“The KAMALA HARRIS of 2024 is light-years better than the Harris of 2019. But the searing experience remains an indelible stain on her image. … In short, there is no margin for the kind of errors that plagued her first presidential bid.”
After being knocked off-kilter for a week by President JOE BIDEN’s decision to end his re-election bid and the Democratic Party’s quick embrace of Harris, the former president’s campaign is ready to try and knock his new opponent down a few pegs.
The Trump campaign’s first $12 million ad flight targeting Harris goes live in six swing states this morning, and it’s all about the border — tagging the VP as “failed, weak, dangerously liberal.”
“Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here. A quarter of a million Americans died from fentanyl. Brutal migrant crimes. And ISIS — now here,” the voiceover says, cutting to footage from Harris’widely panned 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, where she scoffs at a question about visiting the border. Watch the ad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omrMRP15q9M
The new offensive suggests that, after a week of scrambling to find the best message for attacking Trump’s new rival, his campaign ad makers are sticking with the tried-and-true. What’s conspicuously not included are suggestions that she’s a “DEI hire,” allegations she covered up Biden’s mental state, clips of her laughing, mentions of Venn diagrams, or any of the other attacks that have gone viral among the MAGA faithful but do little to move the needle among a broader audience.
Trump won’t have the airwaves to himself this week, of course. We’re told the Harris campaign is expected to announce their own large media buy later this morning, coming on the heels of a $50 million commitment last week from the Future Forward super PAC. Expect to see upbeat, biographical efforts to reintroduce the VP as the new Democratic standard-bearer.
But Trump insiders aren’t fretting. Far from it, according to our conversations last night with senior GOP officials, who remain confident that the sheen surrounding Harris will soon fade and their attacks on her record will sink in with critical swing voters.
“So Harris has a good week because Democrats are in such disarray that they had to force the sitting president to no longer run for president?” one of those officials sarcastically asked. “Has the Democratic base coalesced? Yes. But what we have yet to see is a true Kamala Harris. The vanity and rah-rah homecoming that they’re having right now, it will wear off, and they’ll come back down to earth.”
According to their theory of the case, Harris is a more tantalizing target than Biden ever was: In addition to targeting her record on the border, inflation, and other policies as part of the Biden administration, Republicans are ready to exploit a trove of old clips from Harris’ days trying to outflank other progressives during the 2020 presidential primary.
While Republicans always struggled to convince voters that the relatively moderate Biden was a liberal boogeyman, they argue that Harris has the makings of a NANCY PELOSI 2.0 — the former speaker whom Republicans relentlessly used in attack ads against all sorts of Democratic candidates over the years.
So far it’s down-ballot Republicans who have seized most effectively on Harris’ five-year-old utterances — ranging from her vow to end private insurance (“Let’s move on”) to her dalliance with abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“We need to probably think about starting from scratch”) to her anti-fossil-fuels stances (“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking”) and her indulgence of the idea that incarcerated felons should be able to vote (“I think we should have that conversation”).
We’re told to expect Trump’s campaign and the RNC to eventually follow suit. While those attacks aren’t on broadcast TV yet, they’ve already started to post clips online of old Harris interviews, while the former president has tweaked Harris for some of those old positions on the campaign trail.
The Harris campaign is starting to rein in many of those old positions, starting with her erstwhile push to end fracking, which she first disavowed Friday in a campaign statement to The Hill’s Rachel Frazin. Yesterday she backed off of her past support for a single-payer health system and mandatory assault weapon buybacks while insisting she supports increased border enforcement, as NYT’s Reid J. Epstein reported — essentially aligning her agenda with Biden’s.
“The Harris campaign will rebut most of Republicans’ attacks by arguing that they are exaggerating or lying about her record,” Epstein continued, later quoting Harris campaign spokesman BRIAN FALLON arguing that Harris’ “years spent in law enforcement and her record in the Biden-Harris administration defy Trump’s attempts to define her through lies.”
But the Republicans we spoke to believe the mountain of video clips they have at the ready will speak louder than any campaign spokesperson’s statement. And echoing what campaign insiders told the Daily Caller’s Henry Rodgers, they don’t believe Harris will be able to remain so disciplined once she finds herself in unscripted scenarios, such as sit-down interviews or the debate(s) that Trump is now acknowledging they’ll “probably” have.
In short, the Harris bubble is deflating, they believe. Trump’s favorability numbers are as high as they’ve ever been, insiders say, while the combination of Biden’s sudden exit and running mate JD VANCE’s rocky rollout combined to give Harris an undeniable early boost (one, they gripe, that got a big mainstream-media assist).
