The GOP’s New Rules For Campaigning Against Kamala Harris

The GOP is trying really hard to not let their candidates be too overtly racist and sexist.

Credit: Gage Skidmore | gageskidmore.com | via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

[The latest Brain Milk podcast episode is out, and Adrian Polk and I discuss the politics of swapping Biden for Harris, the Republican Party’s freakout over replacing Biden, and Trump’s growing regrets over picking J.D. Vance. Put it on 1.5x speed and subscribe if you like it!]

The Republican Party is very concerned at the rush of enthusiasm for Democrats thanks to President Biden dropping his candidacy for another term and endorsing Kamala Harris.

Republican donors, meanwhile, are terrified that Democrats having a Black presidential nominee will motivate GOP Congressional candidates to say all kinds of directly and indirectly racist things that will make them lose otherwise winnable elections.

So top Republican officials drafted a new list of GOP campaign rules for all candidates to begin following immediately:

1. PLEASE do NOT imply Harris slept her way to the top. It’s a sleazy attack that makes suburban white women not like us (we absolutely NEED suburban white women to stop flipping blue!), and also we do not want to open ourselves up to attacks about how our presidential candidate Donald Trump has a somewhat more alarmingly illicit sexual history of his own. Noting that Harris has dated some well-connected boyfriends kind of makes her look cool, and is frankly less damning an insinuation than the obvious Democratic counter-attacks about how Donald Trump was maybe found a teensy bit liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, was a well-documented associate of Jeffrey Epstein, and has been accused by lots of women of harassing them and even raping underaged girls with Epstein.
2. The GOP is kind of becoming the party-who-cried-wolf-on-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), so let’s not accuse EVERY woman or ethnic/religious minority you see with a job of being a DEI hire. Some women, Blacks, Muslims, etc., are qualified for the jobs they have, so it looks bad when we call for the firing of everyone who isn’t a white male. Harris is the current vice president, was a senator, was a state attorney general, and was a high-profile prosecutor, so it’s a bit reflexively racist to pretend she’s not qualified to run for president, and, especially now that Trump is polling better than Republicans have in a LONG TIME with young Black males, we have to try to let our racist first impulses be INSIDE thoughts.
3. The Republican Party will cut off your party funding if you promote a new Birther conspiracy about Harris not being a citizen and being ineligible for the presidency. The Birther thing did not make us look good last time around with Obama, and the case against Harris’s citizenship is really grasping at straws.
4. PLEASE STOP creating a bunch of burner accounts on social media to pretend to be Black women in order to attack Kamala Harris. Too many of our candidates are forgetting to log out of their main accounts, and then tweeting out “As a Black woman, I’ll NEVER vote Harris!” with their white male profile pictures. Let’s try to keep digital Blackface to a minimum!
5. SPECIALIZE! You can campaign against independent women and their liberated vaginas, immigrants and the Great Replacement Theory, or the queer community, but not all three. We are alienating way too many demographics too often with our strictly straight-white-male identity politics, so you now have to specialize in terms of your cultural biases. Please, please narrow down your bigotry to only one or two choice groups at the max.
6. We are instituting a new zero-tolerance policy against publicly using words, phrases, and figures of speech that even most conservative voters consider racist these days. From now on, all RNC funding will be immediately revoked if you get caught publicly saying any of the following words: colored, ape-like, coon, mammy, the N-word (obviously the N-word!!!), sambo, tar baby, chinaman, chink, gook, Jap, hajji, spic, wetback, redskin, injun, retard, c***, hoebag, cum-dumpster, tranny, fag, or scissor-sisters. And this is not a definitive list! Please help us here. We’ll never convince ethnic minorities and educated women to vote Republican unless we pretend in public that we consider them culturally American and valuable assets to their communities. AND NEVER CALL A BLACK MAN NAMED TOM AN UNCLE!!!
7. There is no such thing as legitimate rape. Also, it looks bad when we suggest that women should thank God for being impregnated after being raped. They really seem to get emotional and hysterical about that, and, remember, we REALLY need suburban women to stop flipping to Democrats. Let’s have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy about any ideas you may have about forcing raped women to birth their rapists’ babies until at least AFTER the election. Right now let’s all commit to a 15-week national ban, and repeat Trump’s talking points about how the gutting of Roe V. Wade leaves abortion policy up to the states so everyone can be happy that way. We will of course not hesitate to ban abortion nationally the first opportunity we get, but to get elected in the first place we have to lie about our intentions because they maybe don’t poll well at all. Also, again, bringing up rape is an uncomfortable, politically-damaging reminder that Trump has technically been found liable for rape, and has been credibly accused of Epsteinian pedophilia.
8. Native Americans are technically more American than even the most patriotic Republicans, so please don’t put yourself in a situation where you can be filmed yelling at Native Americans to go back to where they came from. It’s a very sore subject! Some legitimate Americans look like illegal foreigners, but aren’t. We suggest you treat every potential voter while you’re out campaigning as a legal citizen, especially when your event is being filmed by the media.
9. Friendly reminder: the Civil War actually was about slavery, and suggesting otherwise polls badly with the college-educated voters we’ve been bleeding every election since the 70s. Rationalize it mathematically: poorly-educated racist voters will support us no matter what, so remember that every non-racist vote counts.
10. Keep your Confederate flags in your basement and garage, please! There’s no reason to bring them along with you at campaign events. And NO SWASTIKAS. We thought we all agreed on that one a long time ago! Remember: always consider the optics of what you are doing and how you are presenting yourself and the Republican Party to the moderate American voter. Keep your inside thoughts INSIDE.
11. Never suggest Hitler had some good ideas. Don’t mention Hitler. Please, we’re begging you: don’t talk about Hitler or the Third Reich in any way that’s even remotely positive. This, for some reason, has become a recurring issue with many of our candidates.
12. Here’s a quick codeword cheat sheet:

• Instead of “the Jew cabal,” say “globalists.”
• Instead of “Barack HUSSEIN Obama,” just “Obama” works.
• Instead of saying “integration was a mistake” or “we need segregation back,” just talk about “states’ rights.”
• Instead of admitting that America’s first colonists were largely religious refugees and undocumented immigrants, explain to your constituents that they were “settlers” or “pioneers” so our immigration ideology doesn’t seem hypocritical and ahistorical.

**** Remember: dog whistles are what we’re after, not bullhorns!

*** DON’T MENTION RAPE OR HITLER AS POSITIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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