The Republican National Committee pushed back Friday evening against Sen. Tim Kaine's, D-Va., claim that Donald Trump shares values with the Ku Klux Klan, and accused Hillary Clinton's running mate of further degrading the 2016 election.

"Tim Kaine sunk to new lows with dirty and deplorable attacks which have no place in this campaign. No matter how desperate he is to distract from his running mate Hillary Clinton's litany of corruption scandals, there is no excuse for these vile and baseless smears," RNC chair Reince Priebus said in a statement.

Kaine warned a crowd of supporters in Tallahassee, Fla., that Trump is legitimizing and giving voice to white nationalist groups.

"Ku Klux Klan values, David Duke values, Donald Trump values are not American values," he said at a campaign event on the campus of Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University in Tallahassee, Fla. "They're not our values, and we got to do all we can to fight to push back and win."

When it comes to equality, he continued, Donald Trump "has a different point of view."

"You've heard during the campaign," Kaine said, "he has ridiculed people with disabilities. He has ridiculed people if they were of Mexican-American origin. He has said that anybody who is Muslim should be treated as second class religiously. That's not the way we do things in this country. It's not the way we do things."

The Virginia senator's comments in Florida come amid a push by the Clinton campaign to link Trump to some of the U.S.' most notorious racist groups, including the Klan.

The Trump campaign also responded Friday evening to Kaine's remarks, and blamed policies like the ones championed by the senator for causing the most harm to minority voters.

"Tim Kaine's policies are responsible for the economic suffering in so many of our inner cities, and for preventable violence that takes too many young lives. Like Hillary Clinton, his policies have produced only more poverty, joblessness, and failing schools. He is part of the Wall Street machine and rigged system that is betraying and failing minority communities in this country, while grinding Americans down to keep enriching himself and his friends," the GOP nominee's campaign said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner.

"These repulsive and repugnant lies perpetrated by a desperate Clinton-Kaine campaign are nothing more than flailing attacks from failed politicians unable to defend their abysmal records, and seeking to deny Americans the change they deserve. It's the lies and cynicism of Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine versus the hope and optimism of Donald J. Trump and Mike Pence," the statement added.

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This article has been updated.