Just a few days after Kamala Harris entered the race for the presidency, the conservative attacks on her are already taking shape. They’re both dark and predictable: She’s a slut. She’s childless. She’s too liberal. She’s too sexy. She laughs. Not in the right way.

It’s the 2016 anti-Hillary playbook all over again. But it’s 2024. And if Republicans lean too far into chauvinism and misogyny, they may find that this time around, they’ll have a lot more pissed-off women to contend with—and they may wind up ushering the first female president right into the White House.

Some of the accusations lobbed at Harris are true, insofar as she is indeed a beautiful woman who laughs and does not have biological children, although she is a stepmother to two: Cole Emhoff, who works in film, and Ella Emhoff, an artist, both of whom affectionately call Harris “Momala.” Harris has also racked up a series of professional accomplishments, working her way up in the California district attorney’s office before becoming the attorney general of the state and then a U.S. senator before ascending to the vice presidency.

But right-wing detractors are determined to undermine both Harris’ character and her achievements. One early line of attack is that “She actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics,” as former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly put it on Twitter, arguing that Harris was “an unqualified political aspirant getting ahead based on smthg other than merit” and that attacking her on these terms is “relevant, and fair game.”

It’s not.

(But if it were, one might ask if Kelly herself would have gotten where she is if television news, and particularly the Fox network, didn’t favor female anchors who look a certain way.)

Here’s the story from whence this pearl-clutching about Harris stems: For roughly one year in the mid-1990s when she was 29 years old, Harris dated 60-year-old San Francisco politician Willie Brown, who was technically married but had been separated from his wife since the early ’80s. Harris and Brown broke up in 1995, and in 1996, Brown was elected mayor of San Francisco, a position he would hold until 2004. Around the time they were dating, and when Brown was speaker of the California State Assembly, Brown appointed Harris to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission. That, apparently, was how Harris “slept her way into and upwards in California politics”: by sitting on two boards.

Well before she dated Brown, Harris was making her own way as a prosecutor, and she succeeded in her career because she was good at it, not because she dated a particular guy for a few months. She started working in the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1990. By the late 1990s, she was recruited by the San Francisco district attorney to work in his office as an assistant DA. And she replaced the man who recruited her because she won an election campaign against him in 2002, not because an ex-boyfriend or anyone else appointed her.

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Not that that matters to right-wingers who are convinced that any woman or person of color who gets ahead can’t possibly have done so through their own merit. “Kamala Harris got her start in politics by sleeping with Willie Brown,” right-wing activist Matt Walsh tweeted. “She became Vice President because Biden needed a non-white female on the ticket. Now she likely becomes the Democratic nominee for president because the guy at the top of the ticket has dementia. She’s made a career out of begging for hand outs from powerful men. A thoroughly unimpressive human being.”

It seems worth saying here that anyone who does well in politics gets a lot of help from a lot of other people. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, was also appointed to a state board by Brown back in 1996, after Newsom volunteered on Brown’s campaign; Newsom has been a Brown protégé ever since. Brown is a notoriously effective political mover and shaker in California, who not only has connections to many influential people but has appointed untold numbers of up-and-comers to various boards and positions over his many years in office. You haven’t heard of most of them, though, because it turns out that a seat on the Medical Assistance Commission is not actually a guaranteed path to fame, power, and the presidency. The idea that Harris’ brief relationship with Brown three decades ago is what catapulted her to the top is as absurd as it is insulting.

So is the idea that she was made vice president simply because Biden wanted a Black woman on the ticket. Joe Biden, it’s worth mentioning, was likely made vice president in part because the Black man running for the presidency wanted a white guy running with him to assuage the fears of white voters; when Hillary Clinton ran for president, she chose a white male running mate for the same reason. Harris will almost surely choose a white person as well, and probably a white man who can appeal to swing-state voters. Donald Trump selected Mike Pence for his first run because he wanted to earn the trust of evangelicals; this time around, he chose J.D. Vance, likely for Vance’s potential strength among working-class whites in the Rust Belt and for Vance’s relative youth.

Those kinds of calculations are standard in politics; vice presidents are routinely chosen because of their skill sets, but also because of their identities. But it’s only when someone outside of the norm is chosen—Harris is the only woman of color to ever be put on the vice presidential ticket of a major party—that accusations of unfairly weaponized identity politics emerge, and are manipulated to suggest that a candidate’s identity playing a role in their selection means that they’re wholly unqualified.

As for handouts from powerful men, well, Trump made his name on the back of his father’s business and wealth, and much of his White House staff and both of his campaigns have been staffed up by unqualified lunatics whose chief qualifications seem to be an unlimited capacity for humiliation and degradation, and an infinite willingness to bend the knee and the law.

Obviously, the attacks on Harris aren’t just laced with vile sexism and derogatory insinuations, including about others she has dated.

At a recent campaign event, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance asked Harris (rhetorically): “What the hell have you done other than collect a government check for the past 20 years?” This racist dog whistle suggests that Harris is some kind of welfare queen living large on the government dime, rather than a lifelong public servant. Never mind that the check Harris is currently collecting is one Vance is gunning for, or that his bills have been paid by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. (Trump, too, engaged in years of tax avoidance, meaning that his bills and lavish lifestyle were heavily subsidized by me, you, and every other American taxpayer.)

The ugliness and hypocrisy don’t stop there. Conservatives are attacking Harris for not having children, and even suggesting that stepparents aren’t real parents, a great way to alienate the nearly 30 percent of American households with step-kin, a group that will include Donald Trump Jr. if he ever gets around to marrying Kimberly Guilfoyle, to whom he has been engaged for nearly four years. And it’s probably not the best strategy to win over the many people who don’t have children, including those 1 in 6 Americans 55 and over.

While Trump has historically done well with men and with white working-class voters, including white working-class women, he has performed dismally with suburban women, women of color, and women with college degrees (white college-educated women were 10 points more likely to vote for Biden than Trump in 2020). Maybe he’s banking on the idea that these voting blocs won’t care if he, his vice president, his surrogates, and his followers smear the potential first female president as an unqualified slut. But given how many American women have been demeaned, discriminated against, denied professional advancement, and otherwise mistreated because of their gender, it’s an awfully risky bet to make.

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