For the first time in the presidential campaign, Donald Trump is starting to fall behind — Kamala Harris has raised more money than the vice president and is trailing the vice president in some key states.
The specific attacks on President Joe Biden they had to throw away everything, from his age to his family to his series of missteps and blunders.
Now, Trump’s campaign advisers are busy devising a powerful messaging strategy with a familiar theme: attacking Harris as the most extreme caricature of a liberal they can think of.
And for at least one day, the former president stuck to the script.
“You know, nobody knew how far left she was, but he’s a smarter version of her, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said on Fox & Friends on Wednesday, criticizing Harris’ pick for Minnesota governor. Tim Walz as her running mate. “He’s probably about the same as Bernie Sanders. He probably is more so than Bernie Sanders.”
Trump added: “This is a ticket that wants this country to become communist immediately, or sooner rather than later.”
Trump advisers planned to label whoever Harris chose as her vice presidential nominee as extreme, according to a campaign adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. In the final days of the Harris selection process, the Trump campaign focused on three finalists: Walz, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.
The attacks underscore a central calculation of the Trump campaign: By portraying Harris as a non-mainstream liberal, it can dampen her appeal to the swing voters in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt states who will determine the outcome of the election. And in the way the campaign has painted Harris and Walz — a former football coach and National Guard member from middle America — as extremists, the GOP’s commitment to the “liberal” mantra has rarely been clearer.
“The Harris-Walz ticket is the most radical in history,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an informal adviser to Trump, told POLITICO. “We are winning a campaign that is defined by an issue and focused on ideology by a remarkable margin.”
Whether Trump can keep that message remains to be seen. If he does, it would be a departure from his approach to the race, since Harris replaced Biden as his opponent. In recent days, Trump has questioned Harris’s black identity, smeared her as “low IQ” and picked a fight with Brian Kemp, the popular governor of a swing state, during a visit to Georgia.
But Trump’s campaign is doing everything it can to make the “liberal” moniker stick.
After selecting Walz on Tuesday, the Trump campaign cast Harris as a “liberal from San Francisco” and Walz as a “West Coast wannabe.” The next day, the pro-Trump MAGA Inc. super PAC released a TV ad calling Harris “dangerously liberal.”
Trump called Harris and Walz “the most radical left-wing duo in American history” on Truth Social, while his own running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, applied the same criticism to his Democratic counterpart.
“This decision to select Tim Walz is yet another sign that she doesn’t care what the American people think,” Vance said Tuesday night on Fox News’ “Hannity.” “She’s only doing this to please the far-left radicals within her own party.”
Republicans are amplifying the message.
Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator, called Walz a “Marxist Don Rickles.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Walz an “Ilhan Omar-style Democrat,” referring to the liberal Minnesota congressman. And at a POLITICO Live event in New York on Wednesday, Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) said Harris had “doubled down on going for an ultra-liberal choice.”
Harris has taken progressive positions on a number of key issues, including the Green New Deal. But she has also frustrated progressive members of her party, including over her record as a prosecutor and her shift away from Medicare for All midway through her 2019 presidential primary campaign.
Walz, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological shift since winning a congressional seat in 2006. He has embraced a number of socially liberal policies, though he generally leaned more toward bipartisan and centrist legislation when he represented a red district in Congress. But after trading in his congressional pin for a key to the governor’s mansion in Minnesota, he began to push for more progressive policies in the state.
His more recent moves have been exactly what Republicans have been leaning on, including an executive order he issued that made Minnesota the first state to protect access to gender-affirming care. Republicans have also criticized him for his military record and for his response to protests in Minneapolis following the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
But overall, it’s mostly the “liberal” label that the Trump campaign is trying to stick on the Harris-Walz candidates.
“They cannot be absolved of their past liberal positions that they are desperately trying to run away from,” said Republican strategist Matt Gorman, who worked for the presidential campaign of Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.
It is unclear how effectively and consistently Trump will be able to prosecute this case.
For the attack to succeed, Gorman said, “it takes discipline and the ability to consistently deliver a message.”
Jeff Coltin contributed to this report.
