Schumer says ‘senior Republican’ told him Democrats will win after Trump’s comments on Harris’ race

Republicans are “embarrassed” that former President Donald Trump is questioning whether Vice President Kamala Harris is Black, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer said Thursday.

“I had one senior Republican colleague saying to me this morning, ‘I guess now you’re going to win the election,’ after he heard Trump last night,” the New York Democrat told reporters at a press conference.

Mr. Trump has inaccurately suggested Ms. Harris, who is multiracial, avoided identifying herself as Black until recently.

“She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday at the Annual Convention and Career Fair in Chicago.

He has doubled down on the claim in social media posts.

Ms. Harris has sometimes mentioned one part of her heritage but not the other at specific moments. But it has always been an open public fact that she has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.

Republican lawmakers mostly have avoided directly criticizing Mr. Trump, suggesting their party focus on policy issues and not personal attacks.

“I wish we’d talk more about her failed policies,” Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, said of Mr. Trump’s presumed Democratic opponent in November.

“She owns all the failed policies in the Biden-Harris administration. And she’s taken the most extreme positions you can possibly imagine. And now she is in the process of disavowing them,” he said.

But Mr. Cornyn, who is running to lead Senate Republicans next Congress, acknowledged Mr. Trump may not heed that suggestion.

“Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” he said. “I don’t think he’s looking for my advice or anybody else’s advice on how to run his campaign.”

Mr. Schumer suggested Mr. Trump is acting out because his polling edge has dropped — or disappeared in the case of some swing states — since Ms. Harris took over the Democratic ticket from President Biden.

“The lower Trump gets in the polls, the more unhinged he gets,” Mr. Schumer said. “The American people will be able to see that.”