Harris weighs how closely to embrace Biden agenda

Vice President Kamala Harris is juggling a difficult task almost a month into her 2024 run: keeping President Joe Biden far enough away to establish her independence while taking credit for the shared accomplishments of their administration.

Harris will continue to push for bipartisan policies yet to be realized from the Biden agenda, her campaign has stressed, including signing a failed Senate immigration deal into law and making the expanded child tax credit permanent.

At the same time, she has touted the defining policy achievements of Biden’s first term to frame herself as a consensus-building candidate.

But Harris has also made a choice to keep Biden scarce in the early weeks of her run for president.

Harris will appear alongside Biden on Thursday, when the two deliver joint remarks in Maryland about the administration’s “progress” on lowering costs for voters. But it is the first time they will campaign together since he exited the presidential race.

The president himself has suggested that, in terms of hitting the stump, he will do whatever the Harris campaign asks of him and told reporters he plans to make stops in his home state of Pennsylvania. However, multiple Democratic strategists had previously told the Washington Examiner that Biden can help Harris the most by simply keeping out of sight. 

She is attempting to establish her own brand as a presidential candidate, a task that is easier if Biden does not share the spotlight.

Biden has held fewer official events since withdrawing from the presidential race, and for those he has held, he’s given Harris a more prominent role. She joined him in welcoming home three Americans held captive in Russia on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews and, before that, had a separate meeting from Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The moves were seen as raising her profile as she auditions for the Oval Office Biden now occupies. But a pair of veteran Democratic operatives with close relationships with the Harris campaign told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that Harris may at times need to create daylight between herself and Biden, even if it means “throwing the president under the bus” to an extent.

Biden faces low marks on the economy, while he overcame pockets of resistance in his campaign for a second term from voters upset over his handling of the war in Gaza.

“This isn’t time to play nice. We all know the stakes of this election, and I have confidence that Vice President Harris will do whatever it takes to win,” one strategist said. “President Biden knows there’s no room for hurt feelings here, and he wouldn’t have withdrawn from the race if he didn’t know the vice president presented the best chance of stopping Trump again in November.”

“The president is a tough guy. Just look at how much abuse he’s taken from Republicans and the media over the past four years,” the second strategist added. “Nothing Vice President Harris will do on the campaign trail can compare to that.”

Thursday’s event will focus on the Biden administration’s efforts to take on “Big Pharma” and lower healthcare costs for households. Biden is expected to announce the 10 drugs selected for Medicare’s new drug price negotiation process, made possible by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

His statement ahead of the announcement specifically mentions Harris’s role in casting the tiebreaking vote in the Senate on the Inflation Reduction Act.

“This historic milestone is only possible because of the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed with the leadership of Democrats in Congress, and with Vice President Harris casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate — without a single Republican voting for it,” he wrote.

Harris similarly noted her vote on the legislation in a separate, lengthier statement, but she has also reached back to her career in California politics to pitch herself to voters. She highlighted settlements she reached with pharmaceutical companies during her time as the state’s attorney general.

Harris has faced criticism for not laying out a concrete agenda since announcing her run for president. But she is slated to expand on those ideas in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, where she’ll deliver her first policy-focused speech of the cycle. Campaign officials say those remarks will outline “her plan to lower costs for middle-class families and take on corporate price-gouging.”

The White House, for its part, sidestepped the question of whether Harris will try to put distance between herself and Biden’s economic agenda.

“One thing that I can — that I know for sure,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre, “is that this president, this vice president, are fighting very hard to make sure that the middle class is stronger.”

“You guys have called it Bidenomics. We talk about how the president is trying to put forward an economic policy, building the economy from the bottom up, middle out that does not leave behind the middle class and make sure it has equity at the center of it,” Jean-Pierre continued. “MAGA-nomics, which is very different, which is something that neither of them believe in, wants to do the opposite of what we’re trying to do on behalf of the American people.”

Republicans have campaigned, in part, by tying Harris to the record of Biden. They are betting they can hobble her campaign by blaming her for inflation and the record influx of migrants at the southern border seen under his presidency.

Still, they view her record apart from Biden as a liability all its own. They have emphasized ideas she espoused during her 2020 run for president, including her support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings and a ban on fracking.

Harris has since walked back many of her prior policy stances.

The race will ultimately hinge on whether Republicans can successfully define her, but so far, she has seen a polling surge amid a wave of Democratic enthusiasm with Biden gone from the ticket.

Before exiting the race in late July, Biden trailed former President Donald Trump by more than 3 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Now Harris has erased that deficit and leads the former president by a point.

Furthermore, Harris has fundamentally reset the race in critical battlegrounds, all of which Trump was leading in or tied in a head-to-head matchup with Biden.

Now, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, Harris leads her opponent in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump still maintains a 3-point advantage in Nevada, and the pair are tied in Georgia.