Top aides to Kamala Harris are heading into the final month of the 2024 presidential race still wrestling with how much distance she can credibly claim from Joe Biden as she looks for more ways to weave in breaks with him on the campaign trail.
But she keeps getting pulled back to his side for official business at the White House — and he keeps injecting himself into the conversation.
Harris aides are looking at rolling out new plans and promises for what Harris would do as president, in part to directly demonstrate notable differences, like in her recent more blunt speeches about abortion rights and tackling the southern border.
“The challenge” of having so little time left in such a short race, one adviser to the vice president told CNN, is “when you’re trying to reach undecided low-intensity voters, how do you actually communicate difference with Biden?”
Running as an extension of the president is not a strong position, Harris aides know, while asserting what she stands for is.
Neither aides in the Harris campaign nor the Biden White House would commit to another joint campaign event between now and the election.
Harris wants to create space, top aides say, but not too much space. She wants to be loyal — but she also wants to win. She is still planning to lean on Biden, who is flying to Milwaukee on Tuesday for an event trumpeting more projects made possible by administration efforts, to buck up union members or to park himself in battleground Pennsylvania for political stops in the final weeks. But no one on the vice president’s team is upset that Biden is headed to spend a whole week of October overseas on a non-pressing diplomatic trip to Germany and Angola. Some wish he’d go away for longer.
Part of leading Democrats’ focus on Biden is seeing him as the albatross embodiment for the unsettling feeling spreading among Democrats that the vice president is not — or at least, not yet — where she needs to be to win in just over four weeks. Still haunted by the 2016 election, they’re frustrated and despairing that even now, seemingly no number of Donald Trump’s offensive statements, lies, lack of plans or legal problems can shake his support.
“I’ll go to my grave not understanding why, but I know it’s a fact that this is going to be a margin-of-error race,” is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s line voicing this sentiment on the trail.
The former president and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, are trying to make Harris out to be the incumbent, talking as if she had been the one signing executive orders for the past three years. The balance is tricky for a vice president squeezed between battered voters desperate for change; Republicans responding to her every new proposal by asking why she hasn’t implemented them already; and an incumbent president whose numbers have been going up with some of the core constituencies she needs.
Biden’s and Harris’ separate appearances surveying Hurricane Helene damage on Wednesday is like much of what’s to come: “singing from the same song sheet,” as Biden put it on Friday — but rarely having them side by side.
Even that was a source of tension: Biden’s decision to go to North Carolina earlier in the week meant that Harris had to hold off on her own trip to a state that she is in an intense fight to win.
No issue for Harris is thornier than the escalating violence in the Middle East ahead of the anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks: With hundreds of thousands of votes on the line in battleground Michigan alone, a range of leaders are pushing her to explicitly distance herself from Biden, people familiar with the discussions tell CNN. But her aides know there can’t be any daylight when she’s also sitting at his right hand in the Situation Room.
But the economy remains the most frustrating for them, with voters still complaining about a recovery that keeps coming in stronger than almost any expert predicted. Biden wants the credit, while Harris wants to talk about the pain that people are feeling and how much more there is to be done without being undercut for the suffering on this administration’s watch.
That came to a head in September, when Harris responded to the Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut with a statement about how much more work needs to be done. Then her aides had to spend hours negotiating with their White House counterparts to scale back a victory lap speech Biden planned to give the next day, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Asked what kind of role she would want Biden to have in the last stretch of Harris’ campaign, given how both the situation in Israel and economic frustrations are reverberating through her home state, Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell said, “That’s a complicated question.”
Dingell, a longtime booster of Biden who is once again sounding the alarm in her “blue wall” state, declined to say more.
Internal Harris campaign research on the September presidential debate found that one of the most popular moments for the vice president was when she said, “Clearly, I am not Joe Biden.”
On Friday, after weeks of some junior White House aides complaining to colleagues about having to run statements and other ideas by the campaign, Biden took a different approach.
“She was a major player in everything we’ve done, including the passage of legislation which we were told we could never pass,” Biden said. “She’s been, and her staff is interlocked with mine in terms of all the things we’re doing.”
Aides say Biden’s decision to show up in the White House briefing room for his first time ever as president was aimed at breaking through to Americans a sense of a good week, in holding off more violence in the Middle East, ending the dockworkers’ strike and another strong monthly jobs report. He reveled in laughing dismissively at now-devoted Trump backer Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for calling the jobs numbers “fake.”
Biden aides did not coordinate the surprise appearance with Harris’ campaign, though they did provide a heads-up minutes before.
Harris aides did not find the appearance helpful. It was akin to how they felt on Thursday when Biden edged himself into the news by walking over to reporters so he could praise former Rep. Liz Cheney’s speech endorsing Harris.
The Trump campaign and other high-profile Republicans, meanwhile, immediately pounced on how Biden effectively bigfooted Harris with his briefing room appearance, walking out two minutes after she took the stage at a campaign event in Detroit.
In mid-September, the Democratic research and polling initiative Blueprint conducted a national poll testing a long series of potential statements Harris could make about herself and Biden. Those that performed best, the polling found, “were those that displayed a clear break between her and Biden,” while those that performed worst were “those that portrayed a future Harris administration as building on the accomplishments of the Biden era.”
Any mention of Biden, the polling found, led to less support even if the position it had Harris taking was the same.
Those numbers have made their way around Harris aides.
“She hasn’t been afraid to say in places where she’s different from him. He’s got no problem with that,” said Mitch Landrieu, a former Biden White House infrastructure coordinator who was a co-chair of Biden’s campaign and now has the same role for Harris. “They’ve tried to hang Joe Biden around her negatively, but that has not worked because she is not him — she is clearly younger than him, and she is clearly female.”
Separating from Trump is much less awkward than separating from Biden, and leading Harris supporters in battleground states told CNN that may be the only real way out of what one called “the ultimate balancing act.”
“There’s a clear contrast with Trump, and as much as that clear contrast can be on display, that’s good. Every day that folks are comparing the chaos of Donald Trump to the views and values of Kamala Harris is a good day for Kamala Harris,” said Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. “Joe Biden has delivered a whole lot for Pennsylvania — especially when it comes to infrastructure, energy jobs. Remember: Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a lot more people went to work than under Donald Trump.”
Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle, a longtime close Biden ally who represents a Philadelphia-area district, also urged that kind of focus going forward.
“Every presidential election is about the next four years and not the last four years. Trump has been ever-present on our TV screens for the last decade and, if reelected, would be the oldest president in history. She can credibly say Trump represents the tired, old past while she represents the future,” Boyle said. “She is doing an effective job of claiming the ‘candidate of change’ mantle.”
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly said he was pleased to see how that played out when he joined Harris for last week’s visit to the US-Mexican border, where she met with local officials and delivered a speech that was different in both setting and taking a hard line than anything Biden has done.
“I think it is fair to say that Arizonans want to hear more about this issue, but at the same time, it ultimately needs to be about making smart decisions, decisions that affect the communities,” the Senate Democrat said. “I don’t think president and the vice president are going to be exactly the same on every issue. I think she’s got a smart plan and she’s articulated it well there.”
Harris’ talking about her experience as a former border state attorney general with a plan centered around actually moving forward with a bipartisan law, Kelly said, is what he thinks works.
So while “I’m not focused on looking at the comparison between her and the president,” Kelly said, “there’s a big difference between her and Donald Trump on the issue.”
Biden wants credit and insists he’s not being precious
For Biden, as tends to be the case with him, this final stretch is a swirl of politicking and psychology.
The president remains largely at peace with his decision to drop out of the race this summer — very aware that if Trump wins, his fears for the future of American democracy could be realized, and that his own legacy is on the line as the person who selected and then stepped aside for Harris.
A few weeks ago, Biden said that directly to Harris campaign leadership, noting that he supports her doing whatever she needs to do to win, a person familiar with the conversation told CNN.
Frustrations continue, though. In some corners of the West Wing and beyond, Biden allies can’t help noticing that Trump’s low-intensity schedule; rambling and sometimes stumbling speeches; and frequently misremembered stories don’t get turned on him as evidence of disqualifying incompetence, as happened to Biden in the spring.
Even into recent days, people who have spoken with close Biden advisers told CNN they have heard complaints that the president would be in the same spot or better right now had he stayed in the race.
Several leading Democratic operatives and officials laughed out loud when told by CNN about that sentiment, with one veteran consultant saying, “That’s literally insane.”
A Biden senior adviser told CNN that this is by no means the pervasive feeling in the White House.
The president is not prickly or precious about any breaks Harris does make with him, the adviser said, arguing that he also keeps saying there’s more work to do.
“The president is all in to help get the vice president elected,” the senior adviser said. “He has and will continue to travel to battleground states on her behalf to talk about what he’s experienced with the vice president as a governing partner.”
CNN’s Gregory Krieg contributed to this story.
