GOP divided over how to beat Harris

Nearly a month since a raucous and successful convention, Republicans are divided on how to win the 2024 election. 

While former President Trump is focused on crowd sizes and allies are bashing Vice President Harris for not sitting down for media interviews, some Republicans, like former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, assessed that her party’s leaders need to “quit whining” and focus on policy instead.

Harris has taken the lead over Trump in the national polling average by Decision Desk HQ/The Hill and is ahead of the former president in six out of the seven battleground states since replacing President Biden at the top of the ticket. 

Now, Republicans are struggling to figure out how to hit back at the momentum behind Harris, an about-face from the united front they had at their convention last month in Milwaukee standing solidly behind Trump.

“What the Trump campaign has to do is actually prosecute that case. We have to turn up the volume so that the voters look beyond the celebrity coronation of Harris and understand the real record,” said Marc Lampkin, a GOP lobbyist and former deputy campaign manager for Bush for President.

“How do they turn up the volume? We need a unified voice that forces corporate media to look at the issues important to the American people, like inflation, immigration, and crime. They need to ask the essential question of if you are better off today than you were four years ago,” he said.

Haley, who was Trump’s top competitor in GOP primaries this year, addressed the July convention where she called on Republicans to unite and elect Trump, offering her clearest endorsement of the former president since she dropped her own bid for the White House.

Less than a month later, with Harris now at the top of the ticket, Haley told Fox News that Trump needs to pivot his messaging away from crowd sizes and toward substantive policy if he wants to connect with voters.

“Nikki is largely right, if it was a traditional campaign. Trump doesn’t do traditional campaigns. He does name calling, and personal attacks and has a hard time talking policy because it isn’t interesting to him,” said a former Trump campaign staffer.

The source added, “Republicans are united in a policy message but Trump isn’t likely to get on board with that.”

Other Republicans have also pleaded with Trump to be more disciplined with his messaging. 

Instead, the former president has used rallies, interviews and press conferences to gripe about Harris, lobbing a host of personal attacks toward the vice president, including suggesting during a national convention of Black journalists that she had “turned Black.”

Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) argued that Trump has “squandered” the goodwill he received after the assassination attempt on him last month during a rally in Pennsylvania.

“There was a lot of sympathy for him in the country and a major vacuum on the Democratic side. He peaked just before the Hulk Hogan appearance followed by his speech at the Republican National Convention. The speech was one of the greatest missed opportunities in the history of American politics and it has all been downhill from there,” Curbelo said. “Clearly he is listening to no one right now and letting the public see him sweat the new realities of the campaign.”

Earlier this month, the Harris campaign launched “Republicans for Harris” and touted endorsements from more than 25 Republicans, including Trump-era aides Stephanie Grisham and Olivia Troye and former Reps. Joe Walsh (Ill.) and Susan Molinari (N.Y.).

Haley’s comments on Fox and willingness to criticize the strategy of the Trump campaign shows the anxiety among Republicans about how they will beat Harris, argues the Haley Voters Working Group. The group is made up of Haley supporters and has been in touch with the Biden, and now Harris, campaigns as they have tried to court more Republican voters.

“Ambassador Haley’s rebuke of Trump’s current ‘strategy’ was a clearly an indicator that Republicans are growing more and more concerned about his chances in November. I’m sure alarms are ringing behind closed doors,” said Emily Matthews, spokesperson for the group.

Trump spoke Monday with Tesla founder Elon Musk on social platform X where he focused on issues like inflation and attacked Harris as a “San Francisco liberal,” citing her record on fracking and defunding the police.

The former president was able to avoid inflammatory comments, unlike when he touted the size of the crowd on Jan. 6 in comparison to the audience from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The Trump campaign defended its strategy, saying it led to the most “dominant primary victory in history” and that it hasn’t changed for the general election.

“Not only does Kamala Harris co-own all of Joe Biden’s failures, but she is even more dangerously liberal. While Kamala hides behind staff to walk back her long-held policy positions and refuses to take questions on where she stands, President Trump has made clear his agenda to make America wealthy, strong, and safe again through his 20 Promises to Make America Great Again and 2024 Republican Party Platform,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

The Trump campaign has used some opportunities to hit Harris on a variety of policy areas, particularly on her work involving root migration issues. In North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump used a rally in Asheville to attack Harris on the economy, blaming her for higher prices and Americans’ financial struggles.

But mostly, he has painted her as a progressive and dangerously liberal, and argues that she is an extension of Biden on the issues they previously attacked the president on.

Meanwhile, Harris has an overall 1-point lead over Trump across the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to a survey from the Cook Political Report Swing State Project.

Harris has a 1.4 percentage point national lead over Trump based on 114 polls, according to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s national polling average.

While Harris closes in on Trump in the polls, some Republicans suggest that the issue with the GOP strategy comes down to discipline, which they say Trump struggles with.

“Let’s use a college football analogy. Portraying a California woman of color as a crazy liberal should be as easy as Alabama playing Western Kentucky in their first game,” a former aide in the Bush administration said. “But it requires at least an 8th grader’s level of message discipline to execute the game plan.”