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On Friday, two minutes after Kamala Harris walked on stage at a campaign event in Detroit, Joe Biden decided to do something he has never done as president: he walked into the White House press briefing room. Cable news shifted immediately to the moment, with Biden chuckling as he introduced himself to the media, touted the jobs report and took questions. The moment was astonishing not just because Biden has operated at such a remove from the public eye since he was replaced as the Democratic nominee, but because it seemed intentionally designed to distract from his vice president and remind everyone that he’s still around, and yes, for all his struggles, still technically president.
This is an awfully inconvenient truth for the Kamala Harris campaign, which has been noticeably struggling in recent weeks. The ebullient joy among Democratic partisans hasn’t transferred to the wider populace. The challenges of events both world- and weather-related has distracted from the culture war and generational shift narrative Team Harris wanted to be advancing at this point. And Tim Walz’s horrific performance in his vice-presidential debate represents at best a missed opportunity, at worst an embarrassment that helped JD Vance find his footing and couldn’t even dodge the mockery of the partisans at Saturday Night Live.
Edward Isaac-Dovere writes at CNN on the core problem: Harris wants to claim credit for all the good and none of the bad, and she’d really like to pretend Joe Biden isn’t the president and she isn’t his vice president right now — because both things hurt her in the polls:
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.” ...
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.
The political coup that elevated Harris and replaced Biden, engineered by Nancy Pelosi and the most powerful elements of the Democratic Party, was widely seen as rescuing the promise of Democrats in 2024. But now, just a few months later, there’s a palpable concern that this move might prove to be a mistake. Should Harris-Walz lose a state like Pennsylvania and go down to defeat, the question on the minds of many will be: was Joe Biden really so unpopular that he couldn’t win again? Were we really right to trust the party to someone who’d already proved her severe limitations as a candidate? If Harris fails, the revisionism about this summer could reach incredible heights.
Maybe none of these concerns will matter. Maybe Harris, despite her defects, will prevail and be remembered as a game change candidate who worked. But at the moment, her campaign sure isn’t behaving as if they are sure of this destiny. This week brings a dramatic change in strategy with a slew of Harris sit-downs with friendly interviewers in part to draw distinctions from the current president — including Call Her Daddy, Stephen Colbert, Howard Stern and The View. Is this what you do with less than a month to go in a campaign if you’re confident you are winning? The answer is: no.
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