In the immediate aftermath of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over from President Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election, Republicans were caught off guard, unsure of how to adapt to the sudden change in the race. But now, they appear to be gathering themselves together for an aggressive attack on her record, wrote Aaron Blake for The Washington Post.
A lot of those attacks, he wrote, are going to center on the positions she took in her 2020 campaign for president to try to court the left flank of Democratic primary voters.
"Republicans have some real fodder for pitching Harris as too far left," wrote Blake. "The effort to highlight those positions has now kicked off, especially in the GOP’s efforts to win back the Senate. A widely shared ad from Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick highlighted a series of Harris’s past positions while tying her to Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.). The National Republican Senatorial Committee put up its own version of the ad Thursday."
Trump himself promoted the ad Monday afternoon on his Truth Social account.
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Among the positions that Harris took during that period are prohibiting fracking and offshore drilling. Polls show the public is divided to narrowly opposed to fracking, even in Pennsylvania, where the industry employs tens of thousands of people — although there is little polling support for a ban on offshore drilling. She also called for reforming Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), abolishing the Senate filibuster, and passing the Green New Deal, all of which are viewed with varying degrees of skepticism by poll respondents, and spoke positively of the Defund the Police movement — while not explicitly endorsing it — something Americans oppose by around 80 percent.
Finally she backed a mandatory gun buyback, which is less popular than other forms of gun control, and treating unauthorized border crossings as a civil offense, which the public is again divided on.
At least some of these positions she no longer holds — for example, she has committed not to ban fracking as president. Some are also arguably no longer applicable, because Biden effectively passed some of the more popular provisions of the Green New Deal in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Additionally, Blake wrote, it is tough to know exactly how all of this will play with voters, even the positions that are clearly unpopular, because "much of this polling is a few years old, because these issues were more front-and-center back then."
