Why Republicans Are Beginning to Fear the "Kamala Effect"

By Giuseppe Sarcina - Corriere della Sera

Not just insults and vulgarities. In Washington, Republicans are studying the "Kamala effect" carefully, and with some anxiety. Analysts from conservative think tanks exchange opinions and compare possible scenarios. Some of them are particularly motivated: they hope to get a place in the next Trump administration, of course if he wins the November election. One of them is Stephen Dewey, founder of GeoFinancial and administrator of the Bastiat Society, the American institute for economic research. Dewey worked for 40 years in the federal bureaucracy, dealing with regulatory activities. Now he is part, among other things, of the Heritage Foundation team that prepared "Project 2025", a hyper-conservative government program for the incoming administration of Donald Trump.

The former official admits that Kamala Harris will be a more difficult opponent to defeat than Biden. It's not just a matter of age. Harris could build a more transversal voting block both socially, mobilizing women, young people, African-Americans and geographically, returning to play in the country's industrial north, which now seemed to be overrun by Republicans. . It's a vision shared by Marc Wheat, director of Advancing American Freedom, a think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. For Wheat "Kamala's staff is already late and therefore will try to engage above all the unions, that is, the only organizations that have a network in the territory, capable of quickly mobilizing voters. That's why it's very likely that Harris will pick as her deputy someone who has been in dialogue with union leaders for some time, a figure like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, for example." And in fact, yesterday Kamala was in Houston, at the annual convention of the American Federation of Teachers, where 1.7 million are registered, including elementary and middle school teachers.

But there is one passage that particularly worries the Republican "intelligentsia". Kamala Harris comes from California justice, where she stood out for her toughness against crime. Therefore, it could reliably present itself as the best guarantor of security and penetrate the urban middle class of deeper America, in the regions of the Midwest or the South, in short, a formidable competitor in one of the most visited Trumpian propaganda. How to fix the situation? Advisers to think tanks and right-wing media like Fox News are suggesting the Trump administration destroy Kamala's resume. True, in the past, when she was in the San Francisco prosecutor's office, she may have achieved some success. But recently she has completely changed her attitude. Almost all Republicans remember that Kamala financially helped some activists accused of serious crimes, on the outskirts of the demonstrations that spread across the country after a police officer killed the African-American George Floyd in 2020.

The key word is: Harris has become an extremist, a radical, even "a Marxist" (the maximum of the minimum for conservatives). Will this strategy be enough to block Kamala's rise? "It's going to take a lot more," replies Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, one of the most influential groups in Washington. Moreover, he is the only one who has really contributed to the policies of the first Trump administration, with the tax reform of 2017, Norquist says that "we have to unmask the economic plan of the Democratic Party", i.e. the idea of ??return. until the 1930s or 1960s, creating an environment hostile to the manufacturing world "stifled by high taxes and excessive union power." The result, according to Norquist, would be the further decline of the industrial North, with businesses and capital migrating to the South, where the Republican Party governs. An argument that will be used to convince the citizens of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin (the key states for the outcome of the election) to vote for Trump.