"Illegitimate nominee": Experts say GOP's attacks on Kamala Harris echo ugly claims about Obama

Vice President Kamala Harris late Monday garnered the backing of enough Democratic delegates to win the party's nomination and face off against GOP nominee Donald Trump, an Associated Press survey found. But while the former California prosecutor has enjoyed surprisingly smooth sailing since she announced her candidacy Sunday, experts predict things can soon get tricky as the race heats up.

Several state delegations convened Monday night to affirm their support for the vice president, including those in Texas and California. By the end of the night, Harris had the backing of well over the 1,976 delegates she would need to clinch the nomination, coming in at just under 2,700 delegates, according to the AP tally. Still, delegates are not bound to cast their vote for Harris at the virtual roll call ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, which party officials said will occur between Aug. 1 and Aug. 7, according to The New York Times.

“When I announced my campaign for president, I said I intended to go out and earn this nomination,” Harris said in a statement posted to X Monday. “Tonight, I am proud to have secured the broad support needed to become our party’s nominee.” She added, “I look forward to formally accepting the nomination soon.”

The development capped off an explosive first 24 hours for Harris' newly minted presidential campaign that saw her set a new presidential fundraising record and add nearly 29,000 volunteers to her campaign following President Joe Biden's decision to bow out of the race. The pledged support also punted concerns that resistance among diehard Biden delegates would derail her nomination bid.

"There had been concerns initially that there might be the equivalent of a very short Democratic primary, and there were concerns that, because she didn't do well in the primary in 2020, that this could lead to a problem to her this turn around," said Jennifer Lawless, the University of Virginia's political science department chair. "But that's no longer the case. She now faces an electoral landscape that is pretty much the same as whatever electoral landscape Joe Biden was going to face."

But experts also say the road ahead to the November presidential contest presents Harris with several greater challenges that even enthusiastic Democratic support can't upend — chief among them her lack of a defined public image and Republican attacks — especially on an abbreviated timeline.

Kevin McMahon, a professor of political science at Trinity College, predicted that race and gender, by way of the racialized and gendered attacks conservatives have flung at Harris — a concern made more pronounced given she's likely to face off against an opponent "who's obviously very open to using racialized attacks or gendered attacks" — will become a key focus of the race that she would have to overcome.

Republicans had begun leaning into racist and sexist attacks against Harris even before Biden exited the race and endorsed her, labelling Harris a "DEI hire," an allegation that she only attained her position because she benefitted from privileging policies and practices. In the aftermath of Biden's withdrawal, those GOP insults have continued and expanded to include mounting misogynistic claims that she slept her way into political power.

GOP opposition has also arisen through threats to legally challenge the replacement of Biden on the Democratic ticket, with the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, allocating millions of dollars to support such legal battles. However those potential lawsuits, legal experts told Salon Monday, stand little chance of amounting to anything in court should they even get there.

"Republicans have made it clear that they want to suggest that [Harris is] an illegitimate nominee. Although the law and the paperwork are not on their side — the Democrats have not held their convention yet so Biden was not an actual nominee who's being switched out, this is an actual process, there's an election — they're suggesting that this isn't fair and that it's bait and switch," Lawless told Salon, noting that such attacks are "consistent" with the way the GOP "suggested that Barack Obama was not a legitimate nominee because he wasn't qualified, and that he wasn't a U.S. citizen."

That narrative, along with claims that the Democratic Party is eschewing democratic means to select their nominee, is something that Republicans are "going to hammer" the party with and will end up sticking to it "no matter what," according to J. Wesley Leckrone, a professor of political science and the department chair at Widener University.

"The question is how independents look at this. I think that's the perception because the right and conservatives are going to hammer away that they are the guardians of democracy, and it's really the Democratic elites that forced Biden out of the race and anointed Harris, who was not picked by the party voters," he told Salon.

With just over 100 days until the election, Leckrone added that another challenge Harris likely will have to navigate is in defining herself as a candidate given that she's a "relatively unknown commodity" for many Americans despite being the sitting vice president because of the low-profile position she's taken in the Biden administration over the last three-plus years.

That uncertainty also extends to her and the president's record, which Lawless said they have "not been able to communicate adequately to the American people."

"The economic upturn that the country has experienced is not translating into people's perception, and what we'll see over the course of the next few weeks is whether that was a problem with Joe Biden not being an adequate messenger, or if, even if you communicate that message well, it doesn't resonate," Lawless said, noting that the matter is a "challenge that's going to matter to independent voters."

In developing that public image of her over the next several weeks, Harris will also have to invest time in challenging the perception of her as a "San Francisco liberal who is unable to represent Middle America," an image the vice president has started to address by stopping in key battleground state Wisconsin and having a "vice presidential shortlist" that includes multiple Midwest governors.

Harris, however, also has a number of advantages that her former running mate did not. Her relative youth and energy, Lawless said, appears to have injected a level of enthusiasm into the Democratic base in ways Biden did not while her racial and ethnic identities make it "a lot more difficult for Donald Trump to chip away at the Democrats advantage when it comes to Black male voters," which was a key part of the Republican strategy. "It seems like that strategy is going to fall flat on its face," she said.

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On Sunday night, just hours after she announced her nomination, a mass call organizing to get Harris elected and fundraising convened on Zoom with upwards of 40,000 Black women, raising more than $1.6 million. Another call Monday night saw around 53,000 Black men endeavoring to do the same, raising another $1.3 million for Harris' campaign.

The vice president had already inherited Biden's political operation, which includes more than 1,000 staffers and the nearly $96 million in funds available as reported at the end of June. But in the first 24 hours after receiving Biden's endorsement, Harris received another $81 million in donations with contributions, according to her campaign, from more than 888,000 donors. Harris has since gone on to bank more than $100 million in donations.

Endorsements from prominent Democrats, including Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Wes Moore of Maryland, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, also rolled in Monday, adding to the spark in enthusiasm around the vice president's campaign and diminishing the pot of her potential Democratic challengers.

Given those advantages, the question that remains is whether she can "use those qualities to her advantage" and mobilize voters who were questioning if the Democratic Party was the one for them, McMahon said.

For her part, the former California senator has already started to define the central themes of her campaign against Trump, seeking to contrast herself as a former prosecutor and law and order candidate with Trump, who was convicted of 34 felony counts earlier this year and faces two other criminal prosecutions at the state and federal level, while also emphasizing her defense of economic opportunity and abortion rights.

"Donald Trump has demonstrated a very, very hostile relationship toward women of color over time, so in a lot of ways, this is his worst nightmare because he's often not disciplined, and if he engages in sexist and/or racist attacks, I think he's going to face significant backlash," Lawless said.

"What we've seen in 2018, in 2020 and in 2022 is that women don't like it and female voters don't like it when you treat them in a sexist way or try to take away their rights or what they've accomplished and earned," she added. "And I think the Republicans are probably in for a rude awakening."