GOP Senate Candidates Plan to Make Dems Answer for ‘San Francisco Radical’ Kamala Harris

Very early on in the cycle, Senate GOP campaign chief Steve Daines prioritized recruiting wealthy, drama-free Republican Senate candidates who could finance their own campaigns, perform well in the general, and not irk Donald Trump. That trend has largely paid off, as most of Daines’s preferred picks have won their primaries with the GOP nominee’s blessing as they gear up for a grueling fall.

Now comes the hard part — actually kicking these Democratic incumbents to the curb with an entirely new Democratic nominee at the top of the ticket. 

Like Democrats, Republicans project confidence that Vice President Kamala Harris’s promotion will play to their favor at the ballot box. “The issues are the same, and my view is we’re going to run on issues,” Senator Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) told NR in the U.S. Capitol last week. “And she was very much a part of the Biden-Harris regime. She’s going to have to explain the views on the border, on inflation, on the departure from Afghanistan, and the list goes on.”

“It’s gonna be a tough race,” Senator Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) said of the Trump-vs.-Harris contest last Thursday. He predicted the Harris-induced “positive bump” in battleground polling will start to fade “once America remembers who she is” — a “California progressive who is left of Joe Biden.”

The NRSC wrote a memo earlier this month characterizing Harris as a candidate who creates “strong down-ballot opportunity” for Republicans. The memo hits her as a “San Francisco radical” and cites a number of her perceived weaknesses, including her former ranking as the most liberal senator by GovTrack (which has since been deleted), the record number of illegal immigrants who have crossed the southern border under the Biden-Harris administration, her flip-flopping on fracking, and her soft-on-crime policy positions. There’s also an entire category dedicated to her “weird” habits, including laughing at inappropriate moments and repeatedly expressing her love of Venn diagrams.

Several Republican Senate campaigns were quick to package these attacks into ads calling out their Democratic opponent’s closeness with Harris.

A campaign ad from Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick ties Senator Bob Casey to Harris. “Kamala Harris is inspiring and very capable, the more people get to know her they’re going to be particularly impressed by her ability,” Casey can be heard saying in a clip featured in the new ad.

The ad blasts Harris for her calls during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary to ban fracking, eliminate the filibuster, abolish ICE, defund the police, and decriminalize illegal immigration. However, Harris’s campaign has since walked back some of these positions. After former president Donald Trump brought up Harris’s 2019 comments on banning fracking, her campaign dismissed them as “false claims” and defended the Biden-Harris administration’s energy record, claiming America now has the highest-ever domestic energy production.

Bernie Moreno’s Ohio Senate campaign released its own ad titled, “Sherrod Brown loves San Francisco liberal Kamala Harris.” The spot begins with Brown saying, “I love Kamala Harris for so many reasons.” 

Moreno, a political outsider and luxury-car dealer, emerged from a crowded Republican primary to take on three-term incumbent Brown thanks to an endorsement from former president Donald Trump. A RealClearPolitics polling average finds Brown leading Moreno by 5.2 points in the swing state, which has trended red in recent cycles. The Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up; it’s widely seen as one of Republicans’ best pickup opportunities this cycle as the party looks to flip Democrats’ 51–49 majority in the Senate.

Unlike other incumbent Democrats running for reelection, Senator Jon Tester, who is running in a tight race to keep his seat in Montana, has not endorsed Harris and had previously called for an open convention. However, it’s not the first time Tester has declined to endorse a presidential candidate — in fact he has never endorsed a presumptive Democratic nominee before. The three-term incumbent has also elected to skip the party’s convention during any year that he has been up for reelection in the red state.

Still, Tester’s opponent, Tim Sheehy, attacked “two-faced” Tester for remaining “silent on his friend Kamala Harris.” Sheehy also cited reports that Tester was involved in recruiting Harris to the Senate in 2015 when he was chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

For now, Democrats are holding out hope that their candidates will continue outperforming the Democratic presidential ticket into the fall.

“I’d be surprised if there’s going to be as much ticket-splitting as people think. I do think there’s probably going to be a little more than in 2016 and 2020 because a lot of the incumbents in this class seem to be a little stronger,” says Coleman, the election analyst. “But I don’t think, for example, that Bob Casey is going to run a million points ahead of Harris, like some of the polling averages currently suggest.”

For most of the cycle, Senate incumbents in Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere have run well ahead of their Republican challengers, even in states where Trump had been polling ahead of former Democratic nominee Joe Biden for months. Though it’s too early for polling to be predictive, Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket adds a level of uncertainty to this year’s Senate map that’s keeping both parties on edge.

Voters can expect TV ads in key Senate races around the country to kick into high gear come Labor Day, which marks the final sprint to November 5. At that point, the ads will start to resonate and the polling and name-identification gaps will likely narrow.

“All the whiplash since the debate a month ago has been a lot even for those of us who follow these things for a living to keep up with, let alone the average voter,” says J. Miles Coleman, an election analyst with Sabato’s Crystal Ball. He believes Labor Day is a good “starting point” to more effectively assess the polling, because voters will by that point have “had enough time to process what’s happened since late June.”

Both Daines and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell are setting expectations low this cycle, telling reporters they’re hoping to secure a 51-seat majority — an achievable goal given that West Virginia is now seen as a lock for Republicans and Montana, a state Trump carried by 16 points in 2020, is already breaking toward Republican Tim Sheehy in the polls. Were Republicans to clear the low bar set by leadership, it would mark a significant improvement over 2022, when Republicans failed to unseat a single Senate Democrat.

But looming over this entire cycle are the slim pickings Republicans will have in 2026 and 2028, when few Democratic incumbents will be up for reelection. Even if Senate Republican leaders won’t say it out loud, the quiet hope is that the GOP can pad its margins as much as possible this cycle, given that 2024 is the most favorable map they’ve had in years (and will have for a while).

Around NR

• Attempts to repaint Kamala Harris as a moderate won’t work, Noah Rothman argues:

The least convincing of all the possible ways in which Kamala Harris could attempt to jettison the far-left progressive persona she’s created over the course of her career in national politics would be to announce through her staff that she simply no longer believed in the ideas she’s spent the better part of a decade advocating. Of course, that’s precisely the approach the Harris campaign has adopted.

• What comes next, after an unusually turbulent moment in American politics? Audrey Fahlberg spoke to members of Congress on the Hill hoping to find out:

The country is “turning the corner” after a tumultuous few weeks, and “we’re finally getting to that point where both parties are coalescing behind Trump and Harris,” [Senator Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.)] told NR. In her view, momentum is on her party’s side. “We’ve hit the apex of absurdity in terms of our everyday lives, and we’re about to stabilize again.”

• The organizers behind an online gathering of “White Dudes for Harris” claim to have raised more than $3.5 million to support Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Ryan Mills has more:

White dude politicos who showed up included Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Illinois governor JB Pritzker, and Representative Adam Schiff of California.

• Kamala Harris may have replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, but the “phantom campaign” remains, writes Jeffrey Blehar:

The candidate name at the top may have changed, but in a supreme stroke of irony, the playbook for the Democratic Party in 2024 remains the same: Keep Kamala away from loose microphones, press gaggles, adversarial interviews, and interactions with voters — as far from the unblinking gaze of any independent camera as possible.

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