When Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris to become the Democratic nominee, Donald Trump confidently claimed she’d be even easier to defeat in November than Biden would have been.
In reality, the vice president’s arrival in the race on a tidal wave of support from her colleagues and party donors creates a major headache for the Republican’s campaign, which, until Sunday, had been enjoying mutinous disarray among its Democratic opponents.
Now, with Harris already claiming to have enough support to become her party’s nominee, reports suggest the Trump campaign fears her ability to unleash her party in the race. “I don’t think Joe Biden has a ton of advantages,” senior Trump campaign adviser Susie Wiles told Atlantic journalist Tim Alberta in March, Alberta reported Sunday. “But I do think Democrats do.”
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Wiles and fellow Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita would later explain they believed the Democrats would ordinarily have, as Alberta puts it, “structural superiority” in a race like the 2024 presidential election thanks to the party’s organization, financing, and “record of support from the low-propensity voters who turn out every four years in presidential contests.” But they viewed the party as being held back by Biden.
With Harris now likely the president’s replacement at the top of the ticket, that impediment to unleashing the party’s advantages has been removed, the thinking goes. As one Trump official told Puck, the campaign had been counting on running against “a corpse” but is now faced with tackling a candidate backed by high levels of Democratic enthusiasm and already record-breaking fundraising.
With just over 100 days until the election, the Trump team finds itself with a campaign machine built specifically to destroy an 81-year-old Biden now needing to be retooled to take out a different candidate who is not similarly burdened by widespread concerns about her age.
Nevertheless, Trump and his campaign have wasted no time in attempting to tear Harris down, in part with efforts to link her to the former president.
“Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our nation than Joe Biden,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement Sunday. “Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two.”
