Republicans are just waking up to the horror that they’ve been had.
The Trump campaign seems blindsided by Kamala Harris. Having avoided the ordeal of a primary, Harris dances onto the national scene appearing well-rested and unscathed. In polls, she is already tied with Trump—erasing his sizable lead in just one week.
Scrambling to make sense of what just happened, J.D. Vance has called her extra-democratic appointment a “coup.” He has suggested it cheated voters out of the chance to pick their own nominee. But a “coup” involves regime change. This switcheroo involved none. That’s why you don’t see members of the Biden administration objecting.
The maneuver didn’t damage Biden’s party, which tested a losing candidate, looked at his polls, and swapped him out for something better. A more accurate description is this: the Republicans have once again been outfoxed. So has the electorate, which could wind up with a far more left-wing president than it even knows.
The question is: What are Republicans going to do about it?
Primaries may frustrate party grandees, but they serve the entire electorate. They are a gauntlet and vetting process, an opportunity to see what the candidates will promise when they’re seeking the approval of their own tribe. Forced to pander to their base, candidates typically say things that will hurt them in a general election. In the general, everyone pretends to be a moderate. But in a primary, candidates are at their most ideologically pure, huddling with their own team. By avoiding a primary, Harris also avoided revealing herself as a leftist.
There is every reason to believe Vice President Harris is actually quite radical and would govern that way. Since the start of her failed 2020 presidential campaign, she has adopted virtually every tenet of progressive maximalism—yes, wokeness—from gender ideology (pronouns-in-her-bio) to seriously discussing defunding the police in a 2020 radio interview.
She has called to “critically reexamine ICE and its role” and concluded “we need to probably think about starting from scratch,” meaning scrapping it altogether. She believes that the term radical Islamic terrorism ought to be abolished—not the terrorism, mind you, just the phrase. In 2020, she put out a video endorsing “equity” and insisted “equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” Actually, that’s what equitable treatment means to the hard left.
As U.S. senator, Harris was one of the earliest sponsors of AOC’s “Green New Deal,” a dismantling of the U.S. economy under the flag of climate fundamentalism. She could scarcely be bothered to visit our southern border and had no interest in securing it, even when fixing the immigration crisis was made her unique responsibility as vice president.
In 2019, she expressed remarkable hostility to American energy. On CNN, she said there was “no question” she would ban fracking and offshore drilling. She fully supported Biden’s disastrous, inhumane policy of encouraging not only hormones but also gender surgeries for vulnerable minors and of flinging open the doors of women’s jail cells to biologically male offenders.
When Joe Biden was running for election in 2020 and referred to the “Latino community,” she corrected him on X: “the Latinx community,” she wrote, preferring the agender, woke neologism unpopular with the Latino community.
In June of 2020, Harris urged her supporters to post bail for BLM rioters who had ransacked our cities, even tweeting a payment link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund just four days after rioters burned a Minneapolis police precinct to the ground. “They’re not going to stop and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop,” she said on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, referring to the BLM protesters. “They’re not going to let up, and they should not.”
Each of these positions is out of step with the moderates in her party and the vast majority of the American people; had they come out in a primary, they would have been quite damaging. For good reason, Harris was ranked the “most liberal” member of the senate by the government transparency organization GovTrack, which recently memory-holed the webpage bearing the accolade.
Now, as a candidate in the 2024 general election, she claims she never wanted to ban fracking. Expect her to reverse course on other far-left positions in the coming weeks. Had she been forced to restate these positions in a recent primary, the current disavowals would seem phony to the point of ridiculous.
Instead, having avoided a primary, Harris can sell herself as a moderate to a public that has no time to unpack whether she was or wasn’t the official “border czar.” She smiles and laughs a lot. She looks like the kind of person you’d want to unwind with over a glass of pinot grigio. She can present herself as a centrist and count on the media to spearhead the cover-up.
The contest comes down to this: Will Republicans let her get away with it? Can the Republicans put her through the equivalent of a primary before the first mail-in votes are sent? Or will the GOP wallow in the unfairness of it all and blind itself to a better strategy going forward?
Here’s what Republican wallowing looks like:
Pushing the idea that Harris is a “DEI hire.” Conservatives insist that calling her a DEI hire is fair and just. After all, DEI is a terrible, unethical system. If the Democrats love DEI so much, why not own it? Biden all but branded Harris a DEI hire when he announced he would only consider female minority candidates.
All true. And all equally beside the point.
Republicans foolish enough to attack Harris as a DEI hire are likely to be startled by the stampede to defend her. For one thing, calling Harris a DEI hire mistakes attacking the system with attacking its beneficiaries. The system of DEI is unethical and must be dismantled. But the beneficiaries did nothing wrong. Were they not supposed to apply for these jobs? Why shame them now?
Consider that we all regard it as immoral for Major League Baseball to have once excluded black players. The system was rotten, but the players in it—Ruth, Williams, DiMaggio—don’t deserve our contempt. Attack the system, not the players.
The other counterproductive strategy—which some Republicans seem keen to pursue—is “slut shaming” Harris for her affair, early in her career, with the powerful older politician Willie Brown, the married mayor of San Francisco. The charge seems ridiculous when leveled against a happily married woman turning sixty, who looks like a kindly auntie and whose stepchildren call her “Momala.” In four years as the first female veep, she presented a personal side that was warm and conventional, and that’s what voters remember. Shaming her for earlier romantic affairs will only inspire her base to vote early.
The question Republicans ought to confront before leveling any attack is: “Will this energize my supporters more or hers?” For nearly every ad hominem salvo currently flung at Harris, the answer is: hers.
Moms from both political parties have had enough with inflation, with gender ideology in the schools, and with criminals on the streets. Many felt betrayed by the party that took its marching orders from the teachers unions during Covid—and kept kids out of school for years.
Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, just endorsed Harris: “She has a record of fighting for us,” Weingarten said. Harris in turn praised Weingarten as “an incredible friend and adviser to the president and me.” That ought to be enough to send many moms to the polls to vote Republican for the first time. It’s a mistake to make them uncomfortable or place them on the defensive.
Harris has never stopped being a San Francisco politician. Republicans should remind the public of that and ask Wisconsin residents: Are you ready to become California? Liberals and conservatives are fleeing Harris’s home state, where she was U.S. senator and attorney general. Would Pennsylvanians like to know why?
Ten million migrants have entered our country since Harris was put in charge of the border. Are they ready for millions more? Would they like to find their own schools and hospitals so overrun that American citizens are sent away, as happened in New York and Texas?
The vast majority of American families prefer Republican policies. It’s the messengers who are so often the problem. And perhaps that’s especially the case this year.
An aura of gloom trails J.D. Vance, and his instincts need recalibration. He seems to believe he is in a primary, talking straight to his base, growling at Democrats. And many on the right are cheering this strategy: Stop worrying about the guys in man-buns, they say. They never vote for us anyway!
Typically, the vice president plays attack dog to keep the presidential candidate’s hands clean. But Trump and Vance both often seem like pit bulls straining at the leash. Why did the elegant, brilliant Usha Vance fall for J.D.? There must be a sweet, loving side to this guy, which he ought to let voters see. If the Mitt Romney–Paul Ryan ticket had too little fight, this one currently suffers from too much: too aggressive, too man-cave, too full of resentment to please the American heart, which still has a fondness for things like joy and hope.
If Republicans want to win, they must put Harris through the 2024 primary she never had. Inform voters of the record Harris is now scrambling to disavow, and the media is working desperately to erase. And most trying of all for Trump-Vance, they must hold two ideas in their heads: Yes, you got played. And also, bitterness will sink you.
Abigail Shrier is the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.
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