Joe Biden becomes a thorn in the Harris campaign’s side

As Hurricane Milton battered Florida last week, Kamala Harris did her best to look and sound presidential. The vice president hosted a live broadcast with the leadership of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She then called into CNN, live, to reassure Americans that her administration was tackling the crisis. The message was meant to be clear: she’s got this. 

Alas, Joe Biden also wanted to show that he’s in charge and that muddled matters. On Friday, the actual commander-in-chief gave an emergency press conference about the disaster from the White House briefing room, which rather overshadowed Harris’s big rally that day in the critical swing state of Michigan. 

Joe and his wife Jill are said to still be secretly fuming about the way he was forced to move aside

Harris and Biden are not, it seems, singing from the same electoral hymn sheet. The disharmony is starting to make itself heard. Last week, Harris also attacked Florida governor Ron DeSantis for being “selfish” in his response to Milton. Poor Joe hadn’t got the memo. He praised DeSantis for his “gracious” and “co-operative” response. 

Such mix-ups are partly inevitable, of course: vice presidents running for the top job are eager to use the power of incumbency to bolster their appeal, but the actual incumbent tends to get in the way. We saw similar overlap issues with Al Gore and Bill Clinton in 2000 and George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan in 1988. 

But the unprecedented nature of Harris’s elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket makes her Biden problem even more awkward. Ever since he was unceremoniously bumped out of the 2024 race over the summer, Biden has done his best to sound supportive. “I promise I’ll be the best volunteer Harris and Walz’s camp have ever seen,” he told the Democratic convention in late August.

But he’s conspicuously failing in that mission. That’s partly down to his declining mental health: he often seems to have no idea what he is saying, which makes “message discipline” a challenge.

Yet there’s mounting evidence of bad blood between Team Joe and Team Kamala. “The White House is lacking someone in the room thinking first and foremost about how things would affect the campaign,” grumbled one Harris aide to Axios over the weekend. There are growing tensions between senior retained members of the Biden-Harris campaign and the newer Harris-Walz staffers.

The two groups have clashing priorities. In order to protect his legacy, Team Biden wants to boast about the resilience of the American economy. In order to win, Team Harris wishes to address voter concerns about the lingering harms of inflation. She keeps saying “it’s time to turn the page” on the failed politics of the past. But Biden’s staff see the glaring flaw in that slogan: Biden and Harris have been in power for almost four years. She is the page she wants to turn.    

In recent days, the Harris campaign has been struggling on any number of fronts. The “internal numbers” in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin reportedly show Harris falling further behind than public polls indicate. To address that slippage, Harris went on a media “blitz,” yet that misfired because she is so bad at answering difficult questions. 

It’s increasingly evident, too, that Harris-Walz campaign is losing ground with lower-income male and non-white voters. Barack Obama duly went to Pittsburgh last week to scold his “brothers” for being insufficiently excited about the possibility of electing a mixed-race woman to the White House. But it’s never a good idea to accuse your own supporters of sexism. Obama’s intervention only added to whispers of panic in high Democratic circles.

The serving president is not helping, clearly. Joe and his wife Jill are widely said to still be secretly fuming about the way he was forced to move aside. The Bidens are proud people and the president’s wife has reportedly distrusted Harris ever since 2019, when she attacked her man on the Democratic presidential primary debate stage. As a campaign flounders, hidden animosities have tendency to bubble up. We can be sure that, if Harris loses, Team Joe will not be able to resist making the argument that he would have beaten Donald Trump.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.