As Republicans ramp up their campaign against Kamala Harris, they’re struggling to find a coherent line of attack.
Republicans have recently criticized everything from the vice president’s handling of immigration to her past as a prosecutor to her “horrible,” “horrible,” and “vile” demeanor. On Wednesday, Donald Trump called Harris a “radical, left-wing nutjob,” and the next day, he called her “nasty” in a Fox News interview, a taunt reminiscent of the insults Trump hurled at Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies have claimed she is actively conspiring to hide Biden’s apparent decline, or that she is a completely different Biden. Some have made overtly racist and sexist attacks, calling her a “DEI employee” or accusing her of not having biological children. Others say she smiles too much. Many more have criticized her for supporting consumer policies like banning plastic straws and eating less red meat. And none of her rivals seem to be trying to pronounce her name correctly.
“They’re literally clutching at straws,” said Michael Broadkow, a former vice chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party. “The Republican Party was desperate to compete with Joe Biden. … I think their attack and strategy has flipped with Harris entering the race.”
The breadth and lack of cohesion in the Republican attacks on Harris is evidence of the novelty of her candidacy, but also of the difficulty Republicans are having in adjusting to a challenger with a different profile than the 81-year-old white male incumbent they have been planning to contest for years.
The day Biden resigned and Harris announced her candidacy, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Watley said on Fox News that the changes would not affect the party’s broader message.
“We’re not going to change our game because President Trump is going to run,” he said. “Whether it’s Kamala Harris or someone else, they’re going to run on the same failed agenda that Joe Biden has been running on for the last four years.”
But Harris’s entry sent the GOP into turmoil. Within hours of her candidacy announcement, Trump’s super PAC put out an ad attacking Harris, claiming she “covered up Joe’s obvious mental decline” and that she “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it herself.” (The White House disputes reports that aides protected Biden to hide signs of decline.)
The attacks then focused on Harris’ identity.
A 2021 video of Trump’s current running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), calling Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable with their lives and the choices they’ve made” has begun circulating on social media again. (“How can you be ‘childless’ when you have such sweet kids like Cole and me 🤔… I love all three of you,” Ella Emhoff, one of Harris’s two stepchildren, wrote on Instagram Thursday.)
Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Harriet Hagueman (R-Wyo.) both called Harris a “DEI hire” in interviews. Rep. Glenn Grossman (R-Wis.) said, “I think a lot of Democrats should stick with her because of her ethnic background.”
By Tuesday, House Republican leaders had been urging lawmakers in closed-door meetings to focus on Harris’s record, not her race. The call came after Trump stoked a false conspiracy theory about Harris’s 2020 eligibility.
Other Republicans have avoided the issues of race and gender, focusing instead on defining Harris as an ultra-liberal San Francisco politician who is “charmingly soft” on crime and other issues. In an interview with CNN Tuesday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas repeatedly called Harris a “San Francisco liberal.” Cotton criticized Harris’s approach to crime, accusing her of opposing the death penalty, supporting rioters and releasing criminals from prison when she was California attorney general.
It’s a different approach from Trump’s 2020 campaign, when he sent conflicting messages about Harris’s criminal record, simultaneously accusing her of being both too tough and too lenient in prosecuting criminals.
“They’re road-testing a variety of messages and haven’t really narrowed down what resonates and what people care about,” said Jason Lowe, a Michigan Republican strategist. “She’s still undefined, and I think there’s a lot that needs to be defined.”
“The Republicans are trying everything to see what works,” he added, hinting that there is more to come.
“We haven’t really gotten into the details of her time as a senator or as attorney general or as San Francisco district attorney,” Law said, predicting, “There’s going to be some good red meat on her record.”
One thing Republicans have seized on almost unanimously is Harris’s handling of immigration, which began in the first year of her vice presidency with Biden tasking her with addressing the root causes of migration from Central American countries to the U.S. The White House described Harris’s mission as “diplomatic” at a press conference Thursday, not the kind of job that many Republicans call the “border czar” of the administration.
But maintaining Harris’s disciplined message on immigration has proven difficult for both Trump and his allies. The former president did not mention border processing once in his interview with “Fox & Friends” on Monday, but he accused her of wanting to “defund the police,” described her as “horrible,” “awful,” “vile,” and called her a “San Francisco radical.” Neither Biden nor Harris’ campaign platforms outlined support for defunding the police, but Harris has supported broader criminal justice reform.
Trump has attempted to subvert the new “prosecution-crime” dichotomy Harris has championed, arguing that Harris is too lenient on some and too harsh on her political enemies.
“They say, ‘I’m a prosecutor. He’s a criminal.’ That’s who they are. They start every case, and I win every case,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends.”
Despite her stated intention to focus on personality rather than policy, a memo released Monday by the National Republican Senatorial Committee included a labeling of Harris as “odd.” The NRSC memo criticizes Harris for “laughing at inappropriate moments,” her love of Venn diagrams and electric school buses, and her support for consumer policies such as banning plastic straws and eating less red meat.
Some of the sources of the attacks were recycled by Democrats to make themselves seem more relatable to the public, including the use of Harris’s smile in campaign ads. The Trump campaign tried to capitalize on some of the Charli XCX and coconut-themed videos that turned Harris into viral memes.
As the Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate earned praise for an ad linking his opponent to Harris’s liberal ideals, Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Chung told reporters that Trump is not a “little kid” — a reference to the neon green hyper-pop album that Trump has associated with the vice president.
“President Trump is a truth teller, and there is nothing more unifying than telling the truth about weak, failed, incompetent, and dangerously progressive Kamala Harris and her destructive policies,” Cheung wrote in response to a request for comment.
Rob Stutzman, a California Republican political consultant, said the lack of a clear line of attack against Harris stemmed from a lack of data early in the campaign about which attacks would resonate.
But he said Democrats also have a problem with being too aggressive in defining Harris as a prosecutor.
“It’s probably not a full Control-Alt-Delete, but it’s a reset of the data that everyone has been focusing on in this election, and I think that’s true for both sides,” Stutzman said.
He said what the data ultimately tells us about how best to define Harris is “as much a D problem as an R problem.”
