Vice President Kamala Harris will try to use her debate on Tuesday against former President Donald J. Trump to argue that Americans are ready to turn the page on the politics of the past decade, with its turmoil and social animus.
But Mr. Trump, standing just feet away, is likely to make a different case: He is expected to try to paint Ms. Harris, the sitting vice president, as the candidate of the status quo.
The debate will pose a challenge for Ms. Harris, who will have to decide how much to embrace or distance herself from President Biden and his policies at a moment when polls show that many Americans are hungry for change. It is a conundrum other vice presidents have faced while seeking the presidency, and Ms. Harris’s allies said she would have to tread carefully as she makes a case for herself.
“She can praise Biden and talk about the accomplishments, but also acknowledge that the work is not done,” said Bakari Sellers, an ally of Ms. Harris and a Democratic political commentator. “So she has to be willing to display to the American people a level of empathy and understanding, and not simply say everything we did was God’s gift to politics.”
A recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College highlighted the difficult task Ms. Harris faces. It found that 61 percent of likely voters said the next president should represent a major change from Mr. Biden. Only 25 percent said Ms. Harris represented that change, while 53 percent said Mr. Trump did.
One of the most glaring vulnerabilities for the vice president is an economy that is stable but whose benefits many voters say they cannot feel. The poll found that Mr. Trump held a 13-percentage-point advantage on the economy, the issue that was cited as the most important to voters.
Mr. Biden championed and pushed through legislation to modernize the country’s infrastructure and pull the economy out of a pandemic spiral, but in recent years he has presided over a period of high inflation, with voters feeling pinched by higher costs of living.
Ms. Harris’s advisers have pointed out that she has already introduced some policies that they hope will make her appealing to voters and to members of the business community, and strike a subtle contrast with Mr. Biden.
But they also say that the contrast Ms. Harris cares about striking is the one between herself and Mr. Trump. She has embraced her past as a prosecutor as a strength in her ability to take on the former president. And she has focused much of her campaign message on preserving personal freedoms rather than on democracy, an idea Mr. Biden had championed.
Last week, Ms. Harris said she would increase the capital gains tax at a far lower rate than what the president had proposed. (On Friday, dozens of business leaders, including the billionaire Mark Cuban and the former 21st Century Fox chairman James Murdoch, signed a letter of support for her.)
She has also floated a $25,000 benefit to help first-time buyers break into the housing market. That benefit was first proposed by Mr. Biden, but Ms. Harris has embraced it and made it a major feature of her plan to combat high housing costs and appeal to young voters who feel shut out of the market.
At every turn, Ms. Harris has been careful not to criticize the administration she works for or the president she serves. In person, she and the president have telegraphed that they have a close relationship.
Last week, Mr. Biden joined her on the campaign trail, holding her hand and kissing her forehead at a union event in Pittsburgh. “Can we please give it up again for our president, Joe Biden,” Ms. Harris said, careful to give Mr. Biden, who last fall became the first sitting president to join a picket line, his due in front of a crucial audience.
Before he decided to end his campaign and support her in July, Mr. Biden had private reservations about Ms. Harris’s ability to win the presidency, and he had expressed those concerns to advisers and allies. In recent weeks, though, he has been encouraged to see the surge in support for her, two allies said.
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement that Mr. Biden “has always had unwavering faith in her leadership and ability to win. That’s why he passionately endorsed her out of the gate, rejecting other approaches that would divide the party.”
Allies have described the president’s feelings about stepping aside as bittersweet. His approval rating has spiked since Ms. Harris entered the race — which his advisers see as evidence that his policies have always been popular.
“More Americans are recognizing that he led us successfully out of a series of crises and is planting the seeds for a prosperous future,” Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, told Fox News last week.
Still, Ms. Harris and her advisers are girding for a variety of debate attacks — including over her ties to Mr. Biden. The president has struggled to address voter concerns on domestic issues, including the economy and migration, and on foreign-policy crises, including the Israel-Gaza war.
Publicly, Mr. Trump and his advisers have long made an influx of migrants a central focus of their attacks against Democrats. Though border crossings along the southwestern tip of the United States are at their lowest level in years, they reached record highs earlier in Mr. Biden’s presidency.
Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have both repeatedly said that Mr. Trump should bear some of the blame for the migrant crisis, since he helped torpedo bipartisan legislation that would have amounted to the strictest restrictions on immigration in years.
Early in the administration, the president gave Ms. Harris the task of assessing the root causes of migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — a portfolio item that her allies have long believed was a no-win assignment, and one that her opponents are now using to attack her.
Robert Shrum, a longtime Democratic political strategist, said Ms. Harris was unlikely to explicitly criticize the president, even on issues where the administration is unpopular. “The frame, instead, should be, and I think probably will be, ‘A lot done, a lot more to do,’” he said.
He cited the example of the presidential campaign that George H.W. Bush ran while serving as President Ronald Reagan’s vice president.
“Bush never criticized Reagan ever, but he talked about ‘a thousand points of light,’ and ‘a kinder, gentler nation,’” Mr. Shrum said. “There was a contrast there that was not explicit, but that people understood.”
Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat of Texas who has criticized the Biden administration’s handling of migration, said Ms. Harris must do a “threading of the needle” on Tuesday, explaining why she has changed some of her policy positions over time.
“She’s now running to the middle, because it is the November election,” Mr. Cuellar said. “She’s got to say, ‘I’m still with the Biden administration, but I’m still my own person.’ And then she’s got to articulate where she stands on some of those things.”
Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s former chief of staff, said Ms. Harris would need go on the offensive with some of the issues where she has stronger footing than Mr. Trump. He said she should hammer Mr. Trump on abortion rights — according to the Times/Siena poll, Ms. Harris holds a 15-percentage-point advantage on that issue — and show viewers who don’t know much about her that she would be ready to lead if she wins in November.
“I think she needs to convey that she’s ready to be president on Day 1,” Mr. Klain said. “And she has to show voters that she cares about their problems.”
A challenge — and an opportunity — highlighted by the poll is that more than a quarter of voters feel they need to learn more about her, while only 9 percent said the same of Mr. Trump. Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said that on Tuesday night the former president would tie Ms. Harris to what she said were “the Biden-HARRIS administration’s failed policies,” writing the vice president’s name in capital letters for emphasis.
“Kamala Harris is not the candidate for change nor is she the candidate of the future,” Ms. Leavitt said in a statement. “Kamala Harris is the Vice President right NOW, and whether she likes it or not, she is responsible for the economic, immigration, and foreign policy crises over the past four years.”
In a statement, Kevin Munoz, a Harris campaign spokesman, said Mr. Trump “represents everything Americans disdain about our politics,” and characterized Ms. Harris as “the best person to represent all Americans, regardless of party or background, as president.”
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