Former Pres. Donald Trump needs to discard his storied penchant for racist and sexist tropes and nicknames if he wants to win over independent voters in his likely race against Vice Pres. Kamala Harris, say political experts in Nevada, one of a handful of battleground states.
Harris, who raised $81 million in the first 24 hours of her candidacy and has been endorsed by enough delegates to win the nomination, has long been a target of Trump’s barbs – from his constant deliberate mispronunciation of her name to his assertion in 2020 that she is not a natural-born American to more recent evaluations of her mental health.
““Kamala, I call her laughing Kamala,” Trump said at a rally Saturday, the day before Pres. Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race. ”Have you seen her laughing? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She is nuts.”
On Monday, as support for Harris’ candidacy expanded, in a social media post Trump assigned her a new nickname – “‘Dumb as a Rock’ Kamala Harris.”
“It’s important for her to manage her nervous laughter, but she’s definitely not dumb,” former Nevada Republican Party chairwoman and political commentator Amy Tarkanian said during an interview, adding Trump is doing himself no favor with suburban women by belittling Harris.
Campaign consultant Lisa Mayo DeRiso, who primarily represents Republicans, agrees.
“Republicans need independents to win in November,” she said via text. “They will be better served if the focus is on issues and competency and not gender or race.”
Tarkanian says Trump is further cementing his image as a “misogynistic jerk” with his choice of J.D. Vance as vice-president, noting Vance suggested women in violent marriages should stay put for the sake of the children.
In a 2021 Fox News interview, Vance lumped Harris in as one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” who don’t have a “direct stake” in America, Vance said.
Harris, a former U.S. Senator who served as Attorney General of California and District Attorney in San Francisco, is poised to knock her head against, if not break through, a number of glass ceilings. If elected, she’d be not only the first woman president but the first female Black and Asian Indian president, as well, in an election cycle where reproductive freedom is on the ballot in Nevada and at least four other states.
Trump, who appointed three Supreme Court justices on the basis of their opposition to abortion, has attempted to distance himself from the court’s ensuing decision abolishing Roe v. Wade, the abortion law of the land for almost half a century. Vance, however, wants to pursue a national abortion ban.
“Trump could have had plausible deniability over his position on abortion,” says Dr. Rebecca Gill, a UNLV political science professor. “However, his choice of JD Vance makes it a little bit more difficult for him to back away from that.”
Gill says Trump “hasn’t quite settled on what his argument is going to be against Harris. So far, it’s been ‘laughing Kamala’ and ‘crazy Kamala.’ These are certainly more personal attacks, as opposed to settling on an argument against her qualifications, experience, or policies.”
Following Biden’s announcement Sunday that he was endorsing Harris, the underbelly of America took to social media with vile attacks against Harris, some sexualized, with seemingly little concern of backlash over Trump being found guilty of 34 felony counts related to covering up payments to a porn star, or a jury’s finding that he was liable for sexual abuse against columnist E. Jean Carroll, who he assaulted in a department store dressing room.
Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, a Republican, said of Harris “100 percent, she was a DEI hire. When you go down that route, you get mediocrity.”
In 2020, Biden pledged to choose a woman as his running mate.
On Tuesday, Republican House leaders instructed members to eliminate race and gender from their criticisms of Harris, POLITICO reported.
“This should not be about personalities. It should be about policy. And we have a record to compare,” Speaker Mike Johnson told POLITICO after meeting with his colleagues. “This has nothing to do with race. It has to do with the competence of the person running for president, the relative strength of the two candidates and what ideas they have on how to solve America’s problems. And I think in that comparison, we’ll win in a landslide.”
“I think what Black women and other women of color are going to have to do is put up a shell,” says Erika Washington, executive director of Make the Road Nevada. “We’re going to have to put up that extra guard, certainly up until election day because the people on the internet feel like they can say anything to anybody, and there’s no filter. We saw it happen in 2016 with Hillary Clinton that everything a woman does is viewed so negatively. This is a woman who is Black and Indian.”
Trump, who led his crowds at rallies to chant “lock her up” during his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, is unlikely to let his own legal woes temper his insults against Harris, says Gill.
“But it definitely will color the way that people receive those remarks,” Gill says. “Part of that has to do with Kamala’s career history. She was a prosecutor, she was a specialist in crimes against women. This kind of prosecutor versus felon typology is probably a lot more relevant than her simply being a woman. I think she will be in a strong position to prosecute the case against him.”
“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said at a campaign office rally Monday of her experience as a prosecutor. “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Gill says it’s hard to say whether voters find personal attacks tiresome.
“We have two test cases ahead of this, and I think they split the evidence,” she says, noting in 2008 America elected its first Black president, Barack Obama. “America does not want to be seen as a country that still has racism and racist tendencies, so you did see an enthusiasm and coalescence around this charismatic Black leader. But then we have this glass ceiling of electing a woman president.”
Harris, according to Gill, lacks the baggage of decades in the public spotlight and the public vitriol that weighed on Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency.
“A lot of people who felt that they wanted to vote for a woman still had a very difficult time actually pulling the lever for that particular woman,” she says. “It remains to be seen how that’s going to shake out around Kamala Harris’s campaign.”
“I’m not thrilled with Kamala, but for the first time, I think the vice-president choice is really going to make a difference because of that attempted assassination (of Trump) being so fresh in people’s minds,” says Tarkanian. “I want to see who Kamala chooses.”
Harris is said to be considering a handful of potential running mates, predominantly white men.
“I don’t think she has to choose a white man,” says Tarkanian, adding that voters who would be turned off by a person of color “are already voting for Trump.” Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and X.
