Republicans step up attacks on Harris as talk of Biden’s successor in 2024 election grows

NEW YORK (AP) — This has been a Republican scaremongering tactic for years.

A vote for President Joe Biden’s reelection, the Republican Party often claims, is really a vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. This line of attack is sometimes laced with racist and misogynistic undertones and is often depicted with macabre imagery.

But after Biden’s disastrous performance at the presidential debate last week, which prompted calls from Democrats to resign, what was once dismissed as a far-right conspiracy – Harris as Biden’s successor – may now actually become a reality. And Republicans, including Donald Trump, are stepping up their attacks.

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Trump and his allies have rolled out new lines of attack against Harris, insulting her abilities, portraying her as Biden’s top supporter and accusing her of involvement in covering up his health – an effort, campaign officials say, that does not reflect their concerns about a potential change at the top of the ticket as Biden insists he is not dropping out of the race.

But in an Independence Day post on his website Truth Social on Thursday, Trump took special aim at Harris, calling her his “potential new Democratic challenger” and giving her a new, derisive nickname: “Laffin’ Kamala Harris.”

“She fared poorly in the Democratic nomination process, starting out as a No. 2 seed and ultimately losing before she even reached Iowa. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t a ‘highly talented’ politician! Just ask her mentor, the great Willie Brown of San Francisco,” he wrote. (Harris dated Brown in the mid-1990s.)

The post came after Trump campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles released a statement earlier this week using a different but similar nickname, referring to her as Biden’s “giggling co-pilot Kamala Harris.”

Trump also released a profanity-laced video, first reported by the Daily Beast, in which he is filmed on the golf course calling Biden an “old, broken piece of crap” and declaring that he knocked the president out of the race. (Trump has repeatedly said in interviews that he did not expect Biden to be pushed aside.)

“He’s giving up the race,” Trump said. “And that means we have Kamala. I think she’s going to be better. She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic,” he said.

Allies also joined in the attacks, portraying Harris as the main defender of Biden’s abilities and accusing her of lying to the American public.

Biden, the White House and his campaign insist he has no plans to drop out of the race. In an interview with ABC News that aired Friday night, he said only “the Lord Almighty” could knock him out of the race.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back against the tone of the attacks against Harris, particularly Trump’s decision to address a decades-old relationship and use other sexist rhetoric.

“I find that disgusting, I find that disturbing,” Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday. “She should be respected in her role as vice president. She should be respected like every other vice president before her who has been in this room. It’s appalling that a former president would say something like that about a current vice president, I’ll be careful about that. And we should denounce that – that’s not OK.”

It remains unclear how Harris would fare against Trump compared to Biden. Replacing a candidate so late in a presidential cycle – let alone an incumbent president who has already swept the Democratic Party primaries – would be unprecedented in modern history, and the mechanics are complicated and potentially messy.

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Polls show Harris’s approval ratings are similar to those of Biden and Trump. A June AP-NORC poll found that about 4 in 10 Americans have a favorable opinion of her. However, the share who have an unfavorable opinion is slightly lower than for Trump and Biden, and about 1 in 10 still has no opinion of her.

Harris, 59, would be a stark generational contrast to Trump, who is 78 and also showing signs of age. As the first woman, first Black person and first person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president, she would also be a potentially groundbreaking candidate who could win support from women, minority voters and younger people – groups with whom Trump has tried to make significant inroads.

Harris has also been the Biden administration’s leading voice on abortion rights, a key issue for Democrats since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which could again boost voter turnout this fall.

Trump’s campaign team, however, said it was confident in Trump’s chances regardless of his opponent, and rejected the idea that Harris could pose a greater challenge to Trump, saying she is a more polarizing figure than the president.

“President Trump will beat every Democrat on November 5 because he has a proven track record and an agenda to Make America Great Again,” LaCivita and Wiles said in their statement.

One campaign official said the focus on Harris was more a reflection of the current media focus on the Democratic nomination slate than a belief that she would ultimately replace Biden.

While the party has plenty of research on the opposition thanks to Harris’ 2020 campaign and her years as vice president, ultimately, they argue, Biden’s record is Harris’s record, and if she were to replace Biden, Trump’s advisers would not be facing an entirely different race.

Harris, for example, was tapped by Biden to lead the administration’s response to the root causes of the border crisis, which ties them to one of his weakest issues. And if he does indeed drop out, they argue, voters will no longer be able to trust the administration, Harris and the press for not bringing Biden’s weaknesses to light sooner.

“The economy is still the economy, the border is still the border, there are still global conflicts,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez. “And changing the person at the top of the ballot does not change those realities for the American voters.”

Associated Press writers Linley Sanders and Josh Boak contributed to this report from Washington.