A new book about the 2024 presidential campaign states that former President Joe Biden wouldn’t let Kamala Harris, his vice president and replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket, get enough distance from him to win.
Being joined at the hip with Biden made it possible for a former president, Donald Trump, to be the change candidate and benefit from a global wave of anti-incumbent sentiment.
Although Democrats beat expectations in the midterm elections two years earlier, Biden headed into his abortive reelection bid with low job approval ratings. The public was especially angry about his handling of inflation and the porous southern border, both issues Trump rode back to the White House.
In FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Barnes report that Biden made Harris’s already tall task even more difficult.
“He would say publicly that Harris should do what she must to win,” they wrote, according to an excerpt. “But privately, including in conversations with her, he repeated an admonition: let there be no daylight between us.”
“‘No daylight’ was the phrase he had used as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 to bind Republican nominee John McCain to an unpopular president, George W. Bush,” they added.
Harris inherited much of her campaign apparatus from Biden. She was surrounded by Biden loyalists. “Her campaign was run by a former White House deputy chief of staff — whom she had just empowered to box out her own confidants — and a phalanx of department heads who had served Biden until the previous month,” Allen and Barnes wrote.
This adds extra context to why Harris had such lousy answers to the question of what she would do differently than Biden, despite that being the most obvious thing she would be asked once she ascended to the top of the ticket.
It is also an important point in the debate over how the abbreviated campaign — Biden didn’t bow out and throw his support behind his vice president until July 21 — affected Harris’s candidacy.
Team Harris’s strategy appeared to rely heavily on a short campaign window, with a sparse interview schedule, slow windup to unscripted events, and ambiguous policy positions. But maybe a negative was that she didn’t really have time to put together Team Harris at all and remained burdened by what had been while Biden was still running.
This does not explain why her previous campaign for president fizzled out before the first votes were cast in 2020, following a similar boom and bust pattern as last year. Nor does it eliminate her own staff turnover problems as at least a partial explanation for why there weren’t many Harris confidants hanging around.
But it’s undeniable that beyond picking Harris to be his running mate and then going on to win the 2020 presidential election, Biden didn’t do her any favors. He was unpopular. His record was difficult to defend. He probably should have foregone a second term and when he finally did, he waited too long to drop out, leaving Harris holding the bag.
A “no daylight” rule suggests that things were even worse than they appeared in public.
Yet Harris agreed to be the candidate. If the obstacles were insurmountable, she could have taken a pass too. She didn’t.
Harris was also the vice president under a president in his 80s. From 2019 to 2023, Biden had considered serving just one term. (He will now have the rest of his life to consider it.) Harris had better reason than most veeps to prepare herself to take over. While she provided a short-term morale boost once Biden finally bowed out, she was unprepared.
The whole episode was a party-wide failure. Democrats feared saddling Biden with a real primary challenger would only further weaken him as a general election candidate. The history — Gerald Ford vs. Ronald Reagan in 1976, Jimmy Carter vs. Ted Kennedy in 1980, George H.W. Bush vs. Pat Buchanan in 1992 — was that the hobbled incumbent still won the primary but succumbed in November.
Then came the disastrous June 27 Biden-Trump debate and Democrats decided they wanted a do-over. But only a partial one: they merely switched to Harris in a noncompetitive process. How much of this was Biden’s fault for quickly anointing her or the party’s fear of losing the money he had raised or the coalitional challenges of sidelining the first black, Asian, and female vice president to pick a Rust Belt governor instead will be debated by Democrats for years.
No ambitious Democrat challenged Biden. None offered themselves as an alternative to Harris.
A REMINDER THAT KAMALA HARRIS WAS A TERRIBLE CANDIDATE
But if you wanted daylight between Biden and the new Democratic nominee, there were better ways of achieving that goal than nominating Biden’s vice president. There is also a certain awkwardness involved in having an angry, defenestrated incumbent president still hanging around the White House after his cautious and risk-averse VP has replaced him as the nominee. It was not a healthy dynamic.
It was, however, an entirely avoidable one if a host of Democratic leaders from Biden on down had made different choices.