Kamala Harris draws GOP attacks as Biden faces calls to step aside

Democrats are starting to coalesce around Vice President Kamala Harris as a 2024 replacement for President Joe Biden following a disastrous debate performance that upended his campaign and the race against former President Donald Trump.

But Republicans are simultaneously coalescing against Harris, accusing her of being “complicit” in a cover-up regarding Biden’s age and mental acuity.   

Harris’s name has vaulted ahead of other possible successors, including Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), should Biden decide to step aside this election cycle, in part because it is easier to transfer the $240 million in their presidential war chest to her. 

But Republicans are not waiting for Democrats to make that decision, launching proactive attacks against Harris in case she becomes Trump’s general election opponent.

“Make no mistake that Democrats, the main stream media, and the swamp colluded to hide the truth from the American public — Joe Biden is weak, failed, dishonest, and not fit for the White House,” Trump campaign officials Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a Wednesday statement. “Every one of them has lied about Joe Biden’s cognitive state and supported his disastrous policies over the past four years, especially Cackling Copilot Kamala Harris.”

The offensive underscores the danger Biden is in politically as members of his own party call for him to make way for a new nominee. The president has failed to quiet the Democratic panic despite a late round of outreach to allies.

But it also signals that Republicans consider Harris, who suffers from low approval ratings despite being the natural choice to succeed Biden, vulnerable to many of the same attacks leveled against him.

Republican lawmakers have extended the criticism to other Democrats, contending the party must be held accountable for what they allege is a coordinated effort to mislead voters about Biden’s mental acuity over the last three years. The tactic suggests an overarching campaign strategy that paints Democrats as “enablers” of Biden despite his mental state.

“They knew full well, frankly, the condition of Joe Biden. They’ve all known this, from Jill Biden on down. Now the American people fully know it,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) said in a press gaggle. “They hid Joe Biden from you reporters, you guys couldn’t even get close to him. And unfortunately, we saw what happened [in the debate]. It’s bad luck for our country, but the Democrats, they have to be responsible for this.”

Other Republicans are considering political consequences, with Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) arguing Harris should be impeached for “lying to America” about the state of Biden’s mental acuity. Roy has also called for congressional hearings to investigate how long those in the Biden administration had concerns about Biden’s mental fitness and whether they intentionally concealed them from voters. 

In response, the White House and Biden campaign pointed the Washington Examiner to comments Harris made to CBS News on Tuesday, in which she remained adamant Biden “is our nominee.” 

“We beat Trump once and we’re going to beat him again,” she told the outlet. “I am proud to be Joe Biden’s running mate.”

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) became the first House Democrat to encourage Biden publicly to stand aside on Tuesday, while others, such as Reps. Jared Golden (D-ME) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), have voiced doubts about Biden’s ability to win reelection.

The president has been defended by party leaders who remain in Biden’s corner, at least publicly. But their defense has also been accompanied by a soft, and in other cases overt, rhetorical shift that suggests Democrats are seriously looking at Harris.

She has received support from the likes of former Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan and less directly from one-time House Minority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro.

“Maybe folks don’t want to hear, but we have timing that is running out,” Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) told SiriusXM’s Mornings with Zerlina on Wednesday. “We have a few months to do a monumental task. That is not cheap, that is not easy, which means that right now, if our president decides that this is not the pathway forward for him, then it means that we are going to have to move very quickly. There’s not going to be time for, you know, a primary, right? That time has passed, right?”

“The vice president is the obvious choice because she’s sitting right there, as somebody who has been in the White House,” she added. “As somebody who already has the name recognition, who’s already out on the trail. But irrespective of how you feel about, you know, Vice President Harris, which I think that as every other politician, everybody has feelings about these folks, but the reality is, the optics of pushing aside a black woman is — they’re not good.”

Harris does have Democratic detractors, including Dmitri Mehlhorn, an adviser to LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman, who said during an American Bridge 21st Century contributor call on Tuesday that Harris “is more threatening to those swing voters than a dead Joe Biden or a comatose Joe Biden,” according to Semafor.

Aside from Republicans’ Biden attacks, Harris could also be criticized for her vice presidency, with her policy portfolio including gun control and a much-panned assignment to address the “root causes of immigration.”

Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Political Future, dismissed Republican scrutiny of Harris as “ridiculous,” “ludicrous,” and “dumb.”

“The Trump campaign obviously read the CNN poll,” Shrum, author of the late Ted Kennedy’s 1980 concession speech to eventual President Jimmy Carter, told the Washington Examiner.

A post-debate CNN-SSRS poll published on Tuesday found Harris is 2 percentage points behind Trump, compared to Biden, who is 6 points behind his predecessor. An Ipsos-Reuters poll published on the same day found Biden was even with Trump and Harris was 1 point behind the former president. A separate YouGov-Yahoo News poll from Tuesday found both Biden and Harris were 2 points behind Trump.

“Only the president can decide this issue, but they fear that there’s a possibility they’ll be running against her, so they’re looking for attacks,” Shrum said. “I think this is an extraordinarily weak attack. They can throw it out there. I don’t think it’d have any impact on voters deciding if she were there, if she were the nominee, whether or not they would have confidence in electing her.” 

“I don’t think people, voters, are going to sit there and say, ‘Well, she was defending the president, so I can’t vote for her,’” he added. “I think it was Nancy Pelosi [who] said that this is a legitimate discussion, but at the end of that discussion, the decision is Joe Biden’s. … I don’t think that we’re in a situation where Biden could not win. He just has to make the decision of whether he wants to go forward.”

Another California Democrat, Bob Mulholland, a West Coast campaign adviser, also compared the Republican feedback of Harris with that of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley during the GOP primary.

“Vice President Kamala Harris has been a prosecutor, a U.S. senator, and now a vice president. Very qualified for any job,” Mulholland told the Washington Examiner.

Paul Henderson, a legal analyst and former chief of administration to Harris when she was San Francisco‘s district attorney, underscored how the vice president conceded the debate, during which Biden appeared to lose his train of thought and repeatedly stood with his mouth agape, “wasn’t Biden’s finest hour,” adding “the outcome of the election cannot be determined by one day in June.”

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“There is no cover-up related to age, and quite frankly, it’s a red herring to the real issues for the election,” Henderson told the Washington Examiner. “I think the party decision for leadership needs to be made [on] the [positions] of the party leaders and not their performance.”

“As for Kamala’s role as a possible replacement, again there is no debate,” he continued. “She is the vice president of the United States, and her role as the presumptive replacement for Biden shouldn’t even be a real question. … For now, the decision is clear that Biden will be the sitting president fighting for reelection and Kamala will serve as his vice president leading up to November. If that changes, the leadership role won’t be a free-for-all but instead an intended elevation of Kamala Harris.”