The Harris-for-Biden switch has wrong-footed Republicans. They may respond by going way over the top with attacks that squander their advantage.
The replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee has created a veritable frenzy of speculation about the new strategic options her candidacy might open up for her party. And it’s very clear from all the carping about a “coup” that Republicans who have been planning a campaign against Biden for years have been wrong-footed by the switcheroo. But does the new Democratic ticket significantly change the Trump-Vance strategy or message? Let’s consider the likely ramifications:
Forget about that “national unity” message
To the extent he didn’t already undermine it with his nasty off-script rant at the RNC, Trump will likely abandon any further “national unity” messaging. It was based on the idea of a mellowed and softened 45th president offering a reasonably safe harbor for voters alarmed by Biden’s alleged senility-driven incompetence. So such talk likely went away for good the moment Biden withdrew from the contest.
It might still make abundant good sense for Trump to make some unprecedented effort to “seize the center” with less rabid rhetoric, given the doubts that already exist about Harris’s ideological positioning. But it fits Trump’s personality vastly better to “seize the center” purely and simply by pushing Harris out with intense attacks on her as a “radical.”
The battleground map changes for Trump as well as for Harris
Early polling indicates that Harris may be within shouting distance of Trump in the Sun Belt battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina) where Biden was losing badly, in no small part because of her stronger appeal to Black, Latino and under-30 voters. This is very significant since Biden’s only path to 270 electoral votes appeared to be via a sweep of the Rust Belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
But just as Harris can recoup some of Biden’s impending losses among Democratic “base” voters, there’s an opportunity for the Trump campaign to keep her from hanging onto the small but critical slice of white working-class voters who voted for Biden in 2020 and were still open to supporting him in 2024. As Ron Brownstein points out, if Harris slips to Hillary Clinton levels of support among non-college-educated white voters she could lose the Rust Belt states just as HRC did.
Defining Harris before she can define herself
The Trump campaign has chosen to hold back its campaign treasury for the stretch drive to the general election even as the Biden campaign was spending freely to shore up his position. The odds are good now that Republicans will cut open the purse-strings and spend massively to define Kamala Harris before she can fully define herself.
That means now, prior to Harris’s big moment in the sun at the Democratic National Convention that begins on August 19 (following a virtual roll call vote nominating her a couple of weeks earlier). Team Trump will want to get a clear sense of how vulnerable she is to pure negative messaging before re-framing the choice of candidates for the final stage of the campaign.
“Too Liberal!” ad infinitum
Republicans have a lot of experience, both positive and negative, in waging pure ideological warfare on Democratic presidential candidates. Pounding them as “too liberal” worked extremely well against Mike Dukakis in 1988, and reasonably well against John Kerry in 2004. It did not work against Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at all, in part because both those candidates made impressive efforts to position themselves as moderates open to a bipartisanship that swing voters craved even if Republicans spurned it.
It’s likely that the Trump campaign will calculate that Harris is more like Dukakis and Kerry than Clinton and Obama. They’ve done reasonably well in convincing voters that Joe Biden is “too liberal.” Harris with her California background and vulnerable issue positions should be an easier target, at least unless she counter-punches fiercely.
Trump, to be clear, has a strong head start in labeling Harris as a lefty, having called her a “communist” in 2020. And just this week he said this about her at Truth Social: “We’re not ready for a Marxist President, and Lyin’ Kamala Harris is a RADICAL LEFT MARXIST, AND WORSE!” He’ll keep this up whether or not his campaign makes it a centerpiece. It’s objectively moronic, but that’s never stopped Trump before.
Swift-boating the former prosecutor
We already know that Kamala Harris will lean on her extensive experience as a state and local prosecutor to depict herself as a tough defender of the law and of basic rights on a mission to hold the convicted felon Trump accountable and keep him out of office. So you can definitely expect Republicans to go directly after this strong point of her background by characterizing her as a rogue progressive prosecutor bent on justifying illegal behavior and emptying the prisons. Already the Trump campaign and its allies are scouring the public records for anything they can use to accuse her of wanting to “defund” or hamstring the police, secure short sentences or early release for violent criminals, or decriminalize misconduct entirely.
For some persuadable voters the whole ballgame may boil down to whether Harris comes across as “Kamala the Cop” or “Kamala the Border Czar.” And it’s worth remembering that Trump’s co-campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, was a major player in the 2004 “Swift Boat” assault on the military record of war hero John Kerry.
Don’t forget the racism and sexism!
It’s been interesting to watch some Republicans shush other Republicans from going right to the racism and sexism with attacks on Harris as a “DEI hire” or someone strictly defined by her ethnicity and gender. But even if they mute the overt stuff (including, believe it or not, “birther” smears about her eligibility to serve as president), it’s going to linger in the background just as it did in Republican campaigns against Obama and HRC. Finding ways to reinforce personal fears about Harris among diversity-averse voters without diving directly into the cesspool will be a tricky business for Team Trump, particularly among the less-inhibited MAGA social media warriors (like X owner Elon Musk).
The earlier question about Trump’s demographic strategy could help determine how far his fans go in drawing attention to Harris’s identity. If Republicans wind up doubling down on white working-class voters and largely abandoning Black voters, it could get really ugly.
Maybe leave the veep at home
When Trump chose J.D. Vance as his running-mate, the idea was to display a young, vibrant, cerebral demagogue who could go feral against Uncle Joe and hold his own in a debate with Kamala Harris. Now it doesn’t look like as smart a move. Vance’s rich history of extremism and incautious rhetoric is becoming a problem for a Trump campaign trying to project stability, and it’s likely Vance will be debating someone resolutely normie like Roy Cooper, Mark Kelly, or Tim Walz. Given Trump’s own erratic personality, the last thing Republicans need is the perception that with a world of options to serve as the former president’s successor, they settled on a big weirdo.
Stay the course (against the Biden administration)
Probably the smartest strategy for the Trump-Vance ticket is to remember that substantive concerns about the condition of the country under Joe Biden’s administration (along with friendly amnesia about the Trump administration) have given Republicans the upper hand for most of this election cycle. Panicking and going medieval on Kamala Harris could squander that advantage and make the election a choice about the kind of change Americans want instead of a simple referendum on an unpopular presidency.
What’s unclear is whether Trump and his MAGA minions have the temperament to stay the course instead of making the final stages of the 2024 campaign 100 days that feel like January 6.
