Vice President Kamala Harris has secured enough Democratic delegates to become her party’s presumptive nominee and shattered all previous one-day fundraising records for a presidential candidate. It was a whirlwind 24 hours for her campaign and the country after President Joe Biden bowed out of seeking re-election and swiftly endorsed Harris as his successor.
While her elevation to the top of the ticket has re-energized many of the forces working to block Trump and MAGA fascism, it has also triggered an onslaught of sexist, racist, and xenophobic attacks. While staying focused on the issues at stake in this election—including issues where the Democratic Party and its platform may fall short—it is imperative that progressives not fall prey to rhetoric that feeds into defeatism and voter suppression.
Harris made history as the first woman, Black American, and person of Indian descent elected to the vice presidency in U.S. history. For the past three-and-a-half years, she’s been a leading voice for infrastructure jobs and expanding the child tax credit.
Everyone knows that the Biden-Harris administration’s record has not been perfect, of course, and workers and progressives have had to keep the pressure on the White House (Gaza and immigration policy stand out in particular). But compared to the chaotic, anti-worker, pro-corporate Trump administration of 2017 to 2021, the Biden-Harris period still stands out as one of the most impactful for working people in decades.
The energy among mass movements that has been sparked by her replacing Biden, however, is a chance to block fascism and keep open the space for democratic struggle. Even if it represented nothing else, the Harris campaign stands as a chance to fight for an alternative to the kind of America that Trump and his supporters would like to impose.
Project 2025—the nearly 1,000-page document written by the far-right Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for the next Republican president—says as much. The attacks the GOP hurls at Harris are part of a strategy to lock in a victory in the 2024 elections and bring about a society that leans further into white supremacy, fascism, and authoritarianism.
Progressives must strategically break down the dog whistle rhetoric and explain that many of the attacks hurled at Harris are a projection of the hate and disdain that the GOP holds for the people she represents.
“Spirit of Jezebel” and “DEI hire”
During the 2022 midterm elections, Sen. J.D. Vance, who is now Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, said in a televised interview with far-right host Tucker Carlson that the country was being run by a “bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made.” Vance went on to name Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg as examples. This sexist and homophobic tirade was not just Vance’s individual sentiment, though; it was an expression of viewpoints that are intrinsic to the GOP’s ideology.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court, we have seen women and those seeking reproductive care fighting not just for the right to make decisions regarding their bodies and health, but in many cases literally fighting for their very lives. Across the country, far too many stories have emerged of women being prosecuted for seeking abortions, being forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term, and essentially being denied medicine to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
This has all been done under the guise of a far-right Christian nationalism that seeks to subjugate women and pressure them to produce babies who can be either indoctrinated with the far-right worldview, raised to be wage slaves or both.
Under Project 2025—the document Trump has unsuccessfully tried to distance himself from—the Department of Health and Human Services would be renamed the “Department of Life.” The government would track miscarriages, stillbirths, and abortions and arrest women who cross state lines to access reproductive care. The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the abortion pill mifepristone would be revoked.
Harris has been a forceful voice for abortion rights, and this has put an even bigger right-wing target on her back.
Already, the far right is claiming she is not equipped to run for president, arguing that because she has not had any biological children, she therefore has no “stake in the future.” Some have even gone as far as saying that her being a stepmother doesn’t count. This, of course, is nothing more than another way of reducing a woman’s contribution to society to being an incubator for human offspring. In another sense, it is a completely ahistorical claim, given the fact that a number of previous presidents, George Washington being one, were childless.
When they are not attacking Harris for her choice not to have biological children, they lean into the sexist and baseless claim that she “slept her way” to the top. This, too, plays into the idea that a woman is not allowed to be a fully realized human being with a career and goals. If not stated directly, it implies that any true success a woman has must be attributed to the men with whom she has had intimate relationships rather than to her own work or capability.
Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau published a video encapsulating this sexist slander, saying Harris’s candidacy represents “the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary [Clinton] because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.” The “spirit of Jezebel” is a phrase many Christian nationalists use when describing a woman they want to classify as wicked, immoral, and stubborn.
Wallnau’s attack shows that it’s not just about sex but also Harris’s race and her connection to the immigrant struggle. Harris is the daughter of immigrants and was raised in an environment saturated with Civil Rights Movement activism. The GOP, meanwhile, has long been a party that stokes the flames of white supremacy and xenophobia. The sea of “Mass Deportation Now!” signs that flooded the Republican National Convention last week were a clear message of their intentions.
In a recent interview, GOP Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee disparaged Harris as a “DEI hire” with an “abysmal” political record. DEI—which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion—is the new term the far-right throws at any individual from an oppressed segment of the population who ends up in a position of power. It’s a prop in the right-wing myth that proper hiring and admissions policies are based on meritocracy, totally ignoring the reality that white supremacy and patriarchy shape such processes.
It suggests that anyone not white and/or male who makes the cut must be less qualified for the job in which they have been hired, that they are a token put there by liberals. It’s an attack on affirmative action and other equity policies up and down the line. The same thing is obvious in Trump’s recent social media statements calling Harris an “illegitimate” candidate (despite the fact that he himself contributed to both her campaign for Attorney General in 2011 and her re-election campaign in 2013).
As the right attacks Harris the individual, make no mistake: They see her as an example of the “wrongs” in the country they wish to eradicate.
While many progressives and those on the left may think much of this is obvious, it does not exempt them from falling prey to such rhetoric. Many, especially in the online world, repeat variations of these talking points and feed into defeatism, and help the cause of voter suppression. Though they may not realize it, they are empowering Trump and his campaign.
“Copmala”
As I wrote in a 2020 article regarding her historic rise to the vice presidency, Harris may be far from leading any sort of revolution, but she shouldn’t be impulsively painted as an enemy of change.
Before becoming a U.S. Senator, Harris’s record as San Francisco D.A. and California A.G. reflected contrasting positions, and there was plenty for criminal justice reform advocates to scrutinize. During Trump’s presidency, however, she also emerged as a main figure in the political resistance from inside Congress to his administration and its abuse of power. This was demonstrated in both public words and legislation.
During her time in the Senate, she was initially a co-sponsor of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s single-payer Medicare for All bill before endorsing a “public option” as a compromise position. She was also a lead author for environmental justice legislation that would require the scoring of environmental regulations to see their effects on frontline communities, who often are the most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change.
She was a supporter of reparations for Black Americans and joined with others advocating for the Justice in Policing Act of 2020. A lot of this advocacy for working people and those in marginalized communities did not stop when she entered the White House.
This includes advocating for student debt relief, bringing the unemployment rate to a record low, making much-needed infrastructure investments, and continuing to fight for a woman’s right to choose what goes on with her body.
Vance recently remarked at a GOP rally that Harris inherits all the actions of the Biden administration, and, for once, he’s right. But not all of that is the negative Vance wants Americans to believe.
Of course, highlighting the wins of workers, progressives, and people of color during the Biden years does not dismiss the administration’s unacceptable stances on things like immigration reform and the Gaza genocide. But to ignore the victories that working people and oppressed communities have scored and focus solely on the negative would be a short-sighted and defeatist approach when it comes to the struggle to block Trump and fascism.
Similarly, throwing disparaging, dismissive, and limiting comments at Harris, such as “Copmala” in 2024 to summarize her entire career, doesn’t take into account her multi-faceted history in politics and the role she could play as president in opening the way to more progressive change.
The fight against voter suppression
When those who claim to be progressives and leftists dismiss the significance of Harris’s candidacy—and the advantage of organizing under her administration as opposed to Trump—they do a disservice to the working class they claim to champion. That is because they play into the hands of the far-right by disillusioning voters and making it so they don’t use their vote as part of the fight against the threat of fascism. It’s demobilizing at a time when we need maximum mobilization.
Voter suppression has been a major weapon of the far-right when it comes to winning elections. Their lack of policies that appeal to a broad majority has made it difficult for them to muster support in numbers when it comes to ballots. Therefore, they seek to disenfranchise people who don’t back them from having the ability to vote.
Pushing the conclusion that Harris, or any progressive Democrat, would be simply another side of the same coin where you find Trump helps the right. It helps in the effort to depress turnout. Workers, progressives, people of color—all of us—must do our due diligence in vetting claims that generalize Harris’s political record (no, she did not incarcerate 1,500 Black men for possession of marijuana), and we cannot stay silent on the sexist and racist attacks we are bound to see leading up to November.
On the evening of Biden’s endorsement of Harris, the organization Win With Black Women hosted a Zoom call that saw 44,000 people join. The attendees raised over a million dollars for Harris’s campaign in under three hours. Not pledged, donated. As of the writing of this article, the organization Win With Black Men is doing the same with similar results.
This speaks to not only the growing influence and power of Black women, who are taking center stage in the political arena but also the fact that some of the best organized segments of the anti-MAGA coalition are to be found among Black people and others of marginalized communities. This is a reality that we cannot afford to ignore. And of course, we cannot forget to point to the mobilizing power of the labor unions representing millions of workers that have come out in support of Harris as well.
We know that politics is where the masses are, and it would appear at this moment that they are being re-energized around Kamala Harris’s candidacy. It is imperative that progressives recognize the weight of the moment and commit themselves to the struggle to defend democracy in November. There is still much to be done, and the best guarantee we have for ensuring there is enough room to continue the work is winning a Harris presidency and keeping Congress out of MAGA Republican control.
As with all op-eds and news analytical articles published by People’s World, this article represents the views of its author.
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