Harris a tough target for GOP
Factchecking Republicans’ early attempts to find coherent line of attack
One of the shortcomings of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign — that she couldn’t pick a lane in the crowded Democratic field — could oddly become a strength as Joe Biden’s running mate.
That’s because Republicans are finding it hard to define her and her positions, and to pick a coherent line of attack.
In the 24 hours after Biden announced that the California senator would be his vice presidential nominee, the GOP attacked Harris as a prosecutor who is “against everything that Black Americans are screaming about today” — and showed her marching in a Black Lives Matter protest.
A senior campaign adviser to
President Trump, Mercedes Schlapp, called her “a puppet of the far left” just moments after another senior adviser, Katrina Pierson, said the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general would have to hide her prosecutor past because “she put a lot of people in jail.”
It is making for a mixed message at a critical time.
“Your best opportunity to define someone is when they are the least well known,” said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and an expert on
political advertising. Even though voters are somewhat familiar with Harris because of her presidential run, he said, “for every minute that’s passed after she was introduced ... it becomes harder to define her.”
It is typical for campaigns to use different messages to appeal to different voters, Goldstein said. The Trump campaign could portray Harris as a “radical” in messages aimed at suburban women and a “prosecutor” in ads aimed at younger people of color as a way of discouraging them from voting.
Still, Goldstein said, “Since day one,” the Trump campaign “has had a scattershot approach. They tend to throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks.”
Here is a look at some of the early GOP attacks on Harris and a fact check on their accuracy: She backs “Bernie Sanders’ socialized takeover of health care”: This line from a Trump campaign online ad is partly true, at least insofar as Harris initially endorsed the Vermont senator’s Medicare for All plan before sending a variety of different messages.
In January 2019, she told CNN that she supported Sanders’ bill that would eliminate private health insurance in favor of a governmentadministered system.
“Let’s eliminate all of that,” Harris said. “Let’s move on.”
She later backed off her answer, saying it had been misinterpreted.
“It was in the context of saying, let’s get rid of all the bureaucracy. Let’s get all of the waste,” Harris said.
At a candidates debate in June 2019, a reporter asked who on the stage would abolish private health insurance in favor of a governmentrun plan. Only two — Sanders and Harris — raised their hands.
Ultimately, Harris proposed a version of a Medicare for All plan that would include a role for private health insurance, which is closer to what Biden has proposed. It would phase in Medicare for All over 10 years, compared with the fouryear rollout Sanders supports. Harris “called Joe Biden a racist”: This line, from Trump Communications Director Tim Murtaugh, refers to the June 2019 debate when Harris attacked Biden for opposing mandatory busing to integrate public schools in the 1970s and for favorable comments he made about working in those years with senators who had favored segregation.
“She thought he was a racist, was convinced of it, she sold Tshirts to that effect, made a big show in one of the debates calling him a racist,” Murtaugh said.
It’s inaccurate to say Harris called Biden a racist.
In a 1975 interview, Biden called busing “an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me.” Harris, who grew up in Berkeley, said in the June debate that at the time, “Here was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.” Her campaign was prepared to take advantage of the wellrehearsed attack, tweeting out photos of Harris as a girl and even selling Tshirts with the “little girl” line.
But Harris prefaced her remarks by telling Biden, “I do not believe you are a racist, and I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground.”
Harris is “a puppet of the far left”: This quote from Schlapp is based on Harris’ Senate voting record. It is indeed far to the left, according to the nonpartisan GovTrack, which scored her as the “most liberal” of the 100 members of the Senate in 2019.
The top House Republican, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, tweeted that “Kamala Harris wants to turn the entire United States into San Francisco. Her radical agenda has been terrible for Californians, and it would be terrible for the rest of America too.”
Goldstein said this attack is aimed at scaring suburban women, who supported Trump in 2016 but have been leaving him over the past four years. Many are swing voters who could be put off by a candidate who leans too far in one direction.
Trump has tried to woo suburban voters in recent weeks by saying Biden would threaten the “security” of surburbia by passing policies that would allow more lowincome housing there. He tweeted Wednesday that the “suburban housewife will be voting for me.”
She “put a lot of people in jail”: This attack, by Pierson, is aimed at depressing turnout among voters of color. And as a district attorney, Harris did indeed put a lot of people in jail.
“This woman of color goes against everything that Black Americans are screaming about today,” said Pierson, who is Black. “She participated in the mass incarceration of young Black men. She participated in all these things that you see Black Lives Matters complaining about.”
Even progressives have been critical of some of Harris’ actions in San Francisco. In particular, they point to her office’s prosecution of marijuanarelated crimes and her opposition to a statewide ballot measure to legalize recreational use of marijuana in 2010, when she was running for state attorney general. She called the idea “flawed public policy.”
She finally endorsed legalizing marijuana in 2018, two years after California voters did so in a ballot initiative.
But Republicans must reconcile this line of attack with Harris’ record in the Senate. After George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis police custody in May, Harris was one of the lead authors of congressional Democrats’ police reform legislation and became one of the party’s leading voices on racial justice.
The bill’s measures include banning choke holds and carotid holds by police, overhauling rules that protect police officers from being held liable in civil court by victims of abuse, and changing the law to make police misconduct a crime if it is reckless, and not just if it is “willful,” as the law now requires.
“She does have one of the most progressive voting records, in line with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,” said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, an organization aimed at supporting women of color in politics.
“It’s true that she’s evolved over time in response to the movements that influenced her,” Allison said. “I don’t think you can squarely put her in a box.”