RADFORD, VA — President Joe Biden is old news on the campaign trail.
Sen. JD Vance made his first campaign appearances as Donald Trump’s running mate Monday with a brand-new line of attack: Vice President Kamala Harris is actually “a million times worse” than Biden, the Ohio senator said in his rural Virginia rally.
“She signed up for every single one of Joe Biden’s failures, and she lied about his mental capacity to serve as president,” Vance said on the stage, where he was joined by hundreds of people who attended his rally.
He even quipped that he was disappointed Biden dropped out because he “was looking forward to debating Kamala Harris.”
Republicans, who have shown an eagerness to run against Biden in November, were forced to make a sharp pivot overnight. Without Biden in the race, much of their messaging about an aging and ailing president unfit to serve is now moot.
Initial messaging on Sunday focused on the unprecedented nature of Biden dropping out just months before Election Day and after millions of Democratic voters had already cast their ballots for him.
Vance echoed the point Monday night, saying Democrats want to “throw out 14 million ballots and not elect Kamala Harris but select Kamala Harris,” going so far as to call it a “threat to American Democracy.”
“It’s disgraceful,” he said.
Earlier in the day on Monday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out a memo — which was obtained by NOTUS — that struck a similar tone.
“San Francisco radical Kamala Harris is seizing the Democrat nomination from Scranton Joe Biden. Democrats subverted the democratic process to anoint Kamala Harris with no input from their voters, and Republicans must be ready to shift gears,” Jason Thielman, the NRSC executive director, said in the memo.
The Trump campaign senior advisers — Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita — broached the subject in their own memo on Monday, saying, “The liberal elite and deep state — sensing the American public’s disgust with their lawfare, and now in a desperate Hail Mary — have swapped out an incumbent President for the incumbent Vice President in a ploy to try and shake up the race.”
Roughly two-thirds of Democratic voters said they believed Biden should end his reelection campaign, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released on July 17.
Even so, the likelihood of a Harris-led Democratic ticket has definitely settled in with the Trump team.
In Virginia, Vance called her a “border czar” and blamed her for the rise in migrants crossing the border.
The “border crisis is a Kamala Harris crisis,” he said.
He also focused on positions Harris took when she was running for president in a competitive Democratic primary in 2019, during which she said she wanted to “ban fracking.” The line led into a popular GOP chant: “Drill, baby, drill.”
These are issues the National Republican Congressional Committee told frontline lawmakers to emphasize on the trail, according to a memo first obtained by NOTUS.
“Republicans have never had less time to define the presidential nominee of our opponents. Because of that, it is vital that our entire Conference is on message and working together to present Kamala Harris as an extreme San Francisco progressive who is out of step with the American people,” the memo reads.
The memo instructed candidates to continue tying Harris to “every one of Joe Biden’s policy failures as his Vice President” and to emphasize how “Harris is even more progressive than Joe Biden.”
“DO NOT: Waste time talking about anything other than what Harris WOULD DO as President,” the memo says.
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Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.