As Republicans ramp up their campaign against Kamala Harris, they are struggling to find a consistent line of attack.
Former President Donald Trump and his allies have built an entire campaign around attacking President Joe Biden. Under Harris, they are finding it harder to find a coherent line of attack.
In recent days, Republicans have criticized the vice president for everything from her handling of immigration and her past as a prosecutor to her “terrible,” “horrible” and “evil” behavior. On Wednesday, Trump called Harris a “radical left-wing lunatic” and then called her “nasty” in an interview with Fox News the next day — an echo of insults Trump hurled at Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Meanwhile, Trump allies have argued that she is actively participating in a conspiracy to cover up Biden’s apparent decline or that she is simply another Biden. Some have engaged in explicitly racist and sexist attacks, calling her “DEI Hiring” or criticizing her for not having biological children. Others say she laughs too much. Still others criticized her for supporting consumer policies such as banning plastic straws and red meat consumption. None of his rivals She seems determined to pronounce his name correctly.
“They’re literally grasping at straws,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former vice chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party. “Republicans desperately wanted to run against Joe Biden… The addition of Harris to the race, I think, has thrown their attacks and their strategies into disarray.”
The breadth and lack of cohesion of the Republican attack on Harris reflects the novelty of her candidacy, but also the difficulty Republicans are having in adjusting to a contender who cuts a different profile than the current nominee, an 81-year-old white man they had been planning to run against for years.
On the day Biden dropped out and Harris announced her campaign, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley suggested on Fox News that the change would not alter Republicans’ broader message.
“We’re not going to change our plans because President Trump is going to campaign, and whether it’s Kamala Harris or anybody else, they’re going to campaign on the exact same failed agenda that Joe Biden has been pursuing for the last four years,” he said.
But once Harris came into power, Republicans were all over it. Just hours after she announced her candidacy, Trump’s political action committee released an ad attacking Harris, claiming she had “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 has disputed reports that advisers isolated Biden to hide signs of deterioration.)
The attacks then focused on Harris’s identity.
A 2021 clip of Trump’s now-running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) calling Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of Cat ladies without children “That they are miserable with their own lives and the choices they have made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” began circulating on social media. (One of Harris’ two stepdaughters, Ella Emhoff, responded on Instagram Thursday, writing, “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have such cute kids like Cole and I 🤔… I love all three of my parents.”)
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) both called Harris a “DEI hire” in interviews. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) said “many Democrats feel they have to support her because of her ethnicity.”
On Tuesday, House Republican leaders warned caucus members in a closed-door meeting to focus on Harris’ record, not her race. The call came after Trump sparked a Conspiracy of false defenders of the birth of a child on Harris’ eligibility in 2020.
Other Republicans, avoiding issues of race and gender, have focused on defining Harris as an ultra-progressive politician from San Francisco who is “SOFT AS CHARM” on crime and other topics. In a Interview with CNN On Tuesday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas repeatedly called Harris a “San Francisco liberal,” Cotton continued, attacking Harris for her approach to crime, accusing her of opposing the death penalty, supporting rioters and releasing criminals from prison when she was California attorney general.
That’s a change of approach from Trump’s 2020 campaign, which pushed mixed messages about Harris’ record on crime, simultaneously accusing her of being too harsh and too lenient in pursuing criminals.
“They’re trying a lot of different messages, but they haven’t really nailed down what resonates the most, what people care about,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in the battleground state of Michigan. “She’s still very undefined and I think there’s still a lot of undefined left.”
He added: “Republicans are doing their best to see what works,” and suggested there was more to come.
“We haven’t gotten to her stage as a senator, attorney general or San Francisco district attorney yet,” Roe said, predicting that “there’s going to be some good red meat on her record there.”
One of the things Republicans have almost universally highlighted is Harris’ handling of immigration, after the first year of her vice presidency was dominated by a mission she received from Biden to address the root causes of migration to the U.S. from Central American countries. The White House described Harris’s assignment as a “diplomatic” one at a news conference Thursday, and not one to become the administration’s “border czar,” as many Republicans have labeled her.
But maintaining a disciplined message against Harris on immigration has also proven difficult for both Trump and his allies. The former president did not mention her handling of the border even once during an interview with “Fox & Friends” on Monday, though he was quick to accuse her of wanting to “defund the police”; described her as “terrible,” “horrible” and “bad”; and called her a “San Francisco radical.” Neither Biden’s nor Harris’s campaign platform outlined support for defunding the police, though Harris has been in favor of broader criminal justice reform.
Trump then attempted to spin the emerging “prosecutor-criminal” contrast sought by Harris, arguing that she is too lenient on some but harsh in punishing their political enemies.
“They say, ‘I’m a prosecutor, he’s a criminal.’ That’s them. They bring all the cases, and I win them,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends.”
Despite claims to have tried to focus on policy rather than personality, a memo released Monday by the National Republican Senatorial Committee includes a category about Harris labeled simply “weird.” The NRSC memo criticizes Harris for “laughing at inappropriate times,” for loving Venn diagrams and electric school buses, and for supporting consumer policies such as banning plastic straws and eating red meat.
The roots of some of these attacks, including the use of Harris, laughing at campaign ads — Democrats have repurposed her lines to make her seem more relatable to a mass audience. The Trump campaign has even tried to capitalize on some of the Charli XCX- and coconut-themed videos that have turned Harris into a viral meme.
At the same time that the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania was being praised for an ad linking his opponent to Harris’ liberal ideology, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung was telling reporters that Trump He was not a “brat” —referring to the artist’s neon-green hyperpop album that has teamed up with the vice president.
“President Trump is telling the truth, and there is nothing more unifying than telling the truth about a weak, failed, incompetent, and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris and her destructive policies,” Cheung wrote in response to a request for comment.
Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant based in California, described the lack of a defined line of attack against Harris as a reflection of the lack of data at this early stage of her campaign about which attacks will resonate.
But that’s a problem Democrats have, too, he said, especially around how aggressively to define Harris as a prosecutor.
“It’s probably not a complete alt-delete, but it does reset the data that everyone has been focusing on for this election, and I think that’s true for both sides,” Stutzman said.
What the data ultimately says about Harris’s best definition, he said, is “both a D question and an R question.”