WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican leaders are warning their members to avoid blatant racist and sexist attacks on the vice president. Kamala HarrisThey and the former president Donald Trump With less than four months to go until Election Day, the Trump campaign is struggling to adapt to the reality of a new Democratic rival.
At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, Republican National Congressional Committee Chairman Richard Hudson RN.C urged lawmakers to continue criticizing Harris’ role in the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
“This election is about policies, not about people,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the meeting.
“This is not personal about Kamala Harris,” he added. “Her ethnicity and gender have absolutely nothing to do with this.”
The warning points to new risks for Republicans battling a Democrat who stands to become the first woman, Black person and South Asian person to win the White House, especially with Trump’s record of racist and misogynistic attacks that could erode the support of key swing vote groups, including suburban women, as well as people of color and young people that his campaign has courted.
The reprimand came after some lawmakers and Trump allies began positioning Harris, a former district attorney, attorney general and senator, as a “DEI” hire, standing for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiative.
“Intellectually speaking, it’s really at the bottom of the barrel,” said Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming. In a TV interview“I think she was a DEI recruit, and I think that’s what we’re seeing. I can’t imagine there’s anyone else.”
As Biden announced he was dropping out of the race, Republicans He laid out a long list of attacks against Harris.That includes attempts to link Harris to some of Biden’s most unpopular policies, the economy and his handling of the southern border. Trump campaign officials and other Republicans have accused Harris of helping to cover up Biden’s health problems and are digging up her record as a California prosecutor to portray her as soft on crime.
Johnson said both Trump and Harris have proven track records of policy in the White House, allowing voters to compare their families’ lives under Trump to their lives now under Biden.
“She is a co-owner, co-author and co-conspirator of all of the policies that got us into this mess,” Johnson said.
What you need to know about the 2024 election
Biden announced on Sunday that he was dropping out of the race. Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio argued in a memo on the state of the campaign on Tuesday that the fundamentals of the campaign have not changed, even as Harris becomes more likely to become the Democratic nominee.
“If Democrats reject her nominee and nominate someone else, voters’ dissatisfaction with the economy, inflation, crime, open borders, housing costs and concerns about two foreign wars will remain the same,” he wrote. “Just as important, voters will also be familiar with Harris’ dangerously liberal record before they partner with Biden.”
In a similar message, Hudson told members at a meeting on Tuesday that the NRCC is focused on Harris being even more progressive than Biden and “owning” virtually all of the administration’s policies, according to an anonymous person familiar with the conversation.
Senator Steve Daines, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, echoed the criticism, calling Harris “too liberal.”
“She’s not some Irish Catholic kid who grew up in Scranton. She’s a San Francisco liberal,” Daines said.
Trump made a similar claim during a conference call with reporters on Tuesday.
“She’s just like Biden, but much more extreme. She’s a radical left-wing figure and this country doesn’t want to be destroyed by a radical left-wing figure. She’s much more extreme than Biden,” he said.
“So I think she should have an easier time than Biden because Biden is a little more mainstream, but not by much,” he added.
Later, in an interview with Newsmax, Trump claimed Harris had “destroyed the city of San Francisco” despite resigning as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2011, and called her “the worst in every way.”
“Kamala Harris is just as weak, failed and incompetent as Joe Biden – and dangerously liberal,” the Trump campaign said in a statement. “Not only will Kamala need to explain her support for Joe Biden’s failed policies over the past four years, she will also need to explain her abysmal weak record on crime in California.”
Trump has a long history of particularly harsh and personal attacks on 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 Trump and his companies for fraud.
In a sign of things to come, Trump His July 4th message is on Truth Social. The network criticized Harris’ poor performance in the 2020 Democratic primary, adding, “That doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘very talented’ politician! Just ask her mentor, the great Willie Brown of San Francisco,” with whom Harris dated in the mid-1990s.
Stephanie Grisham, a 2016 campaign staffer and one-time White House press secretary who broke with Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, said strong, intelligent women attacking Trump seem to particularly get on his nerves.
“She’s going to really infuriate him,” Grisham predicted, noting that if Trump is attacked, “he’s going to hit back 1,000 times harder. He’s not going to be able to stop himself.”
When it comes to women, she added, “His tactic is always to attack their appearance and call them stupid. That’s what he’s always done and I don’t think that’s going to change this time around.”
Rep. Maxine Waters of California, a leading member of the House Black Caucus and one of the Democrats who took on Trump early on, said she was well prepared for what was to come as Republicans tilted the race toward Harris.
“My first thought is the attacks from Trump and the MAGA right. They’re already starting,” Waters told The Associated Press. “They’re going to be nasty and it’s going to be nasty.”
She predicted that approach could backfire for Trump.
“The danger is that he’s so arrogant and self-centered that he will trample over women and it will backfire,” she said.
If Trump goes ahead with a debate with Harris, as he said he would do on Thursday, it could lead to even more heated action on the debate stage.
Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said it was unlikely Trump would debate Harris the way he did with Biden or even with another female rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, in 2016.
“I don’t think Trump will be able to debate Kamala Harris in the same form he did with Hillary Clinton, who doesn’t have the downsides that Hillary has and is a relatively new face of politics,” he said. “Maybe we should be careful.”
___
Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price, Stephen Groves and Amelia Thomson DeVoe contributed to this report.
