Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign, as short as it has been, has been plagued by some serious mistakes. The first would have to be the selection of Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Then she delayed doing interviews for weeks, and when she finally engaged, it was in overly friendly settings that didn’t give her the real practice needed to effectively promote and defend her message.
After failing to seal the deal, she went all in on the Trump-Hitler rhetoric, which isn't working either. But hey, eventually, the campaign had to do something right, even if it's too late for it to matter.
So what has the campaign finally done correctly? Well, it turns out that after weeks of letting Joe Biden occasionally join her on the campaign trail or serve as a surrogate for the campaign, they're finally telling him to buzz off, although not in those exact words.
Last week, reports surfaced that Kamala had no “plans” to campaign alongside Biden — a clear indication that the campaign realized that he was doing more harm than good. Now we’re hearing that Biden wants to do more campaigning for Kamala, but the campaign is ghosting him.
According to a report from Axios, Biden "wants to campaign for Vice President Harris in the last days before the election," but the Harris-Walz campaign, believing Biden to be a political liability, doesn't want him campaigning for her. Biden has even been leaving days open in his schedule to campaign for his vice president, but "Harris' campaign keeps responding: We'll get back to you."
Recommended: Chris Cuomo Accidentally Cuts an Ad for Donald Trump
Axios reports that Democrats — and even some of Biden’s own staff — are carefully managing Biden's fragile ego, with Harris’s team in particular wary of associating her too closely with the unpopular president on the campaign trail. One source likened the situation to a “slow-moving break-up,” noting that while Harris’s allies "respect Biden’s service," they want to avoid tying her to his low approval ratings, currently at 39% according to FiveThirtyEight. Another source summed it up by saying, “He’s a reminder of the last four years, not the new way forward,” echoing Harris’s campaign messaging.
As of right now, there are no campaign events scheduled between now and Election Day where Biden and Kamala will appear together.
Politically speaking, this is obviously a smart move for the Harris campaign, though it's not without risks. According to the report, "Many on Biden's team — including some still on the campaign that Harris inherited from the president — believe Biden could help Harris in the final days," and they believe the Harris campaign is "underestimating Biden's appeal among white, working-class communities in the Rust Belt — including in the critical state of Pennsylvania," where Biden outperformed Hillary in 2020.
What's really risky about this is that offending Biden could backfire. I've noted before that Biden doesn't really want Harris to win, and his loyalists have been talking about revenge for his being forced out of the race. Biden even blindsided the Harris-Walz campaign last week when he announced he would campaign solo in Pittsburgh.
Keeping Biden at a distance may be smart, but perhaps the smarter move would have been to send Biden to states that won't matter, like Florida, or Ohio. Heck, send him to California if you have to make him happy.
