As Republicans rev up their anti-Kamala Harris campaign, they’re having a hard time finding a consistent line of attack.
In recent days, Republicans have slammed the vice president for everything from her handling of immigration and her past as a prosecutor to her “terrible,” “horrible” and “mean” demeanor. On Wednesday, Donald Trump called Harris a “radical, left lunatic,” then branded her “nasty” in a Fox News interview the following day — an echo of insults Trump leveled against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Trump’s allies, meanwhile, have argued she is actively engaged in a conspiracy to hide Biden’s apparent decline or that she’s just another Biden altogether. Some have engaged in explicitly racist and sexist attacks, calling her a “DEI hire” or bashing her for not having biological children. Others say she laughs too much. More criticized her for endorsing consumer policies such as bans on plastic straws and eating red meat. And none of her rivals seem willing to correctly pronounce her name.
“They are literally grasping at straws,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party. “Republicans desperately wanted to run against Joe Biden. … The introduction of Harris into the race, I think, has upended their attacks and their strategies.”
The breadth and lack of cohesion in the Republican assault on Harris reflects the newness of her candidacy — but also the difficulty GOPers are having adjusting to a contender who cuts a different profile than the 81-year-old, white, male incumbent they’d been planning a run against for years.
On the day Biden bowed out and Harris announced her campaign, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley suggested on Fox News that the change would not alter Republicans’ broader messaging.
“We are not going to be changing our plans because President Trump is going to run his race, and whether it is Kamala Harris or anyone else, they are going to run on the exact same failed agenda that Joe Biden has been running over the last four years,” he said.
But once Harris got in, Republicans were all over the map. Just hours after she announced her candidacy, Trump’s super PAC released 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 has disputed reports that aides insulated Biden to hide signs of decline.)
Then, the attacks pivoted to Harris’ identity.
A 2021 clip of Trump’s now-running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) calling Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” began recirculating on social media. (One of Harris’ two step-children, Ella Emhoff, responded Thursday on Instagram, writing: “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like cole and I 🤔… I love my three 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, “a lot of Democrats feel they have to stick with her because of her ethnic background.”
By Tuesday, House Republican leaders issued members of the caucus a warning in a closed-door meeting to focus on Harris’ record, not her race. The call came after Trump prompted a false birther conspiracy about 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 CHARMIN” on crime and other issues. In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas repeatedly called Harris a “San Francisco liberal,” Cotton continued, hitting Harris for her approach on crime, accusing her of opposing the death penalty, supporting rioters and freeing felons from prison when she was California’s attorney general.
That’s a shift in approach from Trump’s 2020 campaign, which pushed competing messages on Harris’ record on crime, simultaneously accusing her of being too tough and too lenient on prosecuting criminals.
“They’re road testing a lot of different messages, have not really narrowed down what resonates, what people care about,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in the battleground state of Michigan. “She’s still pretty undefined, and I think there’s a whole lot of definition yet to be provided.”
He added: “Republicans are throwing everything to see what works,” and he suggested there will be more to come.
“We haven’t really gotten to her time as senator or attorney general or San Francisco D.A.,” Roe said, predicting “there’s going to be some good red meat in her record there.”
One thing Republicans have seized on nearly universally is Harris’ handling of immigration, after the first year of her vice presidency was dominated by an assignment she received from Biden to handle the root causes of migration to the United States from countries in Central America. The White House described Harris’ charge as a “diplomatic” one in a press conference Thursday — and not one for her to become the administration’s “border czar,” as many Republicans have labeled her.
But keeping a disciplined message against Harris on immigration has proven difficult for both Trump and his allies, too. The former president did not mention her handling of the border once during an interview with “Fox & Friends” on Monday, though he was quick to accuse her of wanting to “defund the police”; describe her as “terrible,” “horrible” and “mean”; and call her a “San Francisco radical.” Neither Biden’s nor Harris’ campaign platform described support for defunding the police, though Harris has been in favor of broader criminal justice reform.
Trump then tried to flip the emerging “prosecutor-criminal” contrast sought by Harris, arguing that she is too lenient on some but harsh on punishing her political enemies.
“They say, ‘I’m a prosecutor. He is a criminal.’ They are the ones. Every case is started by them, and I’m winning the cases,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends.”
Despite claiming an intent to focus on policy rather than personality, a memo released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee on Monday includes a category about Harris simply labeled “weird.” The NRSC memo criticizes Harris for “laughing at inappropriate moments,” loving Venn diagrams and electric school buses, and endorsing consumer policies such as bans on plastic straws and eating red meat.
The roots of some of these attacks — including the use of Harris’ laugh in campaign ads — have been repurposed by Democrats designed to make her seem relatable to a mass audience. The Trump campaign has even tried to capitalize off some of the Charli XCX and coconut-themed videos that have made Harris into a viral meme.
At the same time that the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania was praised for an ad tying his opponent to Harris’ liberal ideology, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung was telling reporters that Trump was not “brat” — referring to the artist’s neon-green, hyper-pop album that has become associated with the vice president.
“President Trump is a truth-teller, 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 California-based Republican political consultant, described the lack of a settled attack line on Harris as a reflection of insufficient data so early in her campaign about what hits will resonate.
But that’s a problem Democrats have, too, he said, especially around how aggressively to define Harris as a prosecutor.
“This is probably not a complete control-alt-delete, but it does reset the data that everyone has been focused on for this election, and I think it’s true of both sides,” Stutzman said.
What the data ultimately says about how best to define Harris, he said, is “as much a D issue as an R issue.”