Rightwing playbooks used in past election campaigns are being dusted off for an all-out assault on the vice-president

Rightwing playbooks used in past election campaigns are being dusted off for an all-out assault on the vice-president

For Barack Obama there was “birtherism” and a name they said sounded like a specific Middle East terrorist. For Hillary Clinton there was “Lock her up” and merchandise that said, “Trump that bitch”, “Hillary sucks but not like Monica” and “Life’s a bitch: don’t vote for one.”

Rightwing playbooks deployed in past election campaigns are being dusted off for an all-out assault against Vice-President Kamala Harris, the de facto Democratic nominee aiming to become the first Black woman and first person of south Asian descent to be US president.

“It’s obvious that the Republicans are going to play the race and gender card, which we’ve seen already in some of the attacks on social media,” said Tara Setmayer, a Black woman who is co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee. “It may be catnip for their Maga base but it will be a turnoff for the moderate voters in the battleground states that will determine this election.”

  • nillocEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Careful a lot of them will still vote for him.

    [According to] Ange-Marie Hancock, director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. She also happens to lead a group of scholars studying the current vice presidency. Their work is called the Kamala Harris Project…

    what’s interesting about how it impacts swing voters or independent voters is certainly on the surface, if you were to survey independent voters or swing voters, I bet you would get a strong majority who would say, we really don’t like that kind of language. We really don’t like the way in which he talks about women or talks about his opponents in that kind of way. The challenge of course, is that many political psychologists have found that even as we kind of consciously say, we don’t agree with it, it still ends up having a negative impact.”

    From Consider This from NPR: Kamala Harris already faces racism and sexism from Trump and Republicans, Jul 24, 2024 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/consider-this-from-npr/id1503226625?i=1000663256947

    There’s a deeper explanation in that (short) podcast in case anyone is curious.