Vice President Kamala Harris is facing a suspected, coordinated smear campaign in Florida on Spanish-language radio, Politico reports. The attacks appear to be another Republican twofer:
Democratic veterans in the state are unnerved by the ferocity and speed of the attacks, which have come from callers and guests on local radio programs in recent weeks. They suspect the participants are part of a larger, astroturf effort to diminish Harris’ standing among key Latino constituencies in a region where Republicans have notched sharp gains. Even more worrying for these Democrats has been the lack of pushback from their party.
Suggesting what? That Democrats as a national party have nothing else on their plates at the moment?
‘Oh God, they got a phone bank’
Misogynists gonna misogynize. But Miami-based Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi noticed the calls to Spanish-language radio seemed to have a script. Harris is ill-prepared. Harris is ineffective. Harris being mixed Jamaican-Indian means she will prioritze Blacks over Latinos:
Amandi said he changed the channel to another station and heard another caller “talking about Kamala Harris, and they [said] the same thing. ‘This is the woman who’s done nothing.’ It was a different person than was on the other [station]. And I was like, ‘Oh God, they got a phone bank.’”
Politico assigned someone to the case. A review of webcasts found that while critiques of Biden were more numerous, attacks on Harris shared the same themes and phrases on more than one Miami-based Spanish-language station.
Still, Roberto Rodríguez Tejera, a morning radio host who has been working in Miami media for three decades, said in a phone interview that he too has noticed the trend in calls about Harris on his own morning show. He came to the same conclusion as Amandi that they likely are coordinated. He identified no suspects but speculated that Republicans are behind them.
“It’s not like you get 10 calls every day. It’s not like that. You get a couple of calls here, a couple of calls there,” Rodriguez said. “That’s how the phone banks begin that [have] worked,” he added, pointing to the way political operatives over the years have directed specific messages through callers on the radio programs. “But it’s a trend that you see that is growing by the day; is growing by the week.”
A spokesperson for the Republican Party of Florida did not respond to a request for comment.
Make her look like a demon
If you don’t define yourself first, your enemies will do it for you. These attacks appear to be an early effort to damage Harris should President Joe Biden run for reelection.
“They’re starting early. ‘We must begin to attack her now and make her look like a demon.’ And the problem with that is that the Democratic Party doesn’t realize that this narrative is being born in Miami-Dade County, and it will spread to other Hispanics across the U.S,” said Sasha Tirador, a Democratic operative in Florida.
Tirador said if the party doesn’t start to knock down the narrative as it swells, it’s going to be nearly impossible to “convince all these elderly folks and your typical Hispanics that just listen to AM radio that what they’ve been listening to that ‘Kamala is bad’ is not true in three months, which is what Democrats like to do. They like to swoop in at the last moment and campaign, and that’s why it doesn’t work.”
That this tactic has a history among both major parties is an open secret, says Emiliano Antunez, a Florida-based political operative.
Politico reports that the Democratic National Committee is tracking “misinformation and propaganda targeting Hispanic and Latino communities” and is urging social media platforms to take down misinformation.
But it is also true that Democrats tend to start from behind when they do start to focus their campaign efforts, and often too late to make up lost ground.
Grassroots activists complained in a Zoom presentation I saw last week that as soon as a state tilts red, the national Democratic Party tends to pull back and focus its efforts and funding elsewhere. This has been true historically where Democrats cede rural areas to Republicans who then use strength in those areas to contest control of state legislatures. Gerrymandering and noxious, revanchist legislation follow as the night the day.
And what do Republicans do when they lose ground? Say it with me: They double down.
Everywhere.
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