The New York Times reports that Vice President Kamala Harris’s advocacy for far-left policies on the 2019 campaign trail could imperil her 2024 bid for the Oval Office.
Just days into her candidacy — after President Joe Biden was reportedly forced out as the presumptive Democrat nominee amid a behind-the-scenes pressure campaign from top Democrats, donors, and Hollywood elites — Republicans have shown they are ready for Harris’s candidacy.
As Times reporter Reid Epstein noted Monday, several videos and policy visions that Harris, who has been an elected official since 2004, espoused in her last bid for the presidency have already come back to “haunt” her.
For example, the Pro-Trump Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. has wasted no time hammering Harris. Shortly after Biden bowed out of the race on July 21, the group put out an ad highlighting that Harris shares Biden’s legacy as his vice president.
It also unleashed an ad going through her record, exposing her as “dangerously liberal.”
More ads are in the works with tens of millions of dollars in airtime booked through Labor Day in swing states.
Pennsylvania Republican Dave McCormick’s Senate campaign released an ad on Tuesday exposing Harris’s record and viewpoints while tying her to his opponent, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA).
The video recounts her view that illegal immigration should be decriminalized while also underscoring her vision to ban fracking, among many other far-left stances she has held. Her campaign said that she had about-faced this issue on Friday and that she is not for a fracking ban, the Hill reported.
GOP strategist Brad Todd, who is working with the Pennsylvania Republican’s campaign, told the Times that the Harris “archive is deep.”
“We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that,” Todd emphasized.
As the Times notes, Harris did not leave a shortage of material for Republicans during her White House bid in the 2020 cycle:
She said then that she opposed fracking; would “think about” abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency; called the idea of adding more police officers “wrongheaded thinking”; entertained the idea of allowing felons to vote; said she supported a “mandatory buyback program” for some guns; and called for the elimination of private health insurance.
A central part of the left’s effort to broaden Harris’s appeal to swing voters includes embracing her record as a prosecutor to brand her as a law and order Demcroat.
Harris’s 2020 campaign screeched to a halt before even the Iowa Caucuses amid internal turmoil and a cold relationship with her campaign manager, Juan Rodiguez, as the Times noted at the time. One former Harris aide, Gil Duran, told the Times in 2019, “You can’t run the country if you can’t run your campaign.”
Breitbart News covered a similar angle to Monday’s Times story on July 23, which noted that Harris’s record is coming back to “haunt” House Democrats.
“Kamala Harris allows GOP campaigns to talk to voters with surgical precision about how she would make their lives worse with her dangerous San Francisco liberal policies,” National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Press Secretary Will Reinert told Breitbart News. “Harris’s 2019 primary campaign for president is a Republican ad maker’s dream and a swing-district Democrat’s nightmare.”
Just days later, on Thursday, when CNN’s Manu Raju approached Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA)— chairwoman of the NRCC counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — to ask if it is “a good idea for those vulnerable Democrats to align themselves with Kamala Harris,” she worked to distance her colleagues from the vice president.
“Our races have all been local races. They’re about our candidates and the strength of our candidates,” she said.
“You don’t think this will be nationalized?” Raju followed up.
“I think every — on these congressional races, district by district, this is going to be about the candidates we have and how they’re standing up for their communities,” DelBene responded.
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