during the worst unemployment since the Great Depression”

False. During the coronavirus pandemic, the unemployment rate soared to 14.8 percent, the highest rate since the Great Depression in April 2020, as states issued stay-at-home orders and businesses shut their doors. But by the time President Biden and Ms. Harris took office in January 2021, the rate had fallen to 6.4 percent.

What Was Said

“We have the lowest Black unemployment rate in a generation.”

This needs context. The unemployment rate for Black Americans fell in April 2023 to 4.8 percent, the lowest rate since at least 1972, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking. But it rose to 6.1 percent in August. That rate is still low, but on par with the unemployment rate for Black Americans under the Trump administration, before the coronavirus pandemic. The rate had fallen to a previously record low of 5.3 percent in August 2019.

What Was Said

“What ends up happening is that at gun shows, at flea markets, gun dealers are not — under existing law in the past — required to register their sales.”

This is exaggerated. In April, the Biden administration approved a rule closing the so-called gun show loophole. But Ms. Harris was too broad in describing the previous requirements for background checks at those events.

Licensed firearms dealers were required to look up potential buyers in a background check system before a sale was approved. Private sellers were not, and some sold guns at shows, thus bypassing the background check system. But that does not mean that all dealers at gun shows were private and unlicensed or that all sales at these shows were not subject to a background check.

While there is little recent data on the topic, a 1999 study from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives found that half to three-quarters of sellers at gun shows were, in fact, licensed. A survey of gun owners published in 2017 in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that 22 percent of gun owners who purchased a firearm within the previous two years were not subject to a background check.

Under the April rule, anyone “engaged in the business” of selling firearms for profit must register as a licensed dealer. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives estimated that this would apply to an additional 23,000 dealers.

She added, “It’s got to stop.”

Ms. Harris’s remarks on Tuesday at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists were her most forceful yet about the Trump campaign’s escalating attacks on migrants and communities of color, and her first time directly addressing the situation in Springfield, Ohio.

Bomb threats have shut down schools and government buildings in the city, after Mr. Trump said at the presidential debate last week that Haitian immigrants there were stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs — an accusation for which there is no evidence and which many Black Americans and Democrats condemned as racist.

Mr. Trump has continued to amplify the claims as he seeks to put immigration at the center of his White House bid. Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, has also spread the debunked theories, saying on Sunday that he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”

In her interview, Ms. Harris laid out the city’s distress, pointing to children who could not attend school and law enforcement officers who had been stretched thin. She said residents had enjoyed “productive” lives before people began “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old.”

“It’s a crying shame,” she said. “My heart breaks for this community.”

Ms. Harris linked the growing tensions in the city to other racist political attacks by Mr. Trump, including the lie that he spread for years that Barack Obama was not a United States citizen.

Speaking two days after the second assassination attempt against Mr. Trump, the vice president mentioned her Republican rival by name just once during the roughly 45-minute interview.

On Sunday, as Mr. Trump played golf at his club in West Palm Beach, Fla., Secret Service agents opened fire on a man with a rifle who was hiding in bushes around the course, the authorities say. The man fled without firing a shot and was eventually arrested.

Since then, Mr. Trump has blamed Democrats like Ms. Harris and President Biden for the attempted violence, accusing them of “inflammatory language” in their warnings of the threat he poses to democracy. But at the same time, Mr. Trump, who has a long history of stoking political violence, has continued to use menacing language. He called the Democrats the “enemy from within” and “the real threat.”

Ms. Harris used her Tuesday interview — one of the few she has held with mainstream journalists since becoming the Democratic nominee — to continue hammering home the contrast between her and Mr. Trump and presenting herself as shepherding in a new chapter for American politics.

As she spoke about Springfield, she explained that throughout her career as a prosecutor, she had understood that her words could “move markets.” Holding an office like the presidency, she said, “means that you have been invested with trust to be responsible.”

“We’ve got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States of America engaging in that hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country, is designed to have people pointing fingers at each other,” she said.

Ms. Harris added, “It’s designed to do that, and I think most people in our country, regardless of their race, are starting to see through this nonsense and to say, ‘You know what, let’s turn the page on this.’”

She said she had spoken with Mr. Trump earlier on Tuesday, checking in to make sure that he was OK and reiterating her sentiment that “there’s no place for political violence in our country.”

As the Secret Service faces heightened scrutiny, she told the interviewers that she felt safe under the agency’s protection but that many vulnerable Americans did not feel safe generally.

“You can go back to Ohio,” she said. “Not everybody has Secret Service, and there are far too many people in our country right now who are not feeling safe.”

Ms. Harris fielded a series of policy questions with answers that often echoed her stump speech. In response to a question about whether Americans were better off economically than they were four years ago, she pointed to the Biden administration’s successes in reducing childhood poverty and lowering unemployment and prescription costs. She also elaborated on her proposed “opportunity economy,” which she said would bolster the middle class with benefits like child-care tax credits.

She acknowledged, however, that Americans were still feeling the pain of inflation, citing high grocery costs.

The Trump campaign sought to jump on her remarks.

“Kamala Harris admitted today that she has failed Black Americans,” Janiyah Thomas, the campaign’s Black media director, posted on social media. “She told the NABJ that after three and half years of her failed policies, grocery prices are too high and the American Dream is unattainable for young Americans. We can’t afford four more years of Kamala Harris. It’s time to put President Trump back in the White House and restore economic prosperity.”

Ms. Harris also sidestepped thornier direct questions about her stances on civil and human rights issues, like reparations for the descendants of enslaved people and the war in Gaza, that are particularly salient for Black, young and progressive voters.

Asked whether she would take executive action to create a commission to pay reparations, Ms. Harris said she believed the issue should be taken up by Congress.

“I’m not discounting the importance of any executive action, but ultimately Congress, because if you’re going to talk about it in any substantial way, there will be hearings, there will be a level of public education and dialogue,” she said.

Pressed on whether she would change the United States’ policy toward Israel because of the Gaza conflict, Ms. Harris dodged the question three times, repeatedly pointing to a deal the Biden administration has struggled to broker between Israel and Hamas to institute a cease-fire in exchange for hostages held in Gaza.

“We need to get it done immediately,” she said. “And that is my position. It is my policy. We need to get this deal done.”

Ms. Harris’s appearance at N.A.B.J. was highly anticipated. Mr. Trump had appeared before hundreds of the group’s members in July, as part of its election-year tradition to invite presidential candidates to address its annual convention, and just weeks after he survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa.

He used the venue to question Ms. Harris’s racial identity, telling the room full of journalists that the vice president — whose mother was Indian American, whose father is Black and who has always identified as a Black woman — had “all of a sudden” become “a Black person.”

During the interview, Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized a Black, female interviewer because she had opened the event with a question that included details about his past racist statements.

And he told the group of journalists that immigrants would come and take their jobs, while proclaiming that he had been “the best president for the Black population” since Abraham Lincoln.

Katie Rogers and Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.

The ad wars are the consequence of the fund-raising wars: Democrats have significantly out-raised Republicans in the months after Ms. Harris succeeded President Biden as the head of the Democratic ticket, and Ms. Harris has more money to spend on paid media.

Ms. Harris’s campaign has portrayed her as the underdog and often points to the existence of several outside Republican groups to argue that Democratic donors should not be complacent. But the biggest spender by far in the campaign is Future Forward, the main super PAC blessed by the Harris campaign, which is scheduled to spend $186 million on television and radio over the final 49 days.

The Harris campaign itself is spending more than the Trump campaign in the remaining weeks of the election. Ms. Harris is set to air about $109 million in advertisements, while Mr. Trump will air about $98 million worth.

The state where the candidates and their allies plan to spend the most money on advertising is Pennsylvania: $133 million in all. Democrats have about a $21 million advantage in the state.

TV and radio ad spending plans in swing states

A chart shows reserved spending on television and radio ads in swing states from September 17 onward in seven swing states. Both parties plan to spend the most in Pennsylvania, where Democrats have more than a $20 million advantage.

Democratic

Republican

$77 million

$56 million

Pa.

59

36

Mich.

39

28

Ga.

33

27

Wis.

35

21

Ariz.

31

19

N.C.

Nev.

21

7

Democratic

Republican

$77 million

$56 million

Pennsylvania

59

36

Michigan

Georgia

39

28

Wisconsin

33

27

Arizona

35

21

North Carolina

31

19

Nevada

21

7

The next noisiest state will be Michigan, where about $95 million will be spent on television and Democrats have a $23 million advantage. Democrats have $6 million to $15 million advantages in four big battleground states — Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin — as well as Nebraska, which is home to a single congressional district that is competitive at the presidential level. Republicans have no advertising reserved in Nebraska, while Democrats have nearly $6 million booked there through Election Day. Democrats are also set to run small amounts of ads in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Maine, which Republicans are almost entirely ignoring.

But by and large, Democrats and Republicans seem to agree about which states are the most important relative to one another: About 29 percent of Republicans’ reservations for advertising airtime are in Pennsylvania, while 23 percent of Democratic dollars are headed there. In the other battleground states, the proportion of money that each party is spending is similar.

The pro-Trump outside groups have been slower to reserve advertising time, with some buying relatively last-minute ads that can be much more expensive than the reservations made further in advance. The three main pro-Trump outside groups — MAGA Inc., Preserve America PAC and Right for America PAC — have reserved a combined $95 million over that period, less than half the amount reserved by Democratic outside groups.

Still, the sums reserved by Republicans could change quickly given that several groups are heavily financed by single billionaire donors, such as Miriam Adelson and Timothy Mellon, meaning that a super PAC could quickly secure and spend significant money if one donor is persuaded to write a check.

There is a limit, of course, to what all that money can buy. Some states and markets are more expensive than others. Plus, outside groups are charged more for their ads than campaigns, making the advantage that Democrats have with their super PACs less significant when it comes to what voters actually see.

For instance, Democrats are spending almost twice as much in the Raleigh-Durham market as Republicans on television. But Republicans actually are set to broadcast a higher number of “Gross Rating Points,” a typical measure of television advertising firepower, in that market. That’s because most of the Democratic spending there is coming from a super PAC, while all the Republican spending there is coming from the Trump campaign. The same is true in other North Carolina markets like Charlotte and Wilmington.

The total spending figures do not include campaign or super PAC spending on Meta or Google, which owns YouTube. Those digital platforms do not share data publicly on future reservations, but Democrats have outspent Republicans there considerably in the past.

With no more mass-audience events remaining before Election Day, and former President Donald J. Trump declaring, for now, that he will not submit to another debate, Ms. Harris must determine the best way to keep introducing herself to voters who still have questions about her policies and plans for the nation.

During her 2020 campaign and early in her vice presidency, some of Ms. Harris’s biggest missteps came during unscripted encounters with journalists. To avoid taking chances, she has granted only six interviews in the 58 days since President Biden withdrew from the race, three with friendly radio hosts. Even the press-averse Mr. Biden took more questions in the final two months of his campaign than Ms. Harris has in what is nearly the first two months of hers.

Her team says this is about to change, promising a series of appearances across an array of media venues, including local and national outlets, podcasts, radio stations and daytime talk shows.

“If you want to know the kind of things we plan to do, look at the things she was doing all year before the ticket switch,” Brian Fallon, a senior adviser for Ms. Harris’s campaign, said in an interview, referring to Ms. Harris’s regular media appearances before she succeeded Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket.

On Monday, she recorded a breezy interview with Stephanie Himonidis, a Spanish-language radio host known as Chiquibaby whose show is syndicated on more than 100 stations. Ms. Himonidis asked Ms. Harris about inflation, immigration and her upbringing, and concluded by saying she hoped to meet the vice president “soon at the White House to have a margarita because they have the best margaritas.”

On Tuesday, Ms. Harris sat for a more in-depth interview at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists, the same forum where Mr. Trump, in July, faced some of the toughest questioning of his campaign.

Ms. Harris dodged direct questions about what changes in foreign policy she might carry out to help resolve the war in Gaza and broader Mideast tensions.

But she also delivered her most forceful statements yet about the racist conspiracy theory amplified by Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Ms. Harris connected the theory to episodes from Mr. Trump’s past, like calling for the execution of the suspects in the Central Park Five case and his questioning of former President Barack Obama’s citizenship.

“It’s a crying shame, my heart breaks for this community,” she said. “When you have this kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand at a very deep level how much your words have meaning.”

If there were any question the Harris campaign was pleased with most of the questions and answers from the vice president’s N.A.B.J. interview, it clipped five of her responses and posted them on social media. Not included there: Ms. Harris’s evasive answer about whether she would pursue policy changes to the United States’ stance toward Israel.

Her comments from Tuesday’s event were likely to recirculate on the same cable and broadcast networks that have not been able to secure an interview with the vice president. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have concluded that the old-school strategy of interviews with broadcast networks and national newspapers may not be worth the risk, given that voters increasingly get their election news from a variety of less traditional sources, like TikTok influencers or celebrity-hosted podcasts.

Mr. Trump, for his part, has almost entirely avoided the gantlet of one-on-one interviews with experienced political reporters. Instead, he has sat down with a series of mostly fawning interviewers, including various Fox News pundits; Elon Musk, the X owner who is donating millions of dollars to the former president’s campaign; and Adin Ross, an online video game celebrity who gave Mr. Trump a Rolex watch and a Tesla Cybertruck.

Mr. Trump has, however, held three recent televised news conferences with the mainstream reporters covering his campaign, who posed challenging questions on numerous fronts.

Ms. Harris’s campaign is particularly focused on local TV and radio stations in battleground states like Pennsylvania, where Ms. Harris sat on Friday for a somewhat circuitous 11-minute interview with WPVI, the ABC affiliate in Philadelphia, in between stops in Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre.

Asked for “one or two specific things” she would do to address high prices, Ms. Harris spoke for 1 minute 52 seconds about her biography before she got around to articulating her proposals for tax deductions to new small businesses and tax credits for housing developers.

An answer for people worried about the price of groceries this was not.

Every big news network has a standing request with the Harris campaign for an interview. One potential appearance could be on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” the country’s most-watched news program, which is planning its quadrennial election special on Oct. 7 and has requested interviews with both candidates.

But aides say Ms. Harris is more likely to spend time answering questions from inquisitors with smaller, more niche audiences that include many voters in battleground states. These interviewers include drive-time radio hosts and anchors from the local evening news — particularly those who, like the television reporter from Philadelphia, tend not to ask follow-ups if and when Ms. Harris filibusters or dodges their questions.

“There are big pluses to do local media; there’s no urgency for her to do national press,” said John Del Cecato, who was a media strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. “There’s no soft spots that she’s desperate to keep armored. She simply has better ways to deliver her message to people than in national interviews.”

One of those ways is leveraging the power of the most influential and popular Americans who have endorsed her: On Thursday, Ms. Harris will appear in a virtual event with Oprah Winfrey, who spoke on her behalf at the Democratic National Convention.

In the final seven weeks of the race, Ms. Harris’s campaign is also shifting its focus from tent-pole events like the Democratic National Convention and last week’s debate to get-out-the-vote efforts as the first Americans begin to cast their ballots. Her campaign is planning to use interviews with local reporters — known in the business as earned media, as opposed to advertising that the campaign pays for — to drive a message that it is time to vote.

“There’s an old adage that ‘earned’ beats ‘paid’ every time on a presidential campaign,” said Kate Bedingfield, a former communications director for Mr. Biden in the White House and a deputy campaign manager for his 2020 bid. “Local media is king, and I think she should do it a lot.”

Ms. Harris received mixed reviews for her 20-minute sit-down in August with Dana Bash of CNN. She brought along her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who sat next to her quietly. Asked by Ms. Bash about her shifting views on policy areas like criminal justice and fracking, Ms. Harris deferred repeatedly to a pat phrase — “My values have not changed.”

Mr. Walz, for his part, had not done any interviews since being added to the ticket and had avoided answering questions from his traveling press pool until he spoke with cable TV hosts after the debate last week. Last weekend, he held interviews with local news reporters in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Superior, Wis.

The Wisconsin interviewer asked Mr. Walz who was playing Senator JD Vance of Ohio in his debate prep (nobody yet, Mr. Walz said); if marijuana should be legalized nationwide (“It’s an issue for states,” Mr. Walz replied); and if the campaign was working to have Taylor Swift appear at a rally (“If they are, they haven’t told me,” he answered).

Mr. Walz is also cooperating with a feature story about him being written for The Atlantic magazine.

Before they joined forces on the Democratic presidential ticket, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz, especially the Minnesota governor, had been more accessible figures for journalists.

When it was Mr. Biden running for re-election, Ms. Harris was an eager interviewee. And Mr. Walz’s rise from a rather obscure Midwestern governor to the nominee for vice president was powered by his willingness to make himself available for virtually any national media and cable television request over a two-year period.

But lately, she and Mr. Walz have been speaking to an array of social media influencers. They even produced footage of them interviewing each other.

“I’m the first vice president, I believe, who has ever grown chili peppers,” Ms. Harris told Mr. Walz in a video last month.

Mr. Walz replied, “I’m trying to expand my food knowledge.”

“We’ve got some cantaloupes,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”

The video of them chatting in a Detroit cafe has nearly two million views on YouTube.