WASHINGTON: Republican leaders are warning party members not to use blatantly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, as they and former President Donald Trump's campaign struggle to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic challenger four months before Election Day.
In a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Richard Hudson, RNC, urged lawmakers to stick to criticizing Harris for his role in Biden-Harris administration policies.
“This election will be about policies, not personalities,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the meeting.
“This is not personal regarding Kamala Harris,” he added, “and her ethnicity or her gender has nothing to do with it.”
The warnings point to new risks for Republicans running against a Democrat who would become the first woman, the first black woman and the first person of South Asian descent to win the White House. Trump, in particular, has a history of racist and misogynistic attacks that can turn off key groups of swing voters, including suburban women, as well as voters of color and young people, a feature Trump's campaign has been featuring.
The advice comes as some members and Trump aides began casting Harris, a former district attorney, attorney general and senator, as a “DEI” hire — a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“Intellectually, like the bottom of the barrel,” Representative Harriet Hageman of Wyoming said in a TV interview. “I think she was a DEI hire. And I think that's what we're seeing and I don't think they have anyone else.”
Since Biden announced his withdrawal from the campaign, Republicans have prepared a long list of attack lines against Harris, including attempts to tie him to the most unpopular Biden policies and his handling of the economy and the southern border. Trump campaign officials and other Republicans have accused Harris of complicity in the cover-up of Biden's health problems, and they are digging into his record as a prosecutor in California as they try to paint him as soft on crime.
Johnson said both Trump and Harris have a record on White House policy and said voters can compare how families are doing under the Trump administration to how they are doing under Biden.
“He's the co-owner, co-author, co-conspirator in all the policies that got us into this mess,” Johnson said.
Biden announced Sunday that he is withdrawing from the race. In a Tuesday memo on the state of the race, Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio argued that the fundamentals of the campaign have not changed now that Harris looks increasingly likely to be the Democratic nominee.
“Democrats ditching one candidate for another will not change voter dissatisfaction with the economy, inflation, crime, open borders, housing costs, not to mention concerns about two foreign wars,” he wrote. “Importantly, voters will also learn about Harris' dangerous liberal record before becoming Biden's partner.”
In a similar message, Hudson told members at Tuesday's meeting how the NRCC is more progressive than Harris Biden and essentially focuses on “ownership” of all the administration's policies, according to a person familiar with the conversation and a person who was not identified to discuss it.
Sen. Steve Danes, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, called Harris “very liberal.”
“She's not an Irish Catholic girl who grew up in Scranton. She's a San Francisco liberal,” Danes said.
Trump made a similar argument in a call with reporters on Tuesday.
“She's like Biden but more radical. She's a radical leftist and this country doesn't want to be destroyed by a radical leftist. She's more radical than him,” he said.
“So I think he should be easier than Biden because he was a little more mainstream, but not by much,” he added.
Later, in an interview on Newsmax, Trump claimed that Harris had “destroyed the city of San Francisco”, even though he left his job as district attorney there in 2011, and called him “the worst of everything”.
“Kamala Harris is as weak, failed and incompetent as Joe Biden — and she's also dangerously liberal,” the Trump campaign said in a statement. “Not only does Kamala need to defend her support of Joe Biden's failed agenda over the past four years, she also needs to answer for her own appallingly weak-crime record in California.”
Trump has a long history of launching particularly caustic and personal attacks against women, from former Fox News host Megyn Kelly to his 2016 primary opponent Carly Fiorina to New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued him and his business for fraud.
In a sign of what might come, Trump criticized Harris' poor performance in the 2020 Democratic primary in a Fourth of July message on his Truth social network, saying, “That doesn't mean he's not a 'highly talented' politician! Just ask his mentor, San Francisco great Willie Brown. Harris in 1990 Dated Brown in mid-
The strong and intelligent women who attacked him seemed to get under Trump's skin in particular, said Stephanie Grisham, a 2016 campaign aide who served as Trump's White House press secretary after Jan. 6, 2021. American Capital.
“He's going to have a real surge,” Grissom predicted, adding that attacking Trump “punches 1,000 times harder. He's not going to be able to help himself.”
When it comes to women, he added: “His go-to is to attack the look and call women stupid. That's his go-to and I don't expect it to be any different.”
California Rep. Maxine Waters, a key member of the Congressional Black Caucus and among the first Democrats to confront Trump, said she was well prepared for what lies ahead as Republicans turn the campaign toward Harris.
“The first thing I think about is Trump, the attacks from the MAGA right wing — which have already started,” Waters told the AP. “They're going to be bad. They're going to be bad.”
He predicted that this approach could backfire under Trump.
“The danger is that he's so arrogant and arrogant that he's going to step on women and it's going to backfire,” she said.
The dynamic on the debate stage could increase if Trump goes along with Harris' debate, he said Thursday.
Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said Trump is unlikely to debate Harris the way he would debate Biden — or the way he debated another female opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, in 2016.
“I don't think Trump can approach a debate against Kamala Harris with the same tone as a debate with Hillary Clinton. Kamala Harris doesn't have Hillary's negative side and is a relatively new political face,” he said. “Caution may be warranted.”
