In a surprise move, President Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be Democratic nominee. Harris has now received the support from all state parties, almost all Democratic members of Congress, governors, the Clintons, and Nancy Pelosi, among others. There are a number of technical questions around delegate allocations and such, but it seems likelier by the hour that Harris is the decisive successor to Biden, which means she will also be the locus of attacks from Donald Trump and his cadre.
So far, the attacks seem a bit scattershot, with the Trump campaign planning to paint Harris as some sort of enabler of the enfeebled Biden, hoping to paint her either as obfuscating the reality before the American public or malevolently waiting in the wings until Biden imploded so she could swoop in as heir apparent (perhaps both). I’m not sure that all this will really land with the electorate in general; anyone who’ll buy the idea of some shadowy conspiracy to keep a senile Biden under wraps was probably not voting Democratic to begin with. Not to say that there weren’t indications that people were trying to mitigate the extent of his purported decline, but who can really blame the vice president for standing by her running mate?
They’ll also want to tie her to particular Biden administration policies they consider unpopular, most notably the handling of immigration and the southern border. Three years ago, the administration put in Harris’ portfolio, among several other things, the task of helping coordinate with Mexico and some so-called Northern Triangle Latin American nations to control for the “root causes” of migration. As laid out recently in Vox, this somewhat muddy objective got morphed into an understanding of Harris as somehow being in charge of the border as a whole, which led opponents to call her a failed “border czar” in GOP electoral terminology. Given generally poor public attitudes around immigration over the past couple of years, this is a bit likelier to stick as an attack line, despite the fact that the Biden admin didn’t really fundamentally shift its border approach from Trump’s policies.
What I really want to talk about, though, is the set of attacks that the MAGA world is unlikely to publicly lay out as a strategy, but which will inevitably form part of the backbone of Trump’s anti-Harris efforts. I bet you can guess where I’m going with this, right? Kamala Harris is a Black woman, the child of immigrant parents. These are not demographics that Trump has historically had much affinity for, and if he was already engaged in open misogyny against Hillary Clinton, it’s promising to be much worse this time around. All the “sleepy Joe” stuff was both downstream of a real concern that voters had, but also the fact that Biden was a fellow old white man, without the demographic characteristics that could be weaponized for red meat to the base.
I would imagine this will entail insinuating that she is a “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) candidate, the latest in a series of dog-whistle descriptors used to insinuate that nonwhite people did not and could not have possibly reached technical, high-level, or executive positions on their own merit, but must have been placed there by “woke” culture or political correctness or whatever. Sebastian Gorka, a Trump-era White House official for five minutes (forced out at least in part after failing to qualify for security clearance for being a far-right freak) and a current Newsmax host has already gone there, yesterday calling Harris “literally a DEI hire… who cackles like an insane woman.” The terms vary but everyone knows what they really mean.
These types of attacks will probably prove irresistible to Trump, though I doubt that they’re being encouraged by his more strategic campaign advisers. That’s for the simple reason that they’ll excite the sizable subset of his voter block — which fundamentally believes in strict racial and social hierarchy and longs for a candidate that will just say the N-word and be done with it — but repulse many of the independent and moderate voters he would need to capture in swing states to win the election. Every time he gets right up to the line of calling her an outright slur or insinuating that she simply doesn’t deserve a shot at the nation’s highest office, the portion of the electorate that sees itself as conservative and fiscally-minded but fair-minded and proper, who would have considered voting for Trump purely out of convergence on an economic axis, will get a little less likely to.
Now, I realize I’m saying this about a candidate who essentially launched his political career on the Obama birther conspiracy, smearing the nation’s first Black president as inherently ineligible to hold the presidency. Donald Trump is a racist, and he always has been, stretching back to his early real estate developer days, when his earliest projects at his dad’s company were credibly accused of refusing to rent to Black people. Do we even need to remember the “my African-American over here” moment? (For the record, that former Trump supporter wound up leaving the party over its white supremacist trajectory.) Or the bit about shithole countries? He is also obviously a misogynist, as demonstrated not only by his treatment of Clinton but his treatment of people like E. Jean Carroll, who he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming, then liable for defaming again after he couldn’t keep himself from continuing to attack her.
That said, I think things are different now for a couple reasons. Trump isn’t some upstart coming in out of left field, and he wouldn’t just be lobbing racist attacks at an outgoing president but at his current electoral opponent. It’s clear now, or at least should be clear, that he’s not going to change, which was the silly hope some voters clung on to during his first campaign. After almost a decade in the public eye, after just surviving an attempt on his life, he hasn’t changed and won’t change. And rather than feeling like Obama to Hillary was the natural arc of history and that there was no way Trump could win, as so many voters did, the electorate now understands the existential stakes here and will feel that it has to claw back representative democracy, not just rely on its forward momentum.
Every time Trump starts talking about how Harris is an undeserving immigrant or a childless careerist neglecting her womanly duties or a Black affirmative action hire, it’ll remind everyone about the very real policies, compiled in Project 2025 and elsewhere, that would seek to actually use the power of the federal government to enforce these hierarchies, and that’s not good for Trump, frankly. His actual policies are so unpopular that the more attention gets drawn to the more draconian ones, the worse off it probably is for him electorally.
The flip side of the coin here is that Harris obviously stands to make the history that many had hoped would happen eight years ago by becoming the nation’s first female president, and the first Black woman, Indian-American, Asian-American, and Caribbean-American to boot. Black voters and Black women in particular are a crucial demographic for Democratic campaigns, and this group already seems all-in for Harris. A Zoom call organized by the group Win with Black Women on Sunday, hours after Biden’s drop-out announcement, reportedly attracted over 44,000 participants and raised $1.5 million. I’ll admit that I was a heavy skeptic about having Biden step down so close to the election, but if the Democrats can avoid tripping over themselves and harness this energy while allowing Trump to combust, they’ll be in good shape.
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