WASHINGTON—The intensified focus on Vice President Kamala Harris as President Biden faces continued calls to withdraw from the race for the White House has made her even more of a target on the right, at times in racist and sexist ways.
Such attacks on Harris—the first female and first Black vice president, as well as the first of Indian descent—aren’t new. But Republicans have focused more on her as Democrats have weighed whether she should replace Biden at the top of the party’s ticket, offering a glimpse of the type of attacks Harris would have to contend with if she were the Democratic nominee.
Sebastian Gorka, a former aide to Donald Trump, recently referred to the vice president as “colored” and a “DEI hire.” The former president’s campaign referred to Harris as “Low IQ Kamala” on social media. Some of the former president’s supporters have for years donned shirts, carried signs or sported “Joe And The Hoe Gotta Go” bumper stickers.
Before she became vice president in 2021, Harris had a lengthy career in public service, elected as California’s attorney general in 2010 and then serving as a U.S. senator from that state beginning in 2017. She earned a reputation for her withering interrogations of Trump administration officials while serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The recent attacks, which Democrats and some Republicans say stand to alienate voters, largely stem from the far right. Some conservatives have used the phrase “DEI hire” in a derogatory manner when talking about Black and brown people, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that they say are being pushed by progressives and Democrats. It is an attack several have directed at Harris in recent days.
“She’s a DEI hire, right? She’s a woman. She’s colored, therefore she’s got to be good,” Gorka said during a segment on the conservative news channel Newsmax. He was responding to a question on whether donors believed Harris would fare better than Biden in such battleground states as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas) used similar language in a Fox Business segment this past Monday, in which he said Democrats have “got to choose between a mentally incompetent president and a DEI vice president.”
Asked about subsequent criticism of his remarks, Roy referred to comments from Biden in 2019 that he would prefer a woman or person of color as his running mate. Biden “literally made clear he was picking a female / minority… which is different than saying he’s picking the best regardless of sex or color,” Roy told The Wall Street Journal by text.
A recent New York Post column by the commentator Charlie Gasparino was widely criticized for saying “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president.” The paper’s editorial board doubled down on the characterization in its own opinion column published Wednesday.
“It’s fair rhetoric in the context of what Harris has done as vice president,” Gasparino said when asked about the column.
A spokesperson for the New York Post didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Post and The Wall Street Journal are both owned by News Corp.
“If you’re getting attacked, it means you matter and you’re scaring someone,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) said of the increased Republican focus on Harris. “I just think that that’s inevitable, but it’s also one of the reasons that we should be cautious of just putting someone new in the current media landscape. It is a risk, and that’s why I think the president is clearly running again.”
Biden, 81, has insisted he will stay in the race. Harris, 59, has been one of Biden’s most forceful defenders in public and private since Biden’s halting debate performance in late June. Harris has said she is committed to being Biden’s running mate.
“I think it’s gross, I think it’s disturbing, and it’s not OK,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in early July when asked about how Trump and Republicans have been intensifying their criticism of Harris.
It appears that the bulk of the race- or gender-related attacks against Harris have come from people not directly involved or affiliated with Trump or his team. Still, the former president and his campaign have stepped up their focus on Harris, while occasionally lobbing personal insults her way.
Trump took aim at Harris at a rally at one of his Florida golf clubs on Tuesday, suggesting that Democrats would have booted Biden from office years ago if he had picked “someone even halfway competent” as his vice president. He repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s first name as Cuh-MAH-la in public even though a recently leaked video of Trump on his golf cart shows the former president pronouncing it correctly, as Comma-la.
Some Democrats said Trump’s mispronunciation of Harris’s name, intentional or not, made the vice president sound more foreign—or at a minimum was a sign of disrespect.
In the past, Trump highlighted former President Barack Obama’s full name with an emphasis on his middle name, Hussein. Trump has pushed conspiracy theories that the nation’s first Black president wasn’t born in the U.S.
“I think we all knew a bully in school who did that to the kid who didn’t have a Timmy-Julie-Emily name,” said Jess McIntosh, a Democratic strategist and former communications adviser to Hillary Clinton. “Republicans are attacking Harris with these tired racist tropes because they truly have no idea how to take on a woman who is smarter and tougher than their wannabe strongman Trump.”
The former president has also referred to a Republican primary opponent, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, by her first name, Nimarata. He has amplified questions regarding Haley’s eligibility to run for president, even though she was born in the U.S. and is an American citizen, and nicknamed her “birdbrain.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman, Caroline Sunshine, didn’t directly address why the former president was mispronouncing Harris’s name or criticism surrounding the tenor of the attacks on the vice president. “No one has lied about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and supported his disastrous policies over the past four years more than Cackling Co-Pilot Kamala Harris,” she said.
Trump recently named Harris as his “potentially new Democrat Challenger” in a post on Truth Social that mentioned her run for president and her dating history.
“She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician!” Trump wrote. “Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.”
Harris dated the former San Francisco mayor in the 1990s. Harris’s backers have argued that scrutiny surrounding their relationship is sexist.
Brian Fallon, a Harris spokesman, said in a statement: “Trump and his friends are lying about the Vice President because she has been prosecuting the case against him on the biggest issues in this race, and his potshots will only further turn off key voters he needs to win.”
Alex Conant, a Republican strategist, said Trump’s attacks have always been highly personal and frequently crossed the line. “He says things that no other politician can get away with,” he said, but added that some of the attacks carry risks given how tight the election could be. “The ultimate deciders are going to be suburban women—the exact voters that are most likely to be turned off by sexist attacks and name-calling,” he said.
While a recent Wall Street Journal poll didn’t test whether other Democrats would present a stronger challenge to Trump than Biden has so far, it found that Harris’s approval ratings were roughly in line with views of Biden. Some 35% viewed Harris favorably and 58% unfavorably in the survey, which was conducted after the debate between Biden and Trump.
The topic of whether Biden should continue his campaign—and how Harris would fare against Trump if the president exited the race—was inescapable this past week at the annual Netroots Nation conference, an annual gathering of progressives in Baltimore.
Wadia Gardiner, a volunteer for antipoverty programs in Philadelphia who attended the conference, said she feared Republicans would successfully appeal to a fraction of voters who are uncomfortable with the idea of a woman of color serving as president.
“What these people are doing is nothing new. Check your history books,” Gardiner said, while adding her view that Harris hadn’t been given sufficient opportunity by the Biden administration to distinguish herself. “She was a prosecutor for the state of California. She’s no token.”
Natalie Andrews contributed to this article.
Write to Sabrina Siddiqui at sabrina.siddiqui@wsj.com
