In a fascinating profile of Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles this month, the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta laid out just how deeply their strategy depended on having Biden as their opponent.
The race would be “a contrast of strength versus weakness”, Alberta wrote. “Trump … would be cast as the dauntless and forceful alpha, while Biden would be painted as the pitiable old heel … their campaign has been engineered in every way – from the voters they target to the viral memes they create – to defeat Biden.” Wiles said cheerfully: “Joe Biden is a gift.”
Now that gift has been snatched away. “Their campaign was constructed from the ground up in November 2022 to beat one man,” Hugo Lowell said. “And now their principal enemy has disappeared, and they’re trying to pivot very quickly. It’s difficult to articulate just how big a problem this is for them.”
On the other hand, he added: “They’re good at this.”
How the Trump campaign has recalibrated
As it became clear what a disaster last month’s debate had been for Biden, Trump became noticeably less vocal about his opponent’s weaknesses. Meanwhile, the campaign held back advertising that was critical of Biden, the New York Times reported (£).
The campaign started preparing opposition research dossiers on Harris in recent weeks, Hugo reported. So did Maga Inc, a Trump-supporting political action committee run independently of the campaign. A wave of new attack ads against Harris are ready to be released in key states, including an immediate $5m (£3.9m) ad buy from Maga Inc.
They have also tested messages about Harris with voters to see what works – but any such effort is inevitably less robust than the Biden playbook was. “They spent months poll testing, strategising, and then repeating the same lines again and again,” Hugo said. “That messaging – the court cases as a partisan witch-hunt, crooked Joe Biden – is engrained. Everyone knows it.
“They don’t have those pithy messages in the electorate’s mind about Harris. When I talk to them privately, it’s all very broad brush – they will eventually settle on a few, but they haven’t figured it out yet.”
How they will use Biden’s record to attack Harris
The most obvious way to take on Harris is to link her to Biden, in the hope that his unpopularity will rub off on her and she will be unable to plausibly cast herself as a change candidate.
David Urban, a Republican strategist who was an adviser on Trump’s last two campaigns, told the Washington Post that the two were “interchangeable”. “She is complicit in every bad decision he’s made,” he said. That line has been echoed by many other Republicans over the last 36 hours. “They want to hang every perceived policy failure around her neck,” Hugo said.There is likely to be a particular focus on two issues where the Republicans believe voters are disappointed by Biden: immigration and the cost of living.
Biden tasked Harris with tackling irregular immigration at the southern border of the US, asking her to address the root causes of the issue by working to improve economic and security conditions in central America. While that was a bit of a cursed assignment, it allowed Republicans to call her the “border tsar” – inaccurate since her brief was to focus on long-term solutions, but certainly pithy. “That will work just fine,” Hugo said. “But it isn’t nearly as engrained as the messaging about Biden.”
Meanwhile, although many experts say that Biden has presided over an impressive economic revival, Republicans hope that Americans unhappy with inflation and high interest rates will blame Harris as much as her boss.
How they will draw on her own record
Before she was nominated as vice-president by Biden, Harris was senator for California and state attorney general there. Outside her record during the last four years, that should provide some further ammunition for the Trump campaign.
During her 2020 presidential run, Harris came under fire both as being too soft on crime and too reluctant to reform the police. Expect the first angle to feature more prominently in any Trump attack. In 2020, Republicans also used the fact that she been rated by a non-partisan group as having the most liberal voting record in the senate to cast her as extreme.
“I would guess that Harris will have a honeymoon week or two while they go back to the 2020 primary and see what stuck,” Hugo said. “And then they will come back with what they conclude works in a focused way.”
One possible avenue: a programme that allowed first-time drug offenders to get a high school diploma and a job instead of going to prison. “Trump’s rhetoric is about ‘illegal immigrant’ drug mules carrying fentanyl across the border and ‘poisoning’ American cities. That draws together immigration, the border, and crime, and allows you to pin it all to Harris.”
How they will describe her as Biden’s ‘puppet-master’
Another potent line of attack is to argue that Biden’s decision proves that he is incapable of being president – and that Harris of all people should have known it. A Maga Inc ad now running in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania says: “Kamala knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American dream dead.”
Trump’s own campaign has already published ads that claim she always planned to get rid of Biden, showing her laughing as the Biden logo is replaced with her own. And many Trump surrogates have echoed that argument.
Former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, for example, said that Harris “leads the very long line of Democrats who lacked the courage, integrity and love of country” to persuade Biden to stand down.
“They want to cast her as the puppet-master – a palace intrigue coup organiser who covered up Biden’s decline so she could assume the presidency herself,” Hugo said. “But that’s a very complicated message. Is it really what you’re going to tell people in the rust belt?”
How racist and sexist attacks could feature
As the first woman of colour to be nominated for president by either party, it would be unsurprising if Harris became the subject of bigoted attacks on her candidacy.
Trump himself used charged language about Harris in 2020, calling her “nasty” and “disrespectful”; he also gave oxygen to a baseless “birther” conspiracy, claiming that he had heard “she doesn’t meet the requirements … they’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country”. On Saturday, he called her “crazy” and “nuts”, pointing to her laugh as evidence. (Republicans are, tellingly, preoccupied with her laugh, and have sought to paint her as “cackling Kamala”. They also frequently pronounce her name wrong.)
The other term you may hear a lot more of, if recent media talking points are anything to go by: the idea that Harris is a “DEI hire”, and would be the “first DEI president”. By invoking DEI – or diversity, equity, and inclusion – programmes, Republicans imply that she has succeeded as a result of special allowances made because of her race and gender.
Will that become an explicit part of the campaign? “I’m sure Trump will end up going after the DEI thing, but even if he says stuff like this at rallies to the base, it may fall away as a key message,” Hugo said. “The point is – the campaign doesn’t know yet. They’re trying to figure all this out on the fly, and that’s not a place they want to be at all.”
