David’s view
Kamala Harris got her first standing ovation at The Met on Thursday when she walked onstage. She got her second when she described why she needed to tell the true story of the 2024 campaign.
“It was the closest election in the 21st century,” Harris said, getting out of her chair and pointing at the mostly-full seats in front of her to underscore how she felt about her loss to Donald Trump: “That was not a mandate. That was not a mandate!”
The Democratic Party has little control over what its candidates say and even less over Harris. And partly for that reason, the GOP doesn’t want to move on from her. Ten months after Harris’ defeat, the party is using tactics and messaging very similar to their 2024 approach against the Democratic women nominated for governor of Virginia and New Jersey.
Democrats have looked at those women, Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger and New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill, as their post-Harris comeback stories almost as soon as Election Night 2024 ended. Both were standouts from the 2018 House blue wave — moms with national security credentials, conquering old Republican suburbs. They even roomed together, an irresistible hook for profile writers.
Republicans have remained unimpressed with both. They saw Harris as too cautious and too evasive, unwilling to challenge her party’s base, and incoherent when pressured. Increasingly, they portray Spanberger and Sherrill the same way.
In Virginia, GOP gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears released ads warning that Spanberger will let boys “share locker rooms with little girls” and “let children change genders without telling their parents,” citing her support for the pro-LGBT Equality Act.
The model was the Trump campaign’s anti-transgender advertising last year, and one set of ads even copied the president’s tagline against Harris: Democrats were for “they/them.” (The American Principles Project is putting more ads with that theme up in both states.)
Spanberger has responded more proactively than Harris did, and the overall political environment is better for her than it was for the former vice president. When asked this week about trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports, however, she gave a 297-word reply.
The nominee emphasized that she wanted to restore an old policy of letting schools and teams make “decisions based on fairness, competitiveness and safety.” Republicans focused strictly on the length of her answer — the Harris “word salad” attack, all over again.
And in New Jersey, during his first televised debate with Sherrill this week, GOP nominee Jack Ciattarelli parried her attacks by asking the audience if they understood what she’d said.
“She still hasn’t answered your question,” Ciattarelli said after Sherrill was unclear on whether she supported a state bill to criminalize “hate speech” directed at political figures.
This GOP strategy is helped by the fact that some Democrats appear to see 2024 as a near-miss, not a reason to rethink everything. It’s helped further by the ease of comparing one pantsuited female candidate with another, and further still by the asymmetry between MAGA Republican campaign tactics and those of anti-MAGA Democrats.
Democrats appeal to the rules, and hope for a backlash if an opponent breaks them. “We’re rules-followers, right?” Harris asked her friendly audience in Philadelphia.
Republicans are not so cautious. For the first time in Sherrill’s five campaigns, a Republican requested her military record, and got it — without the redactions required by law — showing that Sherrill didn’t walk at graduation from the US Naval Academy.
Sherrill’s team denounced the release of the information. VoteVets, the PAC that usually moves quickest on this sort of thing, declared that Ciattarrelli “has no respect for Veterans and no regard for our military.”
Ciattarelli brushed that off and went after the revelation from the records: Sherrill, by her own tell, failed to turn in classmates who were part of “the largest cheating and honor code scandal in the history of the United States Navy.”
That might not work for Ciattarelli. While plenty of Trump allies circulated negative reports and rumors about Harris’ personal life on social media during the campaign, the president himself never went there that literally.
But Democrats have not adjusted many of their strategies or stances since their loss last year. Aside from Gaza, a topic that protesters brought up at Harris’ New York stop (but not Philadelphia), its base is urging against any big change, whether to the left or right.
That makes it strikingly easy for Republicans to try to portray more of their opponents as the second coming of Harris.
Notable
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In the New York Post, Republican strategists say they’re branding Sherrill as the “Kamala Harris of New Jersey,” arguing that both are “incapable of answering basic questions and seem to have a penchant for putting their foot in their mouth.”
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In the Advocate, Christopher Wiggins writes about how confidently Virginia Republicans are bringing back the issues that most hurt Harris. “Republicans are returning to Donald Trump’s 2024 playbook.”
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In Politico, Alex Bronzini-Vender covers the first stop of Harris’s “alternate reality” book tour. “Harris, to this crowd, was not only a politician but a figure of almost mythic proportions — a paragon of success professionally and personally.”
