Harris entry into presidential races poses quandary for Trump, GOP

The Trump campaign and Republicans face a new challenge with President Biden’s exit from the 2024 race: How to attack a female opponent without alienating voters.

It’s not new terrain for Trump, who defeated then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign.

But appealing to suburban women and independent voters in particular has long been a challenge for the former president, who has been found liable for sexual abuse, has taken credit for ending Roe v. Wade, and has regularly hurled insults at his female opponents.

Already the campaign against Harris is proving to be somewhat of a minefield for Republicans, who have mocked her likely elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket as a diversity hire.

This has led to a backlash, with Democrats and media personalities describing the argument as idiotic and racist.

Trump himself has ridiculed Harris over her laugh and called her “Dumb as a Rock” on social media.

Other Republicans have signaled some discomfort with these lines of attack.

“I am very clear and very consistent about this and talked to the members about this this morning. This is an election about competing policies. It’s not about personalities,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told CNN on Tuesday. 

“We do very well comparing the records of Kamala Harris and the Biden-Harris administration and the Trump administration,” he added. “And I think if we do that we will have an extraordinary November.”

Trump has thus far attacked Harris on both policy and personality. He has taken to mocking her with the nickname “Laffin’ Kamala” at rallies and has branded her “Lyin’ Kamala” in recent social media posts. Trump told the New York Post on Monday he would describe Harris as “vicious and dumb.”

He has also blamed Harris for the surge in migration at the southern border, calling her the “border czar” in reference to her work addressing the root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle region.

On a call with reporters Tuesday, Trump also went after Harris over her time working in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, claiming the city’s issue with crime could be tied directly to her tenure. 

“If she becomes president, Kamala Harris will make the invasion exponentially worse, and just like she did with San Francisco, just like she did with the border, our whole country will be permanently destroyed,” he said.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, asked Tuesday about Trump’s attacks on his wife, responded, “That’s all he’s got?”

“You heard the vice president yesterday making the case against Donald Trump very clearly,” Emhoff said at an event in Virginia.

“But she also laid out a vision for the future, a vision where there’s freedom, where we’re not having to talk about these issues of today in this post-Dobbs hellscape that Donald Trump created,” Emhoff said, referencing the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Harris is the first woman and first woman of color to serve as vice president, and would break through additional glass ceilings if she is elected president.

Some Republicans have used Harris’s background — the vice president is Black and is also of South Asian descent — as an attack line, suggesting her achievements are tied to her race and gender.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) posted Monday on the social platform X that the media “propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president.”

Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) told CBS News in Milwaukee that Democrats may have felt they needed to back Harris as the nominee “because of her ethnic background, so I’m sure there’s some division there on that issue."

Trump himself has a history of using inflammatory rhetoric about women dating back to his 2016 campaign, when he said then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” following a contentious debate she moderated. 

Trump has mocked the appearance of female critics, including Rosie O’Donnell, Carly Fiorina and adult film star Stormy Daniels. A jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse against writer E. Jean Carroll, though Trump has vehemently denied the allegations.

He has attacked Black prosecutors in New York and Atlanta as “racist” for bringing charges against him, and Harris has already signaled she intends to highlight her record as a prosecutor to make the case against Trump.

And Trump has repeatedly taken credit for ending Roe v. Wade through his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices, something Harris and Democrats are hoping to use to motivate women voters in November.

Exit polls from the 2020 election found 57 percent of female voters backed President Biden, compared to 42 percent who supported Trump. Exit polls from 2016 found 54 percent of women voted for Clinton, the Democratic nominee, while 41 percent voted for Trump.

There is limited polling available on a Trump-Harris head-to-head match-up since the change was made to the Democratic ticket, though a Reuters-Ipsos national poll conducted this week found Harris leading by 2 percentage points nationally. The Trump campaign’s pollster predicted a “Harris Honeymoon” would lead to the vice president seeing a boost in her numbers in the coming weeks.

But the Trump campaign has been adamant that the fundamentals of the race are unchanged and that they are running against a candidate who owns the same record as Biden. Prior to Biden dropping out, Trump led in the polls nationally and in nearly every major battleground state.

“Women want a President who will secure our nation's borders, remove violent criminals from our neighborhoods, and build an economy that helps hardworking families thrive – and that's exactly what President Trump will do," Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. "Women know our nation will be safer and more prosperous under Donald Trump than it is under dangerously liberal Kamala Harris, and that's why President Trump is leading in poll after poll."

Some Republicans also argued voters know what they are getting with Trump more than eight years into his political career, and that coarse rhetoric is unlikely to change their views one way or another.

“I think everyone knows who Donald Trump is, and the last time he faced a woman he won,” said Sean Spicer, former Trump White House press secretary.