Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has backed away from President Biden in the final days of the 2024 election, viewing the unpopular incumbent as a liability in her quest to succeed him, according to several White House and Harris campaign officials familiar with the planning.
Officials on Ms. Harris’s campaign think that holding joint events with Mr. Biden would “only hurt her” at the most crucial stage of the race, as one adviser put it. That leaves Mr. Biden, who has expressed an interest in helping campaign for her in the coming days, left to arrange his own events through trade groups and unions.
By all accounts, the vice president has been unflinchingly loyal to the 81-year-old president whose campaign she took over three months ago. She has declined to put much space between her policies and his, and has been careful to show deference, even in moments where she could have broken away.
“Vice President Harris is grateful for President Biden’s support and appreciates that he is campaigning for her,” said Ian Sams, a campaign spokesman.
But personal loyalty is now just one dimension of their complex relationship.
In recent weeks, Ms. Harris has quietly added some new questions to her daily round of calls to outside allies and advisers, a regular routine she has kept up for much of her career to make sure she is taking the pulse of what is happening outside her immediate bubble.
She has gingerly peppered people who are close to Mr. Biden with questions about the president’s mind-set and his emotional and physical health as Election Day draws nearer: “How do you think he’s doing?” she will ask, according to two people briefed on those calls.
Over the weekend, the difference between the vice president’s campaign schedule and the president’s could not have been starker.
Ms. Harris appeared with the pop superstar Beyoncé at a rally on Friday in Texas with tens of thousands of people, and then joined the political superstar Michelle Obama on Saturday at another event, in Michigan. On Saturday, Mr. Biden traveled to Pittsburgh to participate in a get-out-the-vote event with the Laborers’ International Union of North America, speaking to members in a union hall with barely 100 supporters. His team is also hoping to get him out onto the trail in support of Democratic Senate candidates in Maryland and Delaware, according to people familiar with his planning.
“I’ve done a lot of surrogacy, but the fact of the matter is, I’ve always had to be president at the same time,” Mr. Biden told reporters in Delaware on Monday.
One close ally of Mr. Biden’s, who insisted on anonymity to preserve relationships, said the president understood that the campaign wanted “Beyoncé, not Biden.” Another ally of Mr. Biden’s said it was simply more complicated to schedule events for a sitting president than for other surrogates.
Mr. Biden still believes that he could have beaten former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Harris’s Republican rival, but is not saying it as often in his private conversations, according to the two allies.
When he is briefed on polling numbers, the president expresses a mix of frustration, disbelief and anger that the race is so close. He believes, as he did in 2022, that Democrats will have a better-than-expected showing on Election Day, but the polls reflecting a dead-heat race are part of the reason he wants to hit the trail to help Ms. Harris.
Mr. Biden also understands that the surest way his legacy thrives is if Ms. Harris wins. If she loses to Mr. Trump, one friend said, “it will kill him.” Mr. Biden and his advisers believe that he has a place in the campaign, and that he can still appeal to middle-class white voters and help drive home a character contrast between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump.
White House officials note that the president has done more to help Ms. Harris under the radar than is easily evident. Last week, he recorded video appeals to the campaign’s donors. Emails and text fund-raising appeals by Mr. Biden are set to be delivered next week. On two days last week, he delivered remarks to organizers from 173 union locals in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Mr. Biden’s official, non-campaign events can also serve to help Ms. Harris. On Friday, he apologized to Native Americans in Arizona for abuse of Indigenous children in boarding schools from the early 1800s to the late 1960s, delivering a popular message to key voters in a battleground state.
But Harris campaign officials are holding him at arm’s length, in large part because the vice president is trying to present herself as a change candidate and cannot do that easily next to Mr. Biden.
There is also wariness about what Mr. Biden will say or do when he is on the trail. He told supporters on Tuesday at a local Democratic campaign office in New Hampshire, “We got to lock him up,” a reference to Mr. Trump. He quickly backtracked, saying he meant the former president should be locked up “politically,” but the remarks “were not received well” within the campaign, according to two people briefed on the reaction of campaign officials.
Some of the party’s most senior strategists said they believed Ms. Harris had no choice but to distance herself from Mr. Biden because she does not want voters to think of her as merely a continuation of his administration — even if that hurts the president’s feelings.
Mr. Biden made no secret of his desire to run for re-election, and stepped aside only after his closest allies and many of his voters demanded he be sidelined — an outcome he and members of his inner circle are still smarting over. Now, as the race is nearing its end, he is facing another unwanted reality: that he is not as much help to Ms. Harris as he would like to be.
His approval rating has been between 35 and 40 percent for much of his presidency. And concerns about his age — he will turn 82 next month — forced him to abandon his re-election bid this summer.
“If I were running the Harris campaign, the last thing I would want to do is try to make this campaign about Joe Biden,” said Doug Sosnik, a veteran Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000. “And of course I would not want him out campaigning.”
The president has ceded the spotlight in other ways. On Tuesday, when Ms. Harris delivers a speech from Washington highlighting her campaign’s closing argument, the president will not be in attendance, according to a White House official.
Ms. Harris is not the first nominee to grapple with the question of how — and whether — to make use of an incumbent president during a highly contested presidential race.
In 2000, Al Gore, then the vice president, made it clear that he did not want to campaign with Mr. Clinton, in part because Republicans were attacking the president’s morality in the wake of the scandal involving Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern.
Despite that controversy, in which Mr. Clinton eventually acknowledged having sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, the president’s approval rating had risen to above 60 percent by the time Mr. Gore was running to succeed him. Yet Mr. Gore distanced himself from Mr. Clinton on the day he announced his campaign, and went weeks at a time without talking to the president or appearing next to him.
Former aides to Mr. Gore have said he believed campaigning with Mr. Clinton would have only played into the Republican attacks. But many Democratic strategists have lamented the decision, especially after Mr. Gore lost to George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, by just a few hundred votes.
“Gore’s strategy of icing Clinton out of his campaign led to the worst of all worlds — he got none of the benefits of the high approval that the public had for Clinton’s presidency,” Mr. Sosnik said.
“And in Gore’s case, it should have been easy to navigate,” he added. “To the extent that Clinton had baggage, it all had to do with his personal conduct and nothing to do with his performance as president.”
Mr. Biden and his advisers want it to be known that he is still popular among voters who could help deliver Ms. Harris to victory. As a president who spent nearly a half-century confident in his political prowess, Mr. Biden does not want this final campaign to end with him sitting on the sidelines.
On Sunday, the White House announced that he would travel to Philadelphia on Friday to deliver remarks on his administration’s “historic support for unions,” according to the advisory.
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement that Mr. Biden “knows that every president needs to ‘cut their own path,’ and he will continue to coordinate with the campaign on where and how he can be helpful, like he has done in recent days mobilizing the labor unions he has worked with for decades.”
The post Harris Campaign Distances Itself From Biden in the Crucial Final Days appeared first on New York Times.
