2020
ELECTIONS
Trump prepares a new fall offensive: Branding
Kamala Harris
Drawing on a playbook of caricature and condemnation,
Trump’s campaign hopes to chip away at Joe Biden’s lead by presenting Harris as
an extreme California liberal.
By GABBY
ORR
09/06/2020
07:00 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/06/trump-pence-kamala-harris-409335
Kamala
Harris is about to get the Trump treatment.
President
Donald Trump has long excelled at ridiculing opponents and fomenting rivalries
among those around him — from contestants on “The Apprentice” to his top aides
inside the White House. Now he and his campaign are eyeing ways to drive a
wedge between Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his younger,
lesser-known running mate.
The
president and his allies are plotting ways to portray Harris as a serious
threat to the working-class voters whom Biden hopes to flip this fall, four
years after many across the Rust Belt ditched Democrats to support Trump.
They’re digging up her comments from Democratic primary debates, hoping they
can use them to put her and Biden on defense. And despite Harris’ lukewarm
relationship with some anti-establishment progressive groups, they are
considering ways to cast her as a champion of the radical left by concentrating
on positions she’s taken that run afoul of Biden-style centrism, one of the
former vice president’s key appeals to swing voters.
“Kamala Harris
is a California liberal who has already defined herself as a radical Democrat
with her support of the Green New Deal, socialized medicine, fracking bans, tax
raises and taxpayer-funded abortions,” said Courtney Parella, deputy national
press secretary for the Trump campaign.
Some of
those attacks will be dismissed as false or exaggerated. But the move to cast
Harris as a socialist sympathizer and progressive stalwart comes as the Trump
campaign struggles to deploy a similar playbook against Biden, who has mocked
the president’s attempts to paint him as a “helpless puppet” of the radical
left. Trump’s standing against Biden in polls has barely budged throughout the
year despite nickname after nickname, a flurry of vicious tweets and numerous
presidential press conferences that he’s used to assail his opponent.
“Do I look
to you like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” Biden asked the
crowd on Monday at an event in Pittsburgh, where he distanced himself from
calls to ban hydraulic fracking and condemned the rioting, looting and arson
occurring in some U.S. cities.
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The coming
focus on Harris presents some challenges for the Trump camp. The president’s
team has repeatedly accused Biden of embracing radical social and economic
policies to please left-wing revolutionaries ahead of the November election — a
line of attack that could complicate efforts to convince voters he and Harris
disagree about the direction of their party and the policies their potential
administration should enact.
“You can’t
spend the summer telling voters they should be afraid of electing Joe Biden
because he’s a socialist and then suddenly say, ‘Harris is the actual socialist
and she would be in charge if Biden wins,’” said a former Trump campaign
official.
A person
involved with the Trump campaign maintained that the campaign’s push in the
coming weeks to define Harris would not contradict or undo their messaging on
Biden. This person said they will focus on specific issues, like abortion and
health care, where they believe Harris has staked out untenable positions for
the swing voters Biden is targeting. They say Harris cannot afford to revise
these positions if she wishes to remain in good standing with the left flank of
the Democratic Party.
For example,
after Biden walked back his support for the Hyde Amendment, a decades-old law
prohibiting federal funding for abortion, Harris asked him during a Democratic
primary debate last year if he regretted his “decision for years to withhold
resources to poor women to have access to reproductive health care, including
women who were the victims of rape and incest.”
The
California senator has also said she supports the Women’s Health Protection
Act, federal legislation that would block states from placing restrictions on
abortion services — including gestational limitations that prevent women in
some states from terminating their pregnancies in the third trimester. Biden
has previously backed efforts to outlaw late-term abortion procedures and his
campaign has not said whether he would oppose a Republican-led effort to ban
abortion after 20 weeks if elected.
“Late-term
abortion is a weak spot for Kamala because there’s no way she is going to turn
her back on the liberal women in her base,” said an outside adviser to the
Trump campaign. “If she even appeared to embrace Biden’s indecisiveness on
these issues, she would piss off Planned Parenthood and NARAL beyond words.”
Then-Democratic
presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris listens as Democratic presidential
candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a Democratic
presidential primary debate, July 31, 2019. | Paul Sancya, File/ AP Photo
Harris also
clashed with Biden over his opposition to a “Medicare for All” health insurance
system during the party’s primary last year. She maintained an option for
purchasing Medicare plans from private companies in her own proposal as a 2020
candidate last year, declining to go as far as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.),
whose health care reform legislation she previously co-sponsored in the Senate.
Biden has promoted an expansion of the Affordable Care Act and once said he
would be open to vetoing Medicare for All legislation if the overall cost
placed a financial burden on middle-class Americans.
Harris,
whose record as California attorney general includes several lawsuits against
oil companies over alleged environmental violations, has also carved out a
position to the left of Biden on fracking.
“There is
no question I am in favor of banning fracking,” she said during a climate
change town hall last September, adding that she would use executive authority
to immediately ban fracking on public lands while pressuring Congress to expand
the ban to private lands.
It’s not
unusual to have two candidates with different policy views on the same ticket.
When Vice President Mike Pence signed onto the GOP ticket in 2016, he brought
with him a lengthy track record of supporting free trade deals, including the
Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump once likened to “rape.” Pence also called
Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, a variation of which he later implemented as
president, “offensive and unconstitutional” in a tweet prior to becoming his
running mate.
“Paul
Ryan’s economic plan was more conservative than [Mitt] Romney’s, and George W.
Bush supported a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a man and a
woman in 2004, while [Dick] Cheney spoke supportively of gay marriage,” said
Joel Goldstein, an expert on vice presidential history.
“Generally,
voters focus on the presidential candidates and their positions. As long as the
vice presidential candidate is able to conduct themselves in an able and
capable way, their own opinions are not likely to be much of an issue,”
Goldstein added.
So far,
Harris has emerged as an asset since Biden tapped her as his running mate in
August. Her presence on the ticket contributed to a major fundraising boost
last month as the Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee raised a
record-breaking $364.5 million. And her history-making potential as the first
Asian American and Black woman on a major party ticket has helped inject
enthusiasm into the party’s base, particularly among female and minority
voters, according to recent polls.
In a
statement, Harris press secretary Sabrina Singh said Biden’s 2020
rival-turned-running mate “will be doing everything possible to elect him this
November.”
“As Senator
Harris has said from day one, Joe Biden is the leader our country needs to see
us through this public health and economic crisis and build a better future for
America. She is Vice President Biden’s partner on this ticket,” said Singh.
The
Oakland-born senator already got a powerful first wave of the Trump treatment
when the president and his allies questioned her eligibility for office the
same week she joined the Democratic ticket — a move that drew widespread
condemnation even from some in his own party.
“I just
heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements and by the way the lawyer
that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer,” Trump,
who was the most prominent figure to promote false “birther” conspiracy
theories about President Barack Obama during his first term, said of Harris during
a news conference last month.
Though
birtherism is unlikely to come up during the Oct. 7 debate between Harris and
Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate is expected to dig into the
issues on which Harris and Biden harbor some differences.
A person
close to Pence said he will continue to push his view that the Democratic
ticket “is a trojan horse for a radical leftist agenda” that aligns with
Harris’ political views. This person and others said the vice president will
attempt to “box in” Harris to where she must choose to disavow Biden’s
positions on certain policy issues or water down her own.
The debate
will be an important moment for Pence, who is widely viewed as having
presidential aspirations of his own and delivered a strong performance in 2016
against then-Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine.
“Generally
speaking, your focus is on the presidential candidates and their positions in
the vice presidential debates — though the vice presidential candidates become
a little more important if you’re worried about succession,” Goldstein said,
adding that Trump and Biden are the oldest candidates to compete against each
other in a presidential contest.
It will
also be the first time Pence faces off against a female competitor, let alone a
former prosecutor. The Trump campaign insists Harris’ record as a prosecutor is
a liability for her and Biden, noting that she once declined to pursue the
death penalty against a gang member who killed an on-duty police officer when
she was in the midst of a 2004 bid for the office of San Francisco district
attorney.
“There have
been some very high-profile instances where she refused to seek the death
penalty and she’s largely skated by on them until now,” said a senior Trump
campaign official.
But Harris’
prosecutorial background could also give her the upper hand when she takes the
stage against Pence next month. The California senator deployed some memorable
lines during the Democratic primary debates — including during clashes with
Biden — where she often stood in sharp contrast to her opponents. Though
Trump’s even-keeled vice president is unlikely to be as brash as his boss on
the debate stage, Goldstein said Pence must still walk a fine line as he takes
on Biden’s running mate.
“When Biden
debated [Sarah] Palin in 2008, he was very careful to treat her respectfully
and his success in that debate was just that — that he was respectful to her
while he stuck to the substance in attacking [John] McCain,” he recalled.
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