The effort, which includes expansive advertising and polling, assumes that the vice president would be the most likely candidate to replace the president at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Donald J. Trump’s campaign is preparing a major effort to attack Vice President Kamala Harris if President Biden steps aside as the Democratic nominee, including a wave of ads focusing on her record in her current office and in California, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The Trump team has already prepared opposition research books on Ms. Harris, and has similar dossiers on other Democrats who could become the nominee if Mr. Biden were to drop out of the race.
But the bulk of the preparations so far have been focused on Ms. Harris, including a recently concluded poll testing her vulnerabilities in a general election contest, according to the two people. The Trump team’s attention on Ms. Harris is based on its assumption that if Democrats were to bypass the first Black woman to serve as vice president, it would drive even deeper divisions in the party and risk alienating their base of Black voters.
Trump allies have also begun examining the records of Democratic governors who are considered potential running mates for Ms. Harris. Advisers to the former president are paying especially close attention to Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — the state the Trump campaign is most focused on winning to block the Democrats’ path to the White House.
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Brian Fallon, a campaign spokesman for Ms. Harris, said in a statement: “After tanking the bipartisan border deal, Donald Trump has resorted to lying about the vice president’s record. As a former district attorney and attorney general, she has stood up to fraudsters and felons like Trump her entire career. Trump’s lies won’t stop her from continuing to prosecute the case against him on the biggest issues in this race.”
Since Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27, Mr. Trump and his political operation have softened their criticisms of the president, hoping he stays politically viable until the party formally nominates him and it’s too late to replace him without major legal hurdles. Mr. Trump’s senior team would prefer that Mr. Biden remains in the race, believing his low approval numbers and voters’ widespread doubts about his age and cognitive fitness represent the former president’s best chance at reclaiming the White House.
After the debate, the Trump team decided to hold back advertising that could further damage Mr. Biden, according to one person briefed on the Trump campaign’s internal discussions, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. A change at the top of the ticket could throw a remarkably stable race into chaos — particularly if Ms. Harris, who would be the first Black woman elected president, were to become the nominee.
Shortly before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this past week, as a growing number of Democrats called for Mr. Biden to leave the race, the Trump team prepared anti-Harris signs and videos to show the delegates in the arena and the television audience at home, according to people briefed on the plans. But they scrapped those plans after a young man tried to assassinate Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., last Saturday, two days before the start of the convention. With the nation still in shock, the pressure on Mr. Biden to leave the race briefly abated, and the Trump team assumed the Harris contingency plans were no longer necessary.
The Trump campaign was always going to make Ms. Harris, who has repeatedly said that Mr. Biden is the nominee and that they’re running together, part of the story, particularly with Mr. Biden’s visible physical struggles, said Liam Donovan, a former National Republican Senatorial Committee aide.
“But with the prospect of a switch at the top of the ticket, there’s a sudden sense of urgency around defining Kamala Harris and cementing a lackluster image that has long made Democrats queasy,” Mr. Donovan said. But he also noted a potential pitfall for Mr. Trump: “Being the front-runner against another history-making candidate would introduce new risks for a campaign hoping to reap historic gains among Black voters.”
Some Trump aides say privately that Ms. Harris might be better at delivering certain messages than Mr. Biden has been, particularly on abortion rights, an issue that galvanized Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections. And as a former prosecutor, she may be positioned make a sharp argument about Mr. Trump’s criminal indictments, including his conviction in Manhattan on charges that he falsified business records to conceal a hush-money payment to a porn star in 2016.
But they also believe Ms. Harris will have to own every unpopular Biden-era policy, which will cancel out the gains she might make. In particular, the Trump team plans to attack her over the border crisis, one that the president tasked her with finding the “root causes” of. Aides to Ms. Harris have said that Mr. Trump has distorted her role, and have noted that regardless, border crossings have fallen since a Biden administration curtailing of asylum.
They are also looking to define her based on her tenure as a senator in California and, before that, her time as the state’s attorney general and as the district attorney of San Francisco, where her record during her 2020 presidential campaign was alternately criticized as too conservative, or too lenient toward first-time drug offenders.
According to people briefed on the strategy, if Mr. Biden drops out of the 2024 race but doesn’t resign as president, Republicans will argue that the reasons he quit the race are the same reasons he’s unfit to remain as commander in chief. They will try to tie Ms. Harris to Mr. Biden by claiming there was a broad effort to prevent the public from seeing the president’s deterioration and suggest she was part of that effort.
Republicans running in competitive congressional races are already adopting this message. After Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, called on Mr. Biden to leave the race on Friday, his Republican rival Bernie Moreno posted on X: “If Joe Biden is unfit to run, he is unfit to serve. I am formally calling on Joe Biden to resign the presidency because his continued presence in the situation room is a national security threat. I hope Senator Brown will join me.”
In a statement, Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said bluntly, “While we are rightly considering the implications of the Democrats internal chaos, the real story is the implication that someone is too unhealthy to run but not too unhealthy to serve. That’s absurd.”
Republicans have long criticized Ms. Harris. She has been on the receiving end of similar Republican attacks, particularly about the border and Mr. Biden’s acuity, for years. And despite not rolling out videos or signs, several Republicans made her part of their focus during their convention this week, mentioning her both in conjunction with Mr. Biden and also on her own.
While Democrats are stumbling toward resolution, the Trump campaign has marveled at its position heading into the general election. Mr. Biden’s team has spent tens of millions of dollars in advertising this year, but the president has not gained ground in the race against Mr. Trump. The Trump campaign and its allied outside groups, however, have spent far less and are said to have significant cash reserves for the months ahead.
In the week since the assassination attempt against Mr. Trump, a collection of outside groups run by a former Trump aide, Taylor Budowich, has raised $75 million, according to a person briefed on the amount. Both the Trump campaign and allied groups have been conserving resources, particularly since Mr. Trump had a fund-raising windfall after he was criminally convicted in Manhattan at the end of May.
The super PAC that Mr. Budowich runs, MAGA Inc., has conducted its own opposition research on prospective nominees who might replace Mr. Biden. But the group, like the campaign, assumes Ms. Harris is the likeliest prospect, and officials there have conducted extensive message-testing about her.
A New York Times/Siena College poll last week found Ms. Harris in a slightly stronger position against Mr. Trump than the president. The poll, however, was completed prior to the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump.
Still, Jim Hobart, a pollster whose firm, Public Opinion Strategies, is helping to conduct NBC’s bipartisan poll, said that Ms. Harris is starting from a fairly defined place nationally.
In the most recent survey, he said, “50 percent of voters already have a negative opinion of Harris. Just 32 percent have a positive opinion,” he said. “Could those positive numbers improve if she is the nominee? Sure. But remember, she has never shown herself to be a particularly skilled candidate.”
He pointed to her narrow win in the 2010 attorney general’s race, and the bust that was her presidential campaign in 2020.
The Republican National Committee is closely tracking possible changes on the Democratic ticket, and is leaving open the possibility of lawsuits related to the potential transfer and use of Biden campaign funds, according to one official with knowledge of the matter.
For instance, if a new committee is created for Ms. Harris, and donors who have already donated the $6,600 maximum to the Biden-Harris campaign try to donate to her, Republicans are likely to sue, arguing it’s an over-the-limit donation, the official said. They’re also watching whether Ms. Harris as the presumptive nominee would try to access money before she is formally nominated by her party.
And should the Biden team try something untested, like transferring its money to a super PAC that supports a candidate, a lawsuit is also likely to follow, the official said.
Even if such lawsuits don’t stop the actions, they could gum up the gears of the new Democratic ticket moving forward and highlight the chaos that Democrats have been facing.
