No More "Willie Horton's"

Responding to malicious attacks in the presidential race

Vice President Kamala Harris has hit the ground running. By Monday evening, she had enough pledged delegates to be the presumptive nominee as the Democratic candidate for president. Her campaign raised more money in the first 48 hours, most of it from first-time small donors, than any point in history. Her stump speech is already solid, contrasting her role as a former prosecutor and attorney general with Trump’s history and positioning the race as the future vs. the past.¹ Whomever she picks for her running mate in the next week or two, it will be a strong ticket.

Even though her campaign is in its first week, the time for vigilance is upon us. As Tim Alberta wrote this week, the Trump campaign had built their entire strategy around running against an old Biden. They now have to rethink their strategy with Harris as the focus.

It’s going to get ugly fast. Some conservative commentators have gotten surprisingly comfortable with the adjective “colored”. Speaker Johnson has encouraged his members to avoid “race comments” but he is being ignored as they hide behind claims of the “DEI” candidate. Harris is mistakenly being called the “Border Czar” followed by complaints that she didn’t personally go to the southern border (her real charge was a diplomatic one with Central American countries to explore policies that could stem the flow of migrants to the border).

Yesterday, the Bulwark’s Mark Caputo had a piece titled “The Trump Camp is Planning to ‘Willie Horton’ Kamala Harris”.

In the weeks ahead, the Trump campaign is signaling that it plans to focus on a Minnesota bail fund Harris supported while a presidential candidate during the George Floyd protests in 2020; her 2004 refusal to seek the death penalty for a man who murdered a San Francisco police officer; and the decision by her district attorney’s office in 2007 to give probation to a man who went on to commit a brutal assault.

For those who are too young or don’t remember, the infamous “Willie Horton” ad was a major component of the 1988 race between GHW Bush and Michael Dukakis. While Dukakis had other issues in the campaign (attacked for his ACLU card, the ridiculous tank picture, and Bernard Shaw’s horrific question at a presidential debate), the ad played a key role in the late stages of the campaign.

Here’s the background.² William (never Willie) Horton had been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Massachusetts had a work furlough program for prisoners that initially excluded those with life sentences. A judge ruled that there was nothing in the law that allowed that exclusion. When pushed to make a change, Governor Dukakis declined. While on furlough, Horton escaped. Nearly a year later, he attacked a couple in Maryland (not Massachusetts), raping the woman. He was captured by police and sentenced in Maryland to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years.

The ad was produced by Lee Atwater, a harshly conservative political consultant.³ He said, "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis's running mate."

Now I don’t know what the recidivism rate was in 1980s Massachusetts for their furlough program. My guess, based on similar programs across the country, is that it isn’t high. That’s why these diversion programs are positive. But the recidivism rate is not zero.

So in those exceptions where something bad happens, who is at fault? Most likely it is the officials who make a determination about the risk level of offender violence if one was furloughed. But even their best calculations can simply be wrong. What is clear is that it is not the fault of a governor who presides over the state.

The Bush campaign (more correctly, a PAC working alongside the campaign) knew this was not the governor’s fault. They used it anyway and, as they hoped, the news media picked up the story and ran with it.⁴

Brian Beutler echoed Caputo’s argument in his newsletter this morning. He writes:

There’s no instruction manual for combatting relentless bad-faith innuendo or incitement. But it can’t be counterproductive to cement a fair-minded understanding of the games Republicans play before their deceit takes hold. 

This is ultimately why I suspect Harris’s best response to the most mainline Republican smear—that she got promoted to the top of the ticket as a “DEI candidate”—is to articulate its real meaning once, and refer back to that statement by rote. 

The attacks on Harris are coming. They will be fierce. They will be mendacious.

The New York Times and Washington Post will cover them as “Trump attacks”. They might throw in a phrase like “unsupported” or “wrongly accuses”. But they will give the stories oxygen, quoting unnamed Trump officials and victim family members. They will include rebuttals from the Harris campaign but their commitment to “objectivity” will make it seem that these are stories to pay attention to.

They aren’t.

And it’s up to us to say so.

So we need to marshal our facts. Harris is a naturally born citizen. She was qualified to be selected as Vice President.⁵ Yes, Biden said he would select a woman for his VP but he didn’t say he’d pick any random woman. She didn’t have authority over the border.⁶ Yes, there are people she didn’t recommend for the death penalty and I’m sure there is an offender to whom she offered diversion instead of jail who went on to do bad things. But that’s out of thousands of cases she’d oversee as a prosecutor and tens of thousands as California attorney general.

Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed. So when the attack stories show up in the media, ignore them. Or write a letter the editor or use social media to call out their sloppy journalism. When your cousin puts the stories on Facebook, calmly correct the record and ask him to do better.

And go knock on doors or make calls. Tens of thousands of people have volunteered since Sunday. Don’t fall prey to the negative framing. Instead, talk about a campaign looking to the future and not the past⁷, toward inclusion and not exclusion, toward expanding rights as opposed to restricting them.

The point of the Willie Horton type attacks is to 1) distract from the issues, and 2) keep the focus off things like Project 2025. Don’t let them.

1. It’s long been evident that Trump’s views of the world solidified in the 1980s.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton

3. Who once shared offices with Paul Manafort and Roger Stone

4. Just like “her emails”

5. Way more experienced in politics and leadership than JD Vance

6. Border crossings are at levels not seen in years (not counting COVID)

7. I saw on X this morning that “Won’t Go Back” is being floated as a rejoinder to “Make America Great Again”.