WASHINGTON — As she abruptly went from No. 2 on the Democratic ticket to No. 1, Vice President Kamala Harris had a decision to make: How should she deploy President Joe Biden on the campaign trail?
Given that Democrats had pushed Biden out because of concerns about his age, mental fitness, and ability to defeat former President Donald Trump, would she be best off distancing herself from the 81-year-old president she had served for nearly four years and focusing instead on establishing her own political identity? Or should she continue to embrace Biden and the more popular of his policies?
And on the most practical level: Where should Biden go to campaign for her? How often? And what should he say?
Her answers are now starting to emerge. Harris and the people running her campaign plan to use the president — but carefully, and in a targeted way. The president and vice president will campaign together some, but not too much. And Biden will travel mostly to the important swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where he still appeals to white, working-class voters and union members.
“He gets an enormous amount of credibility in those blue wall states because he’s ‘Workin’ Joe Biden,’” said Cedric Richmond, a former administration official who is now advising Harris’s campaign. “People are underestimating the Democratic Party’s love for Joe Biden. It just highlights how many different messages he can give and the different places he can go.”
That strategy will be on display almost immediately. On Monday, the president will join Harris at a union-focused Labor Day campaign event in Pittsburgh. On Thursday, Biden will be on his own in Wisconsin to tout his administration’s investment in communities there. Next Friday, he will travel to Michigan with the same message.
Campaign advisers to Harris and Biden’s aides in the White House — who are carefully coordinating their decision-making — have decided there is no real advantage for the vice president in making a clear, public break with the president or his policies. Ben LaBolt, communications director at the White House, said Biden would be “leaning in heavily” on the effort to get Harris elected.
“The schedule will be robust and he plans to leave it all on the field,” LaBolt said.
In an interview on CNN on Thursday night, Harris showed every indication that she intends to embrace her boss.
“History is going to show,” she said, “not only has Joe Biden led an administration that has achieved those extraordinary successes, but the character of the man is one that he has been in his life and career, including as a president, quite selfless and puts the American people first.”
However, there are some risks to the approach. Democratic voters turned away from Biden for a reason.
Large majorities said in polls that he was too old to be president for another four years, and there was an explosion of energy among rank-and-file members of the party once Biden was pushed off center stage.
Polls consistently show that many voters are not eager for a reminder of the past, whether it is a return to Trump’s presidency or Biden’s. The president’s approval rating in Michigan is just 38%, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll in early August, and just 42% across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin combined.
As a result, people close to Biden say he and Harris are unlikely to campaign together much in the weeks ahead. Campaign officials say they will “divide and conquer” by traveling separately to spread the campaign message.
Veterans of presidential campaigns in both parties said the trickiest part about deploying Biden on the campaign trail is making sure that his message — and the way he delivers it — does not undercut Harris’s all-important task of convincing voters that she represents a new and different future.
“The last month has shown you that the appetite for turning the page from Biden, while still genuflecting toward and appreciating what he did to win in 2020, is so hot,” said Kevin Madden, who was a top strategist for Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, during his 2012 presidential campaign against President Barack Obama.
“Every election is a contest for the future,” he added. “So they do have to be focused on making a case for what Harris would do the next four years as president.”
Strategists for the vice president are aware that she also needs to quickly establish her own political identity, separate from her role as Biden’s understudy. In a more traditional race, that process would have been going on for a year or more. But Biden backed out just six weeks ago, and Harris has only 67 days left before Election Day.
In 2000, Vice President Al Gore also grappled with how to run in the shadow of a president he had served under.
In that race, George W. Bush argued he would bring dignity and honor back to the White House after President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, an intern at the White House.
Once he became the Democratic Party’s nominee, Gore made it clear he did not welcome Clinton’s full participation in the campaign, believing that it would only remind voters of the salacious episode. Gore distanced himself from Clinton on the day he announced his campaign, and went weeks at a time without talking to the president or appearing next to him.
“For better or worse, the sitting president was a major target of the Bush campaign,” recalled Michael Feldman, a top communications strategist and one of Gore’s chief advisers during the 2000 race. “That presented real challenges for the vice president and his campaign in terms of how best to deploy him. That drama just doesn’t exist in this cycle.”
Feldman said Harris and Biden are in a very different situation. The vice president is “not running from her record,” he said, “and she’s not running from Biden. I expect that he’ll be deployed throughout the campaign. He’s going to go out and they will be thrilled.”
The goal, several advisers said, is to have Biden talk mostly about his record of accomplishments while in office: lower prices for some prescription drugs; investments in infrastructure and computer chips; an increase of 15 million jobs, including in the construction industry; and an economic recovery from the COVID pandemic.
They also said Biden can be helpful by continuing to do his day job, which they believe serves as a daily contrast to the kind of nastiness and chaos that permeated the White House when Trump was president.
“Biden can describe the mess and he can describe the cleanup in a way that no one can match,” said Pete Brodnitz, a veteran Democratic pollster who is not working for Harris. “I think that is useful.”
Biden’s conduct of foreign policy remains a tricky area, several strategists said. Harris will be forced to answer for Biden’s record, especially when it comes to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, in ways that could upset some of her potential voters.
In the CNN interview, the vice president echoed Biden by saying she was “unequivocal and unwavering” in support of defending Israel, while also saying that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
As the campaign heads into the homestretch, Biden might get at least a partial break from one duty that few presidents enjoy.
In the weeks since he dropped out of the race, Biden has done no fundraisers, something that usually would be a key role for a sitting president with a large and well-developed network of donors. But members of that network have already opened their pockets for Harris, whose campaign says it has raised more than $500 million since she got in the race.
White House officials said the president had received requests from congressional candidates to help with fundraising and is likely to meet with donors for that purpose in the coming weeks. And he may still help Harris raise money if she needs it.
On Thursday night, CNN’s Dana Bash allowed Harris to break with Biden, asking whether the vice president regretted saying that the president was “extraordinarily strong” right after the debate performance in June that ended his candidacy.
She declined.
“No, not at all. Not at all,” she said. “I have served with President Biden for almost four years now. And I’ll tell you, it’s one of the greatest honors of my career, truly.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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