As Trump falls short on Biden, His new target is Kamala Harris

President Trump doesn't have Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to kick around anymore. So he's directing his rhetorical daggers at Kamala Harris.

Stubbornly behind in the national and battleground state polls, Trump has increasingly tailored his message towards his base – mainly white men, especially while males without a college degree, a voter demographic Trump won heavily in 2016. And that means more warnings of the "other," a female or racial minority threatening political power long held by white men.

That was an easy task when Clinton was the 2016 nominee – especially since the former senator from New York was hoping to follow the nation's first Black president in office. But after the Democrats – despite being offered the most diverse group of primary candidates in the party's history – nominated a septuagenarian white man, Trump's saber-rattling has turned to Sen. Kamala Harris of California.

He's called her a "monster" and a "communist." In the past week, Trump has speculated about Biden's mental or physical decline if elected, warning that voters would then be left with Harris, the first woman of color to be on a major party presidential ticket.

"Three weeks in and Joe's shot. Let's go, Kamala, are you ready?" Trump said mockingly at a rally in Michigan earlier this week. At a campaign rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump declared Harris "would not be the first woman president."

Wednesday night, Trump involved the trope of the image of the angry Black woman, making fun of her unusual name and suggesting she was somehow unbalanced.

"Kamala. Kamala. You know, if you don't pronounce her name exactly right, she gets very angry at you. And then she starts – you know what she does when she gets angry? She starts laughing. Like she did on '60 Minutes.' Uncontrollable laughs. That means she's angry," the president said at a rally in Arizona.

"I'm not surprised. This is what worked for them in 2016. They know they're in trouble. They have to make sure they mobilize their base and they're scaring people with the 'othering,'" says A'Shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, a group dedicated to elect more Democratic women to office.

"They're tried everything with Vice President Biden – 'Basement Biden,' 'Sleepy Joe,' though the debates showed that he's very much awake, he's not in his basement," Gholar adds.

"So they have to go to what worked for them the first time – the sexism. And now they're adding in the racism. That did work for them in 2016 with President Obama and his record."
Amanda Clayton, a Vanderbilt University political science professor with a specialty in gender and politics, agrees.

"Nothing is sticking – no nickname Trump has for him. He's a folksy old white man, and that's what people are used to seeing in politics," Clayton says of Biden. "So they go back to their playbook of demonizing people of color or women."

White men were a key part of Trump's 2016 win; he won 62% of the white male vote, while Clinton took 31%, according to exit polls. Trump won the votes of white women by a narrower margin – 52% to 43% for Clinton – and lost overwhelmingly among every minority group, regardless of gender.

Harris's nomination pushes a negative button for that same voter group, with polls showing she is viewed least positively by men, more so by white men, and even more so by white men without a college degree.

A YouGov poll the third week of October found that voters overall are evenly divided about Harris, with 47% somewhat or strongly approving of her and 48% somewhat or strongly disapproving of her. However, 67% of white men without a college degree disapproved of her compared to 31% who approve, while 55% of white men with a college degree disapprove of Harris opposed to 43% who approve, according to the YouGov survey.

That could have nothing to do with gender or race. Or, it could have very much to do with it: A recent PRRI poll found that 34% of men, and 31% of white men, think it's a good idea to nominate a Black woman as vice president. That compares with 48% of women overall, 43% of white women and 52% of Blacks who think having an African American woman on the ticket is wise.

But despite the apparent polarization, the benefits of having Harris on the ticket have arguably far outweighed the drawbacks for a campaign that was instantly energized by her addition. The Biden campaign has been outraising the Trump campaign, and the trend started the day the Harris pick was announced, The New York Times found in an in-depth analysis of the two teams' fundraising.

Harris' overall approval rating is a smidgen higher than Biden's, according to Real Clear Politics, with the California Lawmaker having a net-plus of 6.2 percentage points, compared to a plus-6 for Biden.

Clayton also notes that because Harris is a vice presidential nominee, and not a presidential nominee, the gender- and race-based rhetoric against her isn't as powerful. Trump's favorability rating, meanwhile, is underwater -minus 13.4 percentage points. Vice President Mike Pence is less unpopular, with a favorability rating an average of 5.5 percentage points below his favorability rating.

"She's kind of fitting into the gender roles – acting in support of a white man," Clayton says. "It's not as threatening in the same way as it would be if she were running on her own."

Harris has mounted an aggressive campaign travel schedule, appearing in Arizona the same day Trump was there this week and heading to new battleground Texas on Friday. Saturday, Harris will be in Trump's adopted home state of Florida – in his neighborhood, as well as in his head.