Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech in Houston on Thursday. (photo: AFP)
It’s been said a lot already—and it’s going to need to be said a lot more through November and potentially for the next four to eight years—but the attacks being leveled against Vice President Kamala Harris this week are just staggeringly sexist, misogynistic, and racist. This, despite the fact that Republican leadership continues to warn prominent party members that such attacks are likely to turn off key constituencies needed to win the election for former President Donald Trump. And yet the sexist and racist attacks on Harris for being a childless cat lady, a weird laugher, and a winsome slut who slept her way to power persist unabated.
Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, called Harris a “DEI vice president,” and former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly tweeted: “She actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics.”
Kellyanne Conway called her lazy, saying, “She does not speak well; she does not work hard; she doesn’t inspire anyone.” And Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman went with “intellectually, [she is] just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”
On Monday, Trump called Harris “Dumb as a Rock” on social media, and because Trump can’t stop himself from calling women “crazy,” he launched this brilliant salvo in his remarks in Michigan on Saturday: “I call her Laffin’ Kamala,” he said. “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She’s crazy. She’s nuts.” So. Crazy.
Laughter. Lazy. Slutty. DEI hire. Stupid. That seems to be the brief. As Jill Filipovic pointed out earlier in the week, none of this was unexpected, none of it is actually true, none of it is even a little bit new. But of course some of it has historically worked against women candidates.
Yet there is one vital difference between a campaign in which Hillary Clinton was targeted and abused for being a woman in 2016 and the race for the presidency in 2024. The difference is that in 2022, with the Supreme Court’s ending of Roe v. Wade in around half the country, women began to experience punishment and threats for a class of actions that are, for the most part, wholly out of their control. They disliked it immensely. Targeting Harris as someone who is ostensibly a politician who has no control over her career and her success is the same exact play. Query whether it has succeeded with voters in the past couple of years.
Immediately after Roe v. Wade fell two years ago last month, we began to hear stories of women who nearly died because they were unable to get urgently needed medical care while pregnant; young girls unable to terminate a pregnancy that was the result of rape; and women allowed to die because they were given the wrong information about the risks of their pregnancies.
We’ve learned about states banning in vitro fertilization and states overregulating mifepristone and jurisdictions attempting to prevent pregnant women from leaving the state for abortion care. We now know that the “conscience” rights of physicians seem to supplant the rights of women bleeding on their tables. And we’ve also met the bullies and sickos who would help husbands prosecute their wives for terminating a pregnancy. Of course, we have remet newly adjudicated sex abuser Donald Trump, and it seems his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, has zealously suggested that abortion is wrong even in cases of rape and incest and floated the idea that parents should have votes proportionate to the number of their children.
Nothing about this overt GOP platform of forced pregnancy, acceptance of one kind of birth and family, anticontraception rocket-natalism should surprise anyone. This stuff is, after all, the lifeblood of both Project 2025 (“Families comprised of a married mother, father and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society”) and the Dobbs decision. But what’s different for women voters in 2024, alongside Dobbs and Project 2025, is the recognition that a lot of men out there seriously don’t trust us to make good choices at all; that a lot of men think we are not actually moral agents in our own right; and that a lot of men still think of all women as chess pieces they can move around at their discretion.
What has changed, in short, since 2016, is that many women who still believe themselves to be the sum of their decisions have started to bristle at being told that we never truly had the power to make those decisions in the first place. Now look again at the most virulent attacks against Harris. There’s an invisible through line here, and it’s actually pretty consistent: Harris “slept her way to the top“? That suggests that it was California kingmaker Willie Brown who plucked her from obscurity and made her career. She’s an unqualified affirmative action baby and a mediocre DEI pick?
That suggests that a bunch of white men and party bosses pushed her up a ladder despite the fact that she never did anything to merit it. Even the tedious claims about women marrying late and about childlessness trade on the same old tropes measuring women based on not their life choices but their desirability to men, who boldly grab and impregnate women at their own pleasure.
One of the most vile attacks came from Jan. 6 enthusiast and Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau, who said on Monday that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel, and in a way that’ll be even much more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.” He thus also casts her as an object, a temptress, while only men remain the moral deciders. It’s the same dopey story every time: Every woman, in this telling, is just lined up against a wall, hoping against hope that some savior will come along to ask them to dance, then marry and impregnate them, then (if they are allowed to work at all) give them a job they don’t actually deserve, in service of some byzantine liberal plot to harm the other men.
The stunning rise of Kamala Harris from law school, to prosecutor’s office, to state elected office, to the U.S. Senate, to the vice presidency of the United States can thus be reduced by Republicans into a devious plot in which men used her for her entire life as she just floated along, laughing crazily. And one might suppose that—beyond the obvious racist dog whistle—this is why Vance is going with the line of attack that suggests she is somehow lazy, because, as he suggested earlier this week, she just sat around “collecting a government paycheck for the last 20 years.”
There is, to be sure, a cohort of voters who respond well to the message that women are all soft, silky bunnies who need to be cared for by their men, their government, their president, and their party. But after Dobbs, the number of women who reject the idea that because they can’t make good choices, male elected officials should step in to help them out has probably not increased.
The women who put abortion on the ballot in state after state post-Dobbs, and who won abortion rights in every single one of those contests, seem not to respond well to the message that they are the sum of a man’s life choices, as opposed to the infinite possibility of their own. And as American women increasingly reject the imperative that has J.D. Vance sorting them on the basis of their fertility and Donald Trump sorting them on the basis of their hotness, the language of women as creatures who rise and fall based exclusively on the choices of men feels ever more airless.
It’s not just that Dobbs and IVF bans and the reviving of the Comstock Act and Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk took away women’s choices and replaced it with their own. It’s also that the language of women as the totality of male preferences in marriage, parenting, hiring, promotion, and mentoring isn’t a story of women and power. It’s a story of men and their female props. Whether or not Kamala Harris will speak to women as an epoch-shifting politician remains to be seen. The early numbers suggest that she certainly might. The real question is whether a set of attacks rooted in the idea that any woman who succeeds in America does so only because men desire her, sleep with her, promote her, and support her can be salient for women who don’t think of themselves that way. And if the reaction to Dobbs isn’t the answer, I’m not sure what is.
There are a thousand good reasons that going after Harris for her race and gender are stupid and should stop now. But from a purely strategic perspective, chief among these reasons is that every woman who votes has been told within the past two years that someone else—a doctor, a legislator, a husband, a Supreme Court justice—is better suited to make life choices for her than she is. I’m not sure they’re buying it.
Reducing Harris this time around to a cartoon version of a person who never made any real choices because powerful men have been slinging her around the chessboard for 30 years is not a persuasive argument for the GOP, even while it’s a familiar one. Maybe Republicans think women resonate with being called lazy sluts who stand on the shoulders of powerful men for the entirety of their careers. But it seems to me that a failure to treat the putative next president as a moral and political actor in her own right signals a failure to believe that women voters are themselves moral and political actors as well.
Come November, it will be up to all these voters to purge the Republican Party of this notion, once and for all.
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