With President Biden declining to run for reelection and Vice President Harris emerging as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, vulnerable Senate Democrats are scrambling to fend off new Republican attacks on her record.
Biden’s biggest weaknesses have been questions about his age and fitness to be president, but the saving grace for Democrats is that polls show Biden’s biggest problems are limited to himself as a candidate and don’t have a significant impact on lower-ranking Democratic senators.
But now incumbent senators including Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania) and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) are being questioned about some of Harris’ most controversial policy statements, which date back to the 2020 Democratic primary.
Democratic senators worried that a lack of voter enthusiasm for Biden would hurt Democratic turnout in Senate battleground states.
Democrats are unsure whether Ms. Harris, as the nominee, would be able to draw significantly more minority and younger voters to the polls in November than Mr. Biden did, but they are generally optimistic about her effect on energizing the party, pointing out that she raised $81 million in her first 24 hours as a candidate after Mr. Biden dropped out of the race.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) circulated a memo to Senate Republican campaigns on Monday highlighting controversial elements of Harris’ record, from immigration and border policy to “Medicare for All” and opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and fracking.
NRSC Executive Director Jason Seelman wrote in a memo to campaigns that Harris “creates a strong down-ballot opportunity for the Republican Party.”
“To support Kamala Harris is to support her extreme policies, and arguably she poses a greater threat to the Democratic Senate majority than Joe Biden,” he wrote.
Among the Democratic incumbents fighting tough races, Brown, Casey, Rosen and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) have endorsed Harris for the presidential bid.
Tester was the only candidate who had not endorsed Harris as of Monday afternoon.
Tester last week urged Biden not to seek reelection and expressed support for an open nomination process.
But Senate Republicans pointed out that Tester encouraged Harris to run for Senate in 2015 when he was chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Senate Republican strategists are focusing on Harris’ record as a “border czar” during her time as vice president.
They highlight that as a senator, Harris opposed the Trump-era health law known as Title 42, which was used to block immigrants from entering the country, and that she has suggested Immigration and Customs Enforcement be rebuilt “from the ground up.”
Senate Republicans say Harris’ opposition to fracking will be an issue in the Pennsylvania Senate race, where Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania) holds a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent, Dave McCormick.
They also highlighted her past support for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, her praise for cutting $150 million in the Los Angeles police budget, and her calls for a “rethinking” of the role of police.
DSCC spokesman Tommy Garcia said the change in top Democratic candidates won’t have a big impact on the Senate races, where Republicans are “stuck” with a “flawed” candidate.
“Republican Senators are in meltdown because they are still tied to the same flawed candidates and harmful policies that have kept them lagging Democratic Senators all election year. The Senate election is a contest between candidates, and we will win because we have far better candidates,” the spokesperson said.
Other Democrats say she can run on a more moderate record as part of a Biden administration, while Republicans seek to attack Harris’ comments and positions in 2019 and 2020 when she was running in the hotly contested primaries for the Democratic nomination.
“She’s a mainstream Democrat. When she was attorney general of California, progressives criticized her for being a cop-out. When she ran for Senate, they said she wasn’t liberal enough. When she ran for president, progressives didn’t really approve of her,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president of policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.
“She has a track record of three and a half years as vice president and can talk about declining crime, plummeting murder rates, a sharp decline in border crossings, an economy that is the envy of the free world,” he said. “That’s the case she can make and that’s the case she has to make.”
But some Democratic senators are reluctant to join the movement to remove Biden from the running because of the unpredictable impact on lower-level races.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Monday stopped short of endorsing Harris but said he planned to meet with her soon.
“She is rapidly gaining support from grassroots delegates across the country. We are working together to unite the Democratic Party and the country, and I look forward to meeting Vice President Harris in person in the near future,” he said in a statement released by House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York.
Senators who opposed the effort to oust Biden argued privately to their colleagues that Biden had not undercut the approval ratings of Senate Democratic incumbents, despite the president’s low approval ratings and underperformance in battleground state polls.
Biden allies warned that if Biden were to withdraw, Harris could become the nominee and become a drag on lower-ranking Democratic Senate incumbents, according to a person familiar with internal caucus discussions.
As of recently, all of the Democratic incumbents, except for Tester, who is running neck and neck with Republican Tim Sheehy, were leading their Republican opponents in internal polls and quality opinion polls.
That warning from two weeks ago is resonating now as Republican strategists scrutinize Harris’ record for ammunition to use in the Senate race.
The NRSC memo circulated on Monday highlighted that Harris was rated the most liberal senator in 2019 by GovTrack.us.
The paper cited Harris’ role as Biden’s “border secretary” and her pledge during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary to seek to decriminalize illegal border crossings, a goal supported by most Democratic presidential candidates at the time, except for Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.).
The paper noted that she said in 2018 that Congress should overhaul the nation’s immigration system and “start from scratch” by abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The bill noted her support for a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country, a pillar of Democratic immigration policy since the Senate passed comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 2013.
Senate Republicans also noted that as president in 2019, Harris said she would support abolishing the filibuster to pass comprehensive climate change legislation, and that she co-sponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)’s proposal in 2019 to expand Medicare to all Americans.
They will likely try to pin the Democratic candidate’s initial support in 2019 for ending private health insurance as part of a plan to expand Medicare, something Ms. Harris later denied and said she misheard a question on the issue during a presidential debate.
Ms. Harris’ past positions have displeased some major Democratic donors who had hoped that Mr. Biden would remain in the race.
Democratic donor John Morgan announced on social media platform “X” that he would not be fundraising for Harris, telling The Hill that he believes she will lose the election in November.
“You have to be passionate or have aspirations to run for political office to beg a friend for money. I am neither. Now it’s someone else’s turn,” Morgan wrote to X.
Morgan said he would have liked to see Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear (D) or Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia), who has left the Democratic Party to become an independent, lead the nominations.
