WASHINGTON – Republican leaders are warning party members against using openly racist and sexist attacks against the vice president Kamala Harrislike them and the former president donald trump The campaign’s struggle to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic rival less than four months before Election Day.
In a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Richard Hudson, R-N.C., urged lawmakers to continue criticizing Harris for her role in the Biden-Harris administration’s policies .
“This election will be about policy and not personality,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the meeting.
“This is not personal toward Kamala Harris,” he added, “and her ethnicity or gender have nothing to do with it.”
The warnings point to new risks for Republicans in 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 could alienate key groups of undecided voters, including suburban women as well as black and young voters that the Trump campaign has been courting.
The warnings came after some Trump insiders and allies began casting Harris, a former district attorney, attorney general and senator, as a “DEI” hire — a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“Intellectually, it’s really rock bottom,” said Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman in a TV interview. “I think she was hired by DEI. And I think that’s what we’re seeing and I just don’t think they have anyone else.”
Since Biden announced he was leaving the campaign, Republicans launched a long list of lines of attack against Harris, including the attempt to link her to Biden’s most unpopular policies and his management of the economy and the southern border. Trump campaign officials and other Republicans have accused Harris of being complicit in the cover-up of Biden’s health problems and have exploited her record as a prosecutor in California while trying to portray her as soft on crime.
Johnson said both Trump and Harris have records in White House politics and said voters can compare the families’ performance under the Trump administration with their current performance under Biden.
“She is a co-owner, co-author and co-conspirator of every policy that got us into this mess,” Johnson said.
Biden announced on Sunday that he was dropping out of the race. In a state of the race memo on Tuesday, Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio argued that the fundamentals of the campaign have not changed now that Harris appears increasingly likely to be the Democratic nominee.
“The fact that Democrats unseat one candidate over another does NOT change voters’ discontent with the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs, not to mention concern about two foreign wars,” he wrote. “Equally important, voters will also learn about Harris’s dangerously liberal record before they partner with Biden.”
In similar messages, Hudson told members at Tuesday’s meeting that the NRCC is focusing on how Harris is even more progressive than Biden and essentially “owns” all of the administration’s policies, according to a person familiar with the conversation and was given anonymity to discuss it.
Senator Steve Daines, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, echoed this criticism, calling Harris “too liberal.”
“She’s not an Irish Catholic kid who grew up in Scranton. She’s a San Francisco liberal,” Daines said.
Trump made a similar argument in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday.
“She is like Biden, but much more radical. She is a radical left person and this country does not want a radical left person to destroy it. She’s much more radical than him,” he said.
“So I think she should have it easier than Biden because he was a little more popular, but not by much,” he added.
Later, in a Newsmax interview, Trump claimed that Harris “destroyed the city of San Francisco,” even though she left her job as a prosecutor there in 2011 and called her “the worst at everything.”
“Kamala Harris is as weak, failed and incompetent as Joe Biden – and she is also dangerously liberal,” the Trump campaign said in a statement. “Kamala doesn’t just need to defend her support for Joe Biden’s failed agenda over the past four years. , she also needs to answer for her horrific crime record in California.
Trump has a long history of launching particularly caustic and personal attacks on women, from former Fox News host Megyn Kelly to his 2016 primary opponent Carly Fiorina and New York Attorney General Letitia James , who successfully sued him and his company for fraud.
In a sign of what could come, Trump in a Fourth of July Message on Your Truth Social The network criticized Harris’ poor performance in the 2020 Democratic primary, adding “that doesn’t mean she isn’t a ‘highly talented’ politician! Just ask her mentor, San Francisco’s Great Willie Brown.” Harris dated Brown in the mid-1990s.
Strong, intelligent women who attack him seem to especially irritate Trump, said Stephanie Grisham, a 2016 campaign adviser who served for a time as Trump’s White House press secretary before breaking with him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. . US Capitol.
“She’s going to be able to really piss him off,” Grisham predicted, noting that when Trump is attacked, he “punches 1,000 times harder.
When it comes to women, she added: “His goal is to attack appearance and call women stupid. It’s his choice and I don’t expect it to be any different.”
Rep. Maxine Waters of California, who is a prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus and was one of the first Democrats to confront Trump, said she is well prepared for what’s to come as Republicans pivot the campaign toward Harris.
“The first thing I think about is the attacks that are going to come from Trump, the MAGA right wing — which have already started,” Waters told the AP. “They’re going to be nasty, they’re going to be bad.”
She predicted this approach could backfire on Trump.
“The danger is that he is so arrogant and selfish that he will step on women and it will backfire,” she said.
The dynamic could be intensified on the debate stage if Trump proceeds with the Harris debate, as he said Thursday he would.
Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said Trump is unlikely to debate Harris in the same way he would debate Biden — or in the same way he debated another female rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, in 2016.
“I don’t think Trump can approach a debate against Kamala Harris with the same tone as he approached the debate with Hillary Clinton. Kamala Harris doesn’t have the negatives that Hillary had and is a relatively new political face,” he said.
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Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price, Stephen Groves and Amelia Thomson DeVeaux contributed to this report.
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