Wishing he could do more, Biden fades into campaign’s background

Joe Biden views Kamala Harris’ potential victory as a critical part of his presidential legacy. But in the final days of a hard-fought and incredibly close race, he has little role in her campaign.

On Friday, he’ll travel to Arizona, one of the seven swing states set to decide who wins the White House. But the visit will take Biden to the Gila River Indian Community outside of Phoenix to offer a historic apology for the role that the U.S. government played in Native American boarding schools, including the separation of children from their parents.

Although aides close to Biden see these final trips as critical in cementing a lasting legacy, the timing in the run-up to the election only underlines how tangential he has become to the vice president’s campaign. That timing — not to mention the president’s more granular focus on policy — seemingly ensures that his events will be overshadowed by Harris, who will speak about abortion rights in Texas on Friday, as well as Donald Trump and others playing a bigger role on the trail.

“It’s not about Biden’s feelings. It’s about winning. And the Harris campaign is being very strategic about how they use the president,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.

“Harris’ whole pitch is ‘a new way forward,’” Belcher added. “If Biden is on the main stage with her at rallies, it just brings back a conversation that is not ‘forward.’ And that would be a mistake.”

Despite Harris’ efforts to run on her own ideas and forward-looking message, she has struggled at times to separate herself from the president, offering repeated assurances that she would not be a continuation of the Biden presidency but no specific policy areas where she would break from him.

And in the final days of the campaign, Harris is centering her closing message on a Biden preoccupation: the threat Trump poses to democracy. Even so, there are no current plans for Harris and Biden to campaign together before the election, according to three White House and campaign officials. Biden is slated to make a campaign appearance in Pittsburgh on Saturday.

The duo has appeared together at several official events in recent weeks — including as part of the White House’s response to a pair of hurricanes and Iran’s attack on Israel — but made only two joint campaign appearances away from the White House. After the national party convention in August, Biden signaled that he would be comfortable doing whatever the Harris team wanted — even if he privately has said he thinks he could do more, according to two of the officials.

While Harris has dramatically ratcheted up the pace of her campaigning in recent weeks, Biden has largely focused, just as he did in advance of the 2022 midterms, on official events designed to showcase the administration’s accomplishments.

That includes a trip to Milwaukee earlier this month to announce a new plan to replace all lead pipes within a decade and Tuesday’s visit to Concord, New Hampshire, where he was joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other lawmakers to tout Democrats’ attempts to lower prescription drug prices.

Biden has effusively praised and, at times, even shown physical affection toward Harris. He has voiced an understanding that she needs to cut her own political path. And he has sprinkled references to her throughout his speeches about administration accomplishments, which he describes as resulting from the work of “Kamala and I.”

“I don’t think it’s all that useful to the campaign,” said one Democratic operative close to the campaign who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But there’s really not anything he can do to help at this point. Maybe some of these events around policy accomplishments make a difference on the margins. But at best, they’re probably a wash.”

Inside the White House, some aides who’d worked on planning the prescription drug pricing event missed the president’s remarks because they never showed up on the “quad” monitors in several West Wing offices that show four cable news channels simultaneously. When Biden took the stage to address a small crowd of 200 people, Obama was holding forth at a far larger rally in Detroit that also included an appearance from the rapper Eminem. But in an illustration of the role the president plays at this point in the 2024 cycle, the cable networks, perhaps not surprisingly, stayed with Obama’s campaign rally and never switched over to Biden.

One moment from Biden’s New Hampshire swing did generate news: a slip of the tongue during a visit to a Democratic campaign office, where he grabbed a microphone and momentarily seemed to indulge liberal fantasies of putting Trump in prison.

“We gotta lock him up,” Biden said of the former president, before catching himself and quickly adding: “Politically lock him up. Lock him out. That’s what we have to do.”

Biden has sought to differentiate himself, and his party broadly, from Trump’s politics of personal retribution. Harris, for her part, has tried to quash “lock him up” chants during her rallies, urging crowds to help her beat him in November.

Given his enduring appeal with older white voters, Biden could be some utility to Harris, especially in Blue Wall states. Polling suggests that seniors like Biden, connected with his arguments about democracy and were particularly pleased with the prescription drug price victories. He has appeared at a few political events meant to shore up her weaknesses, including a recent one focused on union workers in Philadelphia, and he made a pair of calls to labor leaders in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week. The president this week also recorded videos urging grassroots donors to support the campaign and Democratic groups.

“The President is restating his support for the Vice President’s leadership at every opportunity,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates, “and for an agenda that moves us into the future by strengthening the middle class and protecting our freedoms - away from dangerous policies like recession-causing MAGAnomics and extreme abortion bans.”

Harris and Biden have traveled together twice since she replaced him atop the ticket: at an official event to announce new, lower prescription drug prices at a Maryland community college and a Labor Day campaign rally in Pittsburgh. But in her own appearances, Harris has spent little time touting the administration’s legislative achievements — or defending her and Biden’s economic record, instead focusing on clarifying her own plans to bring down consumer costs and provide more federal aid for small businesses, first-time home buyers and working families.

But for as much as Harris’ campaign has sidelined Biden himself, she has also struggled to say how her presidency would be different from his. New research from the Democratic data firm Blueprint showed that Harris’ unwillingness to differentiate herself from Biden has had a 21 point drag on her, and that she has room to gain ground by staking out some of her own policy positions.

Asked again during Wednesday night’s CNN town hall about how she’d be different from Biden, Harris spoke about how her own background has informed an economic vision that’s her own.

White House aides are aware that a Republican win would damage Biden’s legacy because it would allow the GOP to roll back or undermine some of his legislative accomplishments — and raise questions about whether a Trump victory could have been avoided if the president had abandoned his reelection campaign sooner. Those closest to the president have resigned themselves to Biden playing a minor role in the campaign’s final fortnight but stressed that his travel schedule was not set for next week and he was willing to do as much as requested, according to two of the officials.

Biden has told aides that he believes he could play a bigger part. But he has largely made peace with the change at the top of the ticket, according to the two officials and a close confidant. However, he and some of his senior aides have on occasion ruefully looked at the polls — which show a dead heat between Trump and Harris — and still believe that, with time, Biden could have rebounded from his disastrous June debate performance and ended up in a similar position, the three people said.