Republican leaders urge their party colleagues to avoid racist and sexist attacks on Kamala Harris, the Democrats' likely presidential candidate.
During a meeting with Republican congressmen on Tuesday, local time, top Republican Richard Hudson urged his colleagues to focus on criticizing Harris for her policies.
This election is going to be about politics, not personality, said House Speaker Mike Johnson to reporters after the meeting.
This is not personal with regard to Kamala Harris, and her gender and ethnicity have nothing to do with this whatsoever.
Alleged Quota Filling
The warnings come after some Republicans and Trump allies claimed that Harris was quota-filled due to diversity reasons, and not elected based on her merits.
A video from 2021 has also gone viral, where Trump's vice presidential candidate JD Vance referred to several Democrats, including Kamala Harris, as "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and with the choices they've made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too".
Kamala Harris would, if the Democrats win the election on November 5, become the first woman, the first black woman, and the first person of South Asian descent to become president.
Since Biden announced his withdrawal, the Republicans have shifted their campaign focus – which previously partly targeted Biden as frail and incapable of sitting for four more years on the presidential post.
Johnson: "Co-Conspirator"
As the party now focuses on Kamala Harris, they aim to show how she has been involved in the policies they believe have been bad for the US.
Republicans have accused Harris of helping to cover up Biden's health problems and have tried to link her to Biden's most unpopular policies, including migration. And they have used her background as a prosecutor to try to paint a picture of her as a politician who is soft on crime.
Johnson says voters can compare how families were doing when Trump was president, with how they are doing now when Biden is president and Harris is vice president.
She is involved, co-author and co-conspirator in all the policies that got us into this mess, said Mike Johnson.
