GOP suspected in 'weird' attacks on Kamala Harris on Spanish-language radio

Callers and guests have been ferociously attacking vice president Kamala Harris on Spanish-language radio programs, and Florida Democrats believe it's a coordinated campaign to weaken her popularity with Latino voters.

Miami-based Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi sounded the alarm about "weird" calls on talk radio shows that appear to be scripted and seemingly came out of nowhere, because Harris isn't especially controversial among the state's Democratic voters, who tend to focus on president Joe Biden or the party at large, reported Politico.

“The fact that I'm having to raise this alarm, that it's not coming directly from a Democratic organization or even the folks out of Washington, I think is a sign of concern,” Amandi said.

The callers and guests complain that Harris too ineffective and unprepared to become president, along with plainly sexist or racists criticism, such as claiming her Jamaican and Indian heritage would cause her to prioritize Black Americans over Latinos.

Amandi said he changed the dial to another station and heard another caller making nearly identical claims.

"‘This is the woman who's done nothing,'" Amandi said, quoting the caller. "It was a different person than was on the other [station], and I was like, ‘Oh God, they got a phone bank.’”

Politico recorded and reviewed several segments and heard the same thing Amandi did, with one man describing the vice president “inefficient” and “disappointing,” and complaining that she “doesn’t do nothing at all," and one of the website's reporters heard callers on other Miami-based Spanish-language programs using similar language.

“It's not like you get 10 calls every day -- it's not like that," said veteran morning radio host Roberto Rodríguez Tejera, who has also noticed an uptick in anti-Harris calls. "You get a couple of calls here, a couple of calls there. That’s how the phone banks begin that [have] worked. But it's a trend that you see that is growing by the day; is growing by the week.”

Rodríguez suspects Republicans are behind the attacks, but a spokesperson for the state's GOP declined to comment.

“They're starting early," said Sasha Tirador, a Democratic operative in Florida. "[They] must begin to attack her now and make her look like a demon, and the problem with that is that the Democratic Party doesn't realize that this narrative is being born in Miami-Dade County, and it will spread to other Hispanics across the U.S."