New 2024 Race Kicks Off With Racial And Gender Attacks Against Kamala Harris

WASHINGTON ― It took less than 24 hours since she all but locked up the Democratic presidential nomination for Republicans to start bringing up Vice President Kamala Harris’ race and gender, a signal of how potentially nasty the last four months of the 2024 race against Donald Trump is shaping up to be.

Upon returning to Washington this week from recess, several House Republicans quickly dismissed Harris, the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president, as a “DEI hire,” a pejorative term conservatives have used to refer to programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Unsurprisingly, the attack has often been launched against minorities, including the mayor of Baltimore earlier this year.

“One hundred percent, she was a DEI hire,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told CNN on Monday of Harris, adding, “When you go down that route, you get mediocrity.”

When several of his colleagues echoed Burchett, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) urged his conference to focus on their policy differences and the vice president’s record. “Her ethnicity and her gender have nothing to do with this whatsoever,” Johnson said at a press conference on Tuesday.

But Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) didn’t appear to get the message, calling Harris, a former district attorney, attorney general and senator, “intellectually just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”

“I think she was a DEI hire. And I think that that’s what we’re seeing, and I just don’t think that they have anybody else,” Hageman told Gray TV’s Josh Rultenburg.

President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race over the weekend and endorsed Harris, passing the torch to a younger standard bearer to the relief of many Democrats who