We’re 100 days out from the general election, and if you think Kamala Harris’ candidacy as the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee is unprecedented, wait until you see the unprecedentedly vicious and ugly attacks against her.
Of course, former President Donald Trump’s campaigns are always nasty work; that’s to be expected from a loud-mouthed, racist, sexist, petty, congenital liar of a candidate. But Trump has always singled out Black women for his most denigrating abuse.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of misogynoir, which describes the coupled misogyny and racism thrown at Black women, please familiarize yourself, stat, because this election season will be lousy with it.
The terms ‘militant,’ ‘radical,’ ‘California socialist’ and ‘Marxist’ will be in heavy rotation.
Now that the felonious ex-president must face off against Harris — a biracial Black woman and erstwhile prosecutor nearly 20 years his junior — we’re already seeing disgusting assaults on the vice president’s character that aren’t remotely based in fact.
Remember those vile T-shirts, popular with Trump’s supporters earlier in the campaign, that read, “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go”? Expect even more hypersexualization toward Harris by Trump, his surrogates and his MAGA followers. They’re alleging Harris “slept her way to the top” — as Megyn Kelly claimed — referencing her relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who had been separated from his wife for over a decade when he and Harris dated 30 years ago.
Those falsehoods are also being paired with claims that Harris is a “DEI hire,” a repurposing of “diversity, equity and inclusion” favored by conservatives who are too media-savvy to use overt slurs.
Before becoming multiple firsts as vice president and in Congress, Harris was elected the first woman, first African American and first South Asian attorney general in California history, and served as San Francisco’s first woman and nonwhite district attorney. Her track record easily beats the allegations, but when she proves her rhetorical and intellectual competence against Trump, which will be fun to watch, they’ll try to portray her as a “typical angry Black lady.” These bad-faith allegations will be lodged by people who believe Blackness and womanness, regardless of resume, are inherent markers of unfitness.
The terms “militant,” “radical,” “California socialist” and “Marxist” will be in heavy rotation, and Trump’s team will claim Harris, as president, will defund every police department and encourage mass migration to let undocumented immigrants vote in elections for Democrats.
Just this week, in fact, Trump advisers boasted to The Bulwark of their strategic plan to “Willie Horton” Harris, a reference to racist campaign ads during the 1988 presidential campaign appealing to white panic over perceptions of Black criminality, which portrayed then-Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis as lenient on violent offenders.
That messaging will go hand in hand with fearmongering about immigration, with the GOP repeatedly claiming Harris failed as the Biden administration’s “border czar” — a title she never held, which the GOP made up and a complicit media helped proliferate.
Numerous Republicans have filed impeachment articles against Harris since she became the presumptive nominee, and they’ll continue in this vein because their base loves a good show, however performative. Their own party thwarted a border security bill early this year because Trump wanted to run on immigration chaos. In any case, border crossings have fallen hugely in recent months, and currently stand near where they were in the final months under Trump’s watch.
The Republican Party’s boundless hypocrisy means they’ll contradict themselves at every turn. The same partisans who wanted you to believe Harris slept her way to the top of a major-party ticket will also portray her as a childless, careerist feminazi whose hatred for America’s family model is surpassed only by her passion for funding post-birth abortions.
Regardless of how she handles the Israel-Hamas war, some of the same Republicans known to dabble in antisemitism will claim Harris — the first Biden administration official to call for a cease-fire, but also a consistent defender of Israel’s “right to defend itself” — is stridently anti-Jewish.
While using a super-racist nickname like, say, “Kamala X,” they’ll insist her Jamaican and Indian immigrant parentage makes her neither Black nor American — a reconfiguring of the racist “birtherism” directed at President Barack Obama. (Misogynoir being what it is, they may also falsely suggest, as they do with former first lady Michelle Obama, that she isn’t really a woman.)
She’ll be cast as lax on crime, but also labeled “Kamala the cop,” and since they think Black people are gullible, criminal morons, Trump will trot out rappers while surrogates celebrate his felonies as proof he’s Blacker than Harris. Vivek Ramaswamy and every Black Republican will obligingly repeat these lines to defang any racism accusations.
But the most insidious claim of all will be that Harris cannot win. Not only will this messaging come from Trump and Co., but also from lots of other sources. Paid disinformation agents in Russia, which targeted Black voters most intensely in 2016. Red-pilled American trolls clad in digital blackface.
And it’ll come from mainstream reporters concern-trolling about her campaign’s divisiveness, or a New York Times article where rural diner patrons are polled on the “scariest” things about Kamala Harris. The result will be a lot of people saying they want to vote for Harris, but they worry that no one else will.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of misogynoir, which describes the coupled misogyny and racism thrown at Black women, please familiarize yourself, stat, because this election season will be lousy with it.
But the stats are currently on Harris’ side.
In the 48 hours after Harris became the Dems’ presidential nominee, ActBlue raised $81 million, one of its highest one-day tallies in history. Politico reported that during the first 48 hours of her candidacy, Vote.org saw a 700% spike in voter registrations, which outpaces the increase that resulted from a Taylor Swift social media post. Calls organized for Black women, South Asian women, white women, Latinas, Black men and Black LGBTQ men have raised funds and helped galvanize those communities. Harris’ support among Black and Hispanic voters has bested that of Biden’s, by 8% and 6%, respectively. Polls can be fickle things, but the first Reuters/Ipsos poll since Harris became the candidate has her leading Trump, 44% to 42%. The point is, she can absolutely win.
Over the next 100 days, we’re going to see horrifying levels of racism and sexism — misogynoir, that is — and it will be terrifyingly mainstream. But don’t give up hope. Vice President Harris has what it takes to beat back those representing the worst instincts of America. She just needs our votes to make it happen.