Dan Pfeiffer has some thoughts about how they plan to attack Harris if she does become the nominee:
Despite their hatred of the “Crooked Media” (and Crooked Media), the Republicans follow the news. They know what is happening on our side. They built their entire campaign around beating Joe Biden — using concerns about his age as a proxy to frame the race as strong vs. weak. Thanks to Biden’s debate performance, that strategy worked well. As we stand today, Trump is a heavy favorite to return to the White House. The campaign wasn’t set up to beat Kamala Harris or someone else, so Trump supporters are begging Biden to stay in the race. As the convention continues, more and more Republicans are trying to shoehorn Kamala Harris into their speeches.
Here’s JD Vance on Wednesday night:
We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American companies and American industry. A leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American factories.
Other speakers previewed what I expect to be the top two attacks if Harris becomes the nominee. One, she was in charge of the border and therefore responsible for the chaos that is so prominent in Republican rhetoric. Not to get into technicalities, but she was not specifically responsible for border security; she was in charge of working with countries in the region to stem the flow of migrants. The second attack is classic MAGA conspiracy-mongering — Harris was part of an effort to cover up Biden’s mental infirmities. The former may have some purchase with swing voters; the latter is mostly red meat for the MAGA base, although it could lead to some uncomfortable media encounters.
“Uncomfortable media encounters” is a gentle way of putting it. The media is loaded for bear on that. It’s not just red meat for the base.
And, needless to say, the right will hit hard with misogyny and racism but I think there’s a good chance that they will overplay that hand. The stuff that’s already percolated up from the fever swamps is so ugly it’s likely to backfire in my opinion.
The upside is that Harris is such a contrast to Trump that she makes it easy to differentiate the two candidacies in ways that the battle between the two graybeards doesn’t do. At this point I think that might be helpful and could balance out the downside.
Whatever happens it needs to happen soon. This story is so dominant that it’s drowning out the Trump freakshow and that’s helping him.
The week has been more of a coronation than a convention. Trump and the Republicans are brimming with confidence about his prospects of returning to the White House. A sense of inevitability loomed over the convention and permeated the media coverage, magnified by the near-miss assassination attempt on the former President. His party and even some in the media are treating Trump as a candidate of destiny. But Trump is not inevitable. He is vulnerable.
Yes, he is ahead in the polls today, but he can be beaten. Look at that guy on stage last night. The speech wasn’t good. It didn’t offer a compelling vision for the country. It was low energy, bordering on somnambulant. Trump couldn’t discuss his policy agenda because that would stick a thumb in the eye of most voters. There was no message. Trump lost his fastball.
It’s easy to forget, given the tone and tenor of the press coverage over the last week, but the majority of voters in this country are anti-MAGA. Trump can — and will — be defeated if and only if we do the work to once again turn out the coalition that defeated MAGA in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2022.
Yeah…