Wake up with the Washington Examiner: GOP has to handle Harris and Democrats fend off democracy questions

Coping with Kamala

Republicans wanted to push President Joe Biden out of the White House, but not quite like this. With the president’s historic decision to take himself out of contention for a second term and Vice President Kamala Harris hurtling toward the nomination, there is a mad dash by everyone to set the terms of the new fight. 

Most of the level-setting is being done by Republicans, who had counted on hammering Biden and Democrats on the president’s age and mental fitness. Policy questions could get tacked on as voters express grave concerns about the economy, inflation, and illegal immigration, but even those problems have been trending positively. 

And Harris hasn’t taken her time going on offense herself to counter the messaging coming from Republicans. As White House Reporter Naomi Lim writes this morning, the vice president and presumptive nominee is leaning into her record as a prosecutor and trying to shake off the foibles that sunk her campaign for the Oval Office in 2020. 

“Although some members of the public have been familiar with her since her unsuccessful 2020 Democratic primary campaign or know about her shaky start to her vice presidency, Harris and her aides are looking to steady her and the Democratic Party after Biden upended this year’s election by announcing last weekend he was stepping down as their nominee,” Naomi writes.

“Almost 100 days before this November’s election, should Harris, 59, secure the Democratic nomination, it could change the dynamics of the contest against former President Donald Trump because it creates opportunities for Democrats to reconnect with the party’s base, particularly young and minority voters who have become disenchanted with Biden due to his age and foreign policy.” 

Harris has a fine line to walk as she hits the trail to talk about the successes of the Biden-Harris administration. For every win she pitches to voters, Republicans are pointing to, and spending the money to highlight, her fingerprints all over the lowest points of the last three and a half years. 

Congressional Reporter Rachel Schilke caught up with several House members on Monday night who torched Harris’s record on securing the southern border. Possibly her largest vulnerability, Harris was made the “border czar” in 2021 but danced around traveling to the porous zone. She said she was focused on addressing the “root causes” of illegal immigration to the United States, but as millions of immigrants poured in the talk from both her and Biden sounded hollow to border communities that were worried about increases in crime or were simply stretched financially to handle the influx. 

“She was handpicked by President Biden to be the border czar and she has abdicated that responsibility for the last three and a half years,” Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK) told Rachel. “And as such, we’ve had anywhere from 9 [million] to 11 million people illegally crossing the United States, and she asked to be held responsible for that.”

Republicans are going to keep the pressure on Harris for her actions at the southern border as well as her response, or lack thereof, to Biden’s decline since they entered the White House. Given her close proximity to the president, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) told the Washington Examiner Harris should have known and done something about her boss’s downward spiral. 

“I think Kamala Harris is front and center in that,” Scalise told us. “She’s been closer to President Biden than anybody. And it does beg the question, when did Kamala Harris start recognizing the president’s cognitive decline, and why didn’t she do something about it?”

Despite the weights slung around her neck to begin with, Harris has energized Democrats and could shake those off with strong performances on the campaign trail and in a possible debate with Trump. It’s not clear whether the invitation to a second debate in September is still on the books now that the top of the card has shifted. Trump said the next event should happen at a different venue, suggesting a shifting of the tides that could wash the contest away completely. 

In the meantime, Harris is using the huge fundraising haul she experienced in the first 24 hours of her campaign to get out ahead of and counter any messaging Republicans are trying to use to back her into a corner. 

Click here to read the full report from Naomi on how Harris is trying to remake herself as a top-of-the-ticket candidate.

Democrats and democracy

The mad dash to replace Biden at the top of the ticket has left Democrats exposed to new charges of rigging an election to force a candidate on voters they didn’t choose. Republicans have mostly moved on from the spurious 2020 “rigged election” claims, but they are renewing the argument to complain about the breakneck speed at which Harris has been anointed Biden’s successor. 

There hasn’t been a final word on who the Democratic nominee is going to be. Biden himself hadn’t been named. But an apparent attempt to avoid a brokered convention by reportedly moving forward with a virtual roll call vote that would cement Harris as the party’s new standard bearer weeks before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month is rankling Republicans tiring of being told they are the ones who are threatening democracy. 

“Now the Democrats are rigging their own elections,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said during an appearance on Fox on Sunday. “It looks like, dare we say it, an insurrection. It’s hysterically funny, if not for the fact that Democrats have persecuted good Americans, half of the country and more — for the last three years doing exactly what they are doing now. This is a joke.”

Senate Reporter Samantha-Jo Roth ran through the recent history of Democrats and the DNC struggling to counter the claims the party’s actions have run counter to its stated goals. 

“The DNC has long been accused of interfering in elections by party insiders. In 2017, a revelation from former DNC interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile that the DNC had engineered the party’s primary election system in favor of then-candidate Hillary Clinton caused controversy within the party. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and then-President Donald Trump argued it proved the DNC ‘rigged’ the primary process against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who was running as a Democrat for the presidential nomination,” Samantha-Jo writes.

“The previous criticism brings the clamoring for a blitz primary and even calls for an open convention from some, such as vulnerable red-state Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), back into focus. However, many Democrats seem more intent now to cut out the drama before the convention and settle on Biden’s chosen successor, Harris.”

There isn’t a universal Democratic desire to bless the transfer of power at the top of the party from Biden to Harris without some sort of contest. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), who briefly flirted with the idea of re-registering as a Democrat so he could challenge Harris himself, told CBS on Monday he would prefer to see a primary contest of some sort. Throwing Harris into the challenge of facing down contenders would make her stronger, he said, and would give the party a chance to see what its deep bench is made of. 

Pro-Democratic bench rather than anti-Harris sentiments were common among people Samantha-Jo talked to. 

“I think if [Harris] was out on the campaign trail, trying to earn the votes of us delegates, that could help her come out even stronger,” David Seaton-Lorenz, a delegate from Massachusetts told her. “There is so much talent in the party. We owe it to ourselves to see what’s out there.”

Harris taking over where Biden left off has included some voting. Harris boosters point out that every vote for Biden in primary contests was a vote for the Biden-Harris ticket. And as of Monday evening, it appeared Harris had secured a large enough majority of the delegates to seal the nomination for herself. 

Click here to read more about the criticisms Democrats and the DNC are facing.

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