“I think the Republicans should be a little more careful about what they wish for,” says one pollster.
Joe Biden is out. “The Biden-Harris administration” is in.
As momentum to replace Biden with Vice-President Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket only grows, Republicans and the Trump campaign are eyeing the other side of the aisle warily, preparing to alter a campaign plan that has been over a year in the making if need be.
Their plan is to paint Harris as a daffy and out-of-touch “San Francisco liberal,” according to one Trump campaign adviser, one who can more easily be caricatured as a true-believing left-winger than the man she would replace. Plus they say swapping out nominees would not mean they have to alter the attack on what they believe are Biden’s greatest vulnerabilities besides his age: inflation and immigration. And immigration, Republicans say, may be an even bigger problem for Harris than it was for Biden since the president deputized her to explore the root causes of the migration crisis.
“I think it really doesn’t matter who the Democratic candidate is,” said Nicole Malliotakis, a member of Congress from New York who sat in the president’s booth on the third night of the Republican National Convention. “It’s the Biden-Harris administration. She’s the border czar. In fact, I think it’s almost better to run against Kamala Harris because the one thing she was supposed to do is secure the border, and she’s been a complete disaster on that issue.”
The Trump campaign also plans to turn the charge that they are anti-democracy against the Democrats if Harris replaces Biden, pushing the notion that Harris was chosen by party bosses and not by the voters. On Thursday morning, at an event sponsored by Politico, Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita called any effort to replace Biden with Harris “an attempted coup.”
“You can’t step down as a candidate for president because you’re cognitively impaired while still being president,” he added.
Republicans are bracing for the fact that Harris will be a more effective campaigner than Biden and certainly a better debater. And they think that should Harris ultimately become the nominee, she will be awash in positive media coverage from outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, which Republicans believe have been on a crusade to replace Biden. The positive media coverage will likely result in a modest polling bump for Harris — but Republicans believe it will only be a temporary one.
Trump previewed a line of attack on Harris on July 4 when he referenced Harris’s previous failed run for president in 2020 and the relationship she had with Willie Brown, a San Francisco power broker and future mayor when he was 60 and she was just 29.
“Also, respects to our potentially new Democrat Challenger, Laffin’ Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote on his social-media platform, Truth Social. “She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician! Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.”
Privately, GOP officials worry that this side of Trump, the one that makes racially coded and misogynistic remarks and that has been kept mostly under wraps this campaign season, would come out should Harris become the nominee, further turning off college-educated voters and women.
“It would change the race significantly because it brings race directly into the picture and it brings gender directly into the picture,” said GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “If Trump goes back to the Trump we’ve known, then all bets are off.”
“I think the Republicans should be a little more careful about what they wish for,” he added. “It reminds me of the dog that catches the car. It doesn’t work out very well for the dog.”
The Biden campaign has insisted that the president is still running, and he is said to harbor private doubts that Harris would be as strong a candidate as he is. Biden does run strong among older white voters who tend to vote Republican, a demographic that has kept him neck and neck with Trump in the northern battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Should Harris, the first Black and Asian woman to serve as vice-president, end up being the nominee, there would likely be a softening of support among older white voters. But she also might have success at bringing Trump-curious Black and Hispanic voters back into the Democratic fold. States like Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, which have been moving off the map of contested states and into Republican hands, could come back into play.
If the Democratic Party were to execute a switch just months prior to the election, it would represent yet another unprecedented event in a campaign that has been full of them. Many Republicans said that in a year in which nothing has gone according to plan, it would be hard to predict how the latest twist in this race would go.
Asked what the difference would be between a Republican campaign against Joe Biden and one against Kamala Harris, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a close Trump ally, said, “I have no idea. I guess they both have their minuses.”
