Nikki Haley says Harris is Democrats’ ‘weakest candidate’ – but DEI attacks ‘aren’t helpful’

Former GOP presidential candidate and one-time UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said Republicans trying to paint Vice President Kamala Harris as a "DEI" candidate are not helping Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Haley made the comments on Thursday during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper.

She suggested that Republicans focus on Harris’s policies and her past as a politician in their criticisms, not her skin color or her gender. “It’s not helpful,” Haley said. “There’s so many issues we can talk about when it comes to Kamala Harris that it doesn’t matter what she looks like. It matters what she’s said, what she’s fought for, and the lack of results that she’s had because of it.”

Haley offered her own criticisms of Harris, saying the vice president was the "weakest candidate" the Democrats could have picked to replace Joe Biden, who announced his departure from the 2024 race on Sunday.

“She is much more progressive than Joe Biden ever was,” Haley said. “So, the fact they put in Kamala Harris – kudos for putting in someone younger – the fact that you put in one of the most liberal politicians you probably could have put in, it’s going to be an issue.”

Some Republicans have opted to focus on Harris' person, rather than her policies, in their attacks. Trump running mate Senator JD Vance attacked women such as Harris and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for not having children and, in his estimation no "direct stake" in the future of the US.

"We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too," Vance said in the 2021 clip from Tucker Carlson's Fox News show.

He continued, explaining his disdain for Americans who do not have children of their own.

"And it's just a basic fact, if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children," he said. "And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it."

Vance's opinions are not in line with the Constitution, which does not differentiate between Americans with children and those without. Even if it was, Vance is wrong about Harris — she is a stepmother.

Harris' stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, 25, responded to the video of Vance — which went viral this week — by posting to Instagram that she considers the vice president a third parent.

"How can you be 'childless' when you have cutie pie kids like cole and I," she wrote on Thursday. "I love my three parents."

Kerstin Emhoff, who is the ex-wife of Harris's husband, Doug Emhoff, also voiced her belief that the vice president is just as much as parent as any biological parent.

"These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I," she wrote in a statement to CNN on Wednesday. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

According to the US Census Bureau, approximately 40 percent of American families are blended with at least one partner having a child from a previous relationship before marriage. That's a lot of people who, in Vance's estimation, aren't real parents.

Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren shared similar sentiments to Haley during a recent segment on Fox News. She said conservatives attacking Harris about her motherhood and suggesting she is a "DEI" candidate because she is black and a woman may be alienating to a massive portion of the electorate.

"The attacks on her personally on whatever her past personally may have been or calling her a childless lady, none of those are going to work," she said. "They are going to make women second-guess their support for what they may have felt for Donald Trump. Bad move."