By Suzanne Bowdey

While some Republicans take a premature victory lap over Joe Biden’s exit from the November race, others are warning that beating his vice president isn’t the slam dunk they think it is. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is the latest to sound the alarm that conservatives may be taking the threat of Kamala Harris too lightly. “Republicans, I worry, vastly underestimate Kamala Harris,” he cautioned on his Monday podcast. The worst thing the GOP can be at this point is “overconfident.” Especially when she has the entire mainstream media establishment behind her.

“When you or I bring up Kamala Harris’s name in Republican circles, people laugh,” the Texan pointed out. “It’s immediately a punchline.” But to some Americans, the promotion of Harris as a “historic” candidate will resonate. “I think people are underestimating what billions of dollars of free media [from] the entire corrupt corporate media complex, [who will pitch] her as a combination of Mother Teresa, Oprah and Gandhi.”

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Cruz felt uneasy. “I was very worried at the [RNC] convention,” Cruz admitted. “… There was an air of celebration. It was, ‘We’ve won. We’re on to victory. This is a landslide. Trump’s coming back in. We’ve got a huge Republican majority.’” His advice? “Celebrate after Election Day. Celebrate after we’ve won. Now is not the time for celebration. Now is the time for hard work.”

Some of that “hard work” includes making sure voters know exactly what they’re voting for in Harris, a radical Democrat that ranks as more extreme than even maverick Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). According to a congressional survey from 2019, when Harris was in office, GovTrack broke down the senators on ideology and found that in the list of all 100, the former California attorney general clocked in at #100, “winning the title of the most leftist senator.” Sanders was #99.

The researchers assigned a score based on their “legislative behavior by whether they sponsor and cosponsor overlapping sets of bills and resolutions with other Members of Congress.” The breakdown found that Harris “joined bipartisan bills ‘the least often compared to Senate Democrats,’ as just 15 percent of the bills she cosponsored were introduced by a non-Democrat.” That may help explain her universal unpopularity, which forced her out of the Democratic primary before anyone else in 2020.

Still, despite her abject failures as a border czar and her general incompetence as Biden’s second-in-command, Harris raised an astonishing amount of money in the early hours of the president’s withdrawal. According to the campaign, she raked in an eye-popping $100 million in the first two days, including $80-plus million in the first 24 hours across the “Harris campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and joint fundraising committees,” CBS reported.

Dan McLaughlin, senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a senior writer at National Review Online, believes that this, coupled with the Democrats’ relief that Biden isn’t running, will make Harris a more formidable force than Republicans believe. “We should not write off the menace of a Kamala Harris presidency simply because she has proven herself shallow and inept as a vice president,” he warned in his column this week. “On the one hand, there’s the Harris we saw as California attorney general, a senator, and a presidential candidate. That Harris was a dangerous authoritarian with an unlimited appetite for power who displayed contempt for the Constitution and no regard for the rights, dignity, faith, or reputations of anyone in her way.”

Then, he points out, “On the other hand, there’s the Harris we have seen as vice president: bluntly, an idiot. That Harris is a figure of fun and hardly seems in danger of accomplishing anything.” The bottom line, he argues, is that Kamala “is a menace to the American system. Her advancement to the presidency would be a terrifying prospect for liberty and law.”

In a conversation on “Washington Watch” with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Tuesday, Dan went deeper, digging into the ways she’s used her executive power to subvert the law. “I mean, she’s certainly maximized the power that she had, both as AG and as a senator. It remains to be seen whether she could fully operate those levers as president. But I think she’s much more menacing in that role than she is now. … But if she has the power, I think she will surround herself with people who know how to use it … and intend to use it ruthlessly.”

Perkins agreed, pointing out that people may be “misled by her verbal gaffes and the nonsensical stuff that she says. She’s actually a pretty astute political operative when you look at what she has done with the power that she has had at different times.” Case in point, Dan reminded people, “She’s supported court-packing openly during her presidential run. … She was on the Senate Judiciary Committee, [where she was really] slash and burn. I mean, she grilled one nominee over his belonging to the Knights of Columbus, which is, you know, completely mainstream Catholic organization. So Harris is somebody who is going to care a lot about the courts, a lot about stocking it with real hard-edge progressive activists.”

At the same time, McLaughlin said, she does have challenges. “I don’t think she’s actually a very good candidate. [In] her first run for office, she got 46% of the vote statewide in California, which is not great for a Democrat [in] her one election to the Senate [when] the California system kept any Republican off the ballot. And when she ran for president, she got massacred and had to drop out very, very early. But there will be a lot of institutional and financial efforts put behind her to rally the Democratic base. … Certainly she doesn’t have the age vulnerability of Biden,” he noted. “So, they’re going to come out with a certain amount of vigor and probably a little bit of a honeymoon on the campaign, just from the relief of being able to move on from Biden.”

She has little to zero respect for religious freedom, the rights of pro-lifers, or simply due process of law, he reiterated. “She can say [she] was tough on crime, but I think some of her actions since then undercut that, as well as some of the things that she’s supported the Biden administration doing, whether it be in immigration law or other areas.”

So what’s driving the money haul, Perkins asked? “Is this just because [Democrats] have no other option? Or is this because they feel like this is all being driven just by a hatred of Donald Trump? I mean, it doesn’t seem like she has a strong political constituency.” It’s puzzling, Dan agreed. “Harris, if you look from the very beginning of the Biden administration, has been very consistently in polling more unpopular than Biden, more unpopular than Trump, more unpopular than just about any other major figure in national politics. There are clear majorities who have disapproved of her from the beginning, so she is going to have a lot of work to do to be able to repair that particularly in the handful of Midwestern swing states [like] Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that are almost certain to decide this election.”

Part of that is “her political profile as a true California progressive, who is kind of out of step with the rest of the country,” he explained. “And part of it is personality. … She comes across as sort of condescending and I would say more forced than artificial, but a little bit artificial. She’s somebody who kind of puts on what feels like an act.”

It all points for the need for the GOP to take House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) advice: “We have to run like we’re 10 points behind,” he told Perkins recently, “as you do in any campaign.”

At the end of the day, “I still think Trump wins in November,” Cruz predicted, “but this is not a layup. It is not given. … If you’re a Democrat, what makes you nervous is chaos, and this much chaos 100 days out is scary. But you know what? Even more scary is going to an election where you’re almost certain to lose, which is where Biden was.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.