Can Kamala Harris survive the Republican oppo machine?

The Scene

Republicans finally know who they need to beat in 15 weeks: Vice President Kamala Harris. They’re still figuring out which version of Harris is running.

Will it be the “smart on crime” prosecutor who out-played a generation of Democratic talent in California while tacking to the center when needed? The flat-footed 2020 presidential candidate, whose “conversations” about progressive policies ended with zero progressive votes? The 2020 vice presidential winner whose rhetoric — “there is no vaccine for racism” — didn’t survive the anti-woke backlash?

As Harris secured the nomination, Republicans waded through all of it, pulling clips and quotes from a 20-year career that brought her into an unpopular Democratic White House. One emerging approach: Attack all of it, blowing up the prosecutor-versus-predator frame she laid out this week by portraying her as soft on crime, pathetically weak on immigration, and a handmaiden to presidential failure.

“One hundred percent of the Joe Biden record is Kamala Harris’,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told reporters on Monday. At the same time, the National Republican Senatorial Committee was circulating a memo, urging candidates to emphasize that “Harris is even more progressive than Joe Biden.”

The real work started on Tuesday, when the Trump campaign shared the mugshots of people arrested in Minnesota, then released on bail after help from the Minneapolis Freedom Fund. On June 1, 2020, as protests and riots broke out in response to the murder of George Floyd, Harris tweeted a link to the fund’s donation portal “to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota”; ever since, Republicans have linked her to criminals who re-offended after release, and even one man who was acquitted of his original charges.

“The Minnesota Freedom Fund has no connection with Kamala Harris beyond a single tweet posted to her Twitter account more than four years ago, at a time when people across the political spectrum were galvanized by the murder of George Floyd and the mistreatment of protesters in Minneapolis,” said Jana Kooren, the MFF’s deputy executive director. “We understand her tweet as a human reaction to that moment, shared by millions of people around the world.”

GOP strategists didn’t expect many attacks to land this week. Too much attention swirled around Harris, her own vice presidential options, and President Biden’s Wednesday night speech about his decision not to run. The Trump campaign’s pollster Tony Fabrizio put out a memo warning that she’d likely receive an initial bump in public opinion surveys before they could rev up their attack machine.

But they’re building for the next 105 days, and combing through a long list of Harris decisions and statements that stand apart from the Biden record. Biden won the 2020 Democratic nomination while ignoring most of the left’s policy demands. Harris met those demands, and lost it.

“She has, in the past, endorsed a whole list of left/unpopular positions, chasing the wokeish activist wing of the Dems, and they will be used against her,” wrote author and Liberal Patriot co-founder Ruy Teixeira, in an email. “It’ll be interesting to see whether and how much she tries to move to the center on any of this stuff, or just sticks to the abortion/democracy/Trump is a Satanic criminal playbook to rile up the alleged anti-MAGA majority.”

Know More

Harris’s doomed 2020 primary campaign has informed Republican thinking about her ever since. Democrats saw her as potential White House material as soon as she entered California’s 2016 U.S. Senate race; she arrived in Washington as a left-leaning “resistance” was underway, defining itself by opposition to Donald Trump.

That meant opposing the Muslim travel ban, which Harris rallied against, and opposing Trump’s immigration policy of family separation, which she traveled to a detention center to memetically denounce. Harris never endorsed the campaign to “abolish ICE,” but she came close, saying in 2018 “we need to probably think about starting from scratch.”

It also meant endorsing Medicare-for-All, then walking back the endorsement, after being tripped up by questions on whether she, like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, would phase out private insurance. The Sanders brain trust knew that would hurt. Its theory, when the senator got multiple 2020 rivals to sign on to his bill, was that they might pander to his voters, but would struggle to defend the policy.

Harris never endorsed the movement to “defund the police,” but when Los Angeles redirected $250 million from policing to social services, she praised the mayor “for doing what he’s done.” The cuts were reversed one year later, but Harris stuck with the concept. “It is outdated, it is wrong-headed thinking, to think that the only way you’re going to get communities to be safe is to put more police officers on the street,” Harris told voters at a September 2020 event in Detroit, recirculating among Republicans this week. “What we have to do, and what we will do, is reimagine public safety.”

That messaging didn’t survive the 2021 crime spike seen in Los Angeles and other cities; the softer touch on immigration, and criticism of border agencies, hasn’t been heard again since Biden falsely accused border guards of striking Haitian migrants.

Other Democrats had also been forced to own or explain progressive ideas that they embraced in the Trump years. One popular response: Recanting. Texas Rep. Colin Allred, who’s challenging Cruz, had condemned the idea of a border wall, and now condemns “open border policies.” Another response: Moving on quietly. In races where they’re accused of supporting the “defunding” of police, Democrats appeared with police and sheriffs in ads and embraced the Biden administration’s increased law enforcement funding, which was condemned by Black Lives Matter groups who don’t have the inter-party influence that they used to.

David’s view

What has the Democratic candidate switch really cost Republicans? They had an entire convention, with four days of earned media, without high-profile attacks on Harris that stood out. If there are bereaved families who blame her for springing criminals out of jail, or furious Arizona ranchers who fear that she’d open the border, they can still be found. They just won’t be on a big arena stage.

Four years ago, Trump’s party was frustrated that it had to run against a candidate who never talked about phasing out private insurance or unbuilding ICE. Joe Biden knew he wasn’t winning the party’s college-educated progressive primary voters, and didn’t offer what their advocacy groups wanted. When they faded — the Women’s March, national BLM, protesters demanding a halt to all deportations — Biden wasn’t affected.

The View From Democrats

Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, who also ran in the 2020 primary, said that the issues Republicans were dredging up now wouldn’t be a serious problem for her.

“So much has changed since 2019,” said Castro. “I seriously doubt that it’s going to have any impact on the voters. We’ve gone through a pandemic, the Dobbs decision came down — the world has changed so much.”

Castro, like Harris, proposed a total rethink of immigration policy — decriminalizing the act of crossing the border. But he didn’t see Republicans getting much lift if they brought that up. “What voters will remember is the tremendous cruelty of the Trump administration, and this sea of ‘mass deportation now’ signs they had at the convention. People will reject how extreme Trump was,” he said.

Notable

In the Bulwark, Marc Caputo reports that Trump strategists want to make “Willie Hortons” out of several criminals freed by Harris or the bail fund. “We’re holding the bucket of paint to define her at a time of our choosing,” said Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita.

In the Atlantic, Tim Alberta writes that the Trump team now has the election choice that it feared. “The convention scene was one of a party peaking too early.”