As the 2024 presidential race enters its final stretch, Kamala Harris faces a daunting challenge: How to distance herself from Joe Biden without alienating the Democrat base that pretends he’s a successful president. It’s a balancing act that would be tough for a competent politician. The problem is that Joe Biden isn’t making it any easier for her.
According to a new report from CNN, the Harris-Walz campaign is grappling with how to showcase her differences from Biden while still maintaining loyalty to the administration.
"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," the outlet says.
Harris’s advisers know that “running as an extension of the president is not a strong position,” especially when there is rampant voter fatigue with the Biden administration.
You think?
“The challenge is when you’re trying to reach undecided low-intensity voters, how do you actually communicate difference with Biden?” one Kamala advisor told CNN.
To navigate this, Kamala's aides have been working on new policies and messaging that put more distance between her and Biden. The problem is that every time Harris tries to put space between herself and Biden, Biden manages to reinsert himself into the conversation.
Kamala has had some success trying to position herself as the “change” candidate, but those efforts have been undermined by Joe Biden repeatedly. Last month, during an interview on The View, he undermined her by linking her to key foreign and domestic policy positions.
Those remarks on The View were just the beginning, as he later in the week appeared in the White House Briefing Room and further undermined Harris’s campaign message.
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"I'm in constant contact with her," Biden said. "We're singing from the same song sheet. We — she helped pass all the laws that are being deployed now. She was a major player in everything we've done, including passage of legislation we were told we could never pass. And she's been, and... her staff is interlocked with mine in terms of all the things we're doing."
And then there's the economy issue—which poll after poll show voters trust Trump more to handle.
The White House is always wanting to take a victory lap when new economic data is released, even as voters still feel the pain of inflation and rising costs. Harris has tried to strike a different tone, acknowledging that “much more work needs to be done” on the economy. These two messages are like oil and water, because Biden wants credit, and Kamala doesn't want to take ownership of an economy that voters are sour on.
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CNN’s report highlights concerns among Democratic operatives who see Biden as an “albatross” around Harris’s neck, particularly in battleground states where she’s struggling to gain traction. They think Biden could cost her the election because Harris isn’t where she needs to be with just weeks to go in the campaign.
If there's anything this story makes clear, it's that Kamala Harris is running against both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
