President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race for the White House may have been a shock, but it should not have come as a surprise. For weeks, Democrats openly panicked about a landslide loss in November if the party kept an 81-year-old at the top of the ticket.
Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, sat back and watched the damaging spectacle unfold. What they did not do is plan for it to end.
As The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta reported earlier this month, Republican operatives were convinced that Trump had fatally wounded Biden’s campaign at their June 27 debate. But they also thought — and hoped and prayed — that Biden would stubbornly refuse to accept the political reality, hold on to the Democratic nomination and lead his party to disaster.
What Republicans did not do is any real planning for an alternative. Trump chose a running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, who appeals more to hard-right ideologues and donors like Peter Thiel than female swing voters in the suburbs; it was a pick that reflected confidence, if not hubris. Then, at the Republican National Convention last week, the GOP spent days going on about how their opponent was old, frail and weak, all but ignoring the 59-year-old vice president, former prosecutor and heir apparent, Kamala Harris.
“When convention speakers reached out to the GOP nominee’s campaign, gauging whether to hedge their speeches with attacks on Harris,” Alberta noted in an update this week, “they were told to keep the focus on Biden.”
That the Trump campaign and its media affiliates were inexplicably blindsided is apparent in their insta-response to Harris’ ascendance. Opposition research from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, provided to reporters on Monday, includes bullet points that try to paint Harris as “weird,” the evidence including that she laughs at “inappropriate” times and likes Venn diagrams. There are the usual lines of attack — conflating Harris’ diplomacy in Central America with her being a “border czar” — but it’s largely a cut-and-paste job.
It’s not that the NRSC isn’t bringing it’s best, but that this is the best the GOP can do. Republicans can also do much worse.
“One hundred percent, she was a DEI hire,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said Monday, claiming the former San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, and U.S. senator lacked the qualifications to even be a vice president (Vance, by contrast, has written one (1) book and been a senator for less than two years). Biden, he said, only picked Harris because she is of Black and Indian heritage.
“What about — what about white females?” Burchett asked, normally and not sounding a little suspect and actually kind of weird.
Playing to white racial anxiety, using the preferred euphemism of the day (DEI standing for diversity, equality and inclusion, now used as a stand-in for “affirmative action” and far worse), is not Republicans’ only play. There is also that old favorite, misogyny; combine it with racist dog whistles and you have your new 2024 talking points.
Matt Walsh, a self-styled "fascist" who watches Disney cartoons and gets offended for a living, asserted that Harris had only got to where she is by sleeping with powerful men and “begging for hand outs.”
Megyn Kelly, a former cable news personality who was fired by NBC for defending white racists donning “blackface,” likewise ignored Harris winning multiple contested elections in the country’s most powerful state and declared that the sitting vice president was an “unqualified political aspirant” who had chosen to “sleep her way into and upwards in California politics.”
On Fox News, Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conway managed to avoid calling Harris “colored” — what passes for a win in MAGA circles, and a test failed by former Trump advisor Seb Gorka — but her attacks were only marginally more subtle. Harris, Conway said, “doesn’t work hard” and “she does not speak well" (Trump appears to believe differently and is trying to back out of his scheduled debate with her).
Speaking Tuesday, former Republican lawmaker Joe Scarborough lamented his old party’s decline, arguing that the “DEI” and related attacks make the GOP looks like “total idiots,” alienating voters who are less online and steeped in far-right grievances. They might not completely understand what Republicans are going on about, but “they know it is probably racist.”
Since Harris locked up the Democratic nomination, the question for Republicans has been: "Can you be normal about a woman of color?" The answer so far is a resounding “afraid not.”
