Harris forges her own way — but won’t stray too far from Biden

Kamala Harris shadowed Joe Biden at a series of solemn ceremonies to mark 9/11 — less than 12 hours after a debate in which she barely said his name. Later this week, she’ll be beside him again for an awards dinner in Washington — before heading back to the campaign trail.

It’s all part of a delicate balancing act that Harris will likely have to perform in the final two months of the campaign that she made explicit during the debate.

“Clearly, I am not Joe Biden,” she said in response to Donald Trump’s declaration that “she is Biden.”

Like any vice president running for president, Harris is closely associated with the administration, and in many cases she relishes that position. But as she casts herself as the agent of change, she can’t afford to be too close, especially given Republicans’ attacks on his record and with Biden’s approval still hovering beneath 50 percent despite a recent uptick.

And yet she also may need him, especially with older white voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere with whom Biden holds a unique appeal and who will be crucial in the battle for 270 electoral votes.

Nowhere was that more on display than during last night’s debate, where she positioned herself as a “new generation of leadership” and prosecuted her case with a dexterity that provided a sharper contrast with Biden than anything she said. In fact, she didn’t have to say much at all to render Biden an afterthought in the battle for the White House when it suited her.

Amanda Litman, a Democratic operative and the founder of Run For Something, an organization that encourages young people to seek elected office, said Harris’ emphasis on her own forward-looking agenda over a relitigation of her and Biden’s shared record allowed her to subtly establish herself independent of him.

“She also stylistically can really distance herself,” Litman said, “both in the way she talks about things like abortion but also in her expressions and disinterest in engaging with Trump’s bullshit.”

In response to the first question of the debate, when ABC’s David Muir asked Harris if she felt Americans are better off than they were four years ago, Harris offered no defense of “Bidenomics,” no statistics about record low unemployment or job creation, no reference to recent inflation reports showing prices coming down. Instead she went through components of her own economic plan: building more housing, reinstating and enlarging the child tax credit and making it more affordable to start small businesses.

When Trump blamed Biden for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war there, warning of a world on the brink of “World War 3” and questioning if Biden was even doing the job of being president, Harris didn’t engage with the substance of the comments.

“They threw him out of a campaign like a dog,” Trump said. “We don’t even know, is he our president? But we have a president ... that doesn’t know he’s alive.”

Coolly, Harris responded moments later: “It’s important to remind the former president you’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me.”

That rejoinder, and Harris’ outlining of her own economic agenda from the start, were two moments one of her senior campaign aides pointed to as reflective of the campaign’s broader strategy of Harris distinguishing herself outside of her role of being Biden’s vice president. Every time, in fact, that Trump caricatured the president as senile and frail, she ignored the comments altogether.

Her debate strategy was far different than just over two months ago, when Harris delivered the most immediate and forceful defense of Biden after his faltering debate performance that eventually forced him from the race. Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper from Los Angeles shortly after that first debate ended, she brushed aside the questions that ended up dogging him for weeks, excusing his “slow start” while urging viewers to consider Biden’s overall performance as president, not just how he performed in the debate.

Yet Trump, who has groused constantly about Democrats swapping candidates but struggled to land on a consistent line of attack against Harris, made things fairly easy for the vice president on Tuesday night. Instead of delivering every broadside at Harris with “you and Biden,” the former president mentioned the current one sporadically, often in casual asides mocking him for spending “all his time on the beach” or being old, suggesting to Harris “you’ll wake him up at four o’clock in the afternoon.” Only after the first commercial break, which came an hour in, did he begin a more concerted effort to link the two.

“She is Biden. She is trying to get away from Biden,” Trump declared amid an attack on the pair’s economic record, impersonating Harris and exaggerating her alleged effort to distance herself. “‘I don’t know the gentleman,’ she says,” Trump went on. “She is Biden.”

“A rational strategy for Trump, given the discontent with Biden, would have been to tightly and relentlessly tie the vice president to the president on the economy, the border and other issues on which he doesn’t rate highly,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “His mission was to make her the incumbent and himself change. But rational and Trump are often not words that go easily together.”

The former president’s aides, in previewing the debate, had vowed that he would hold Harris accountable for the current administration’s record given that, as senior adviser Jason Miller put it, she’s “been vice president for three and a half years.”

Another person who spoke with Trump prior to his encounter with Harris urged him not to succumb to her baiting. Trump, and not for the first time, struggled to execute on that strategy.

Biden, in a post on X shortly after the debate had ended, praised Harris and asserted that she outfoxed Trump.

“Wasn’t even close,” Biden wrote, parroting her parting shot at Trump even though, in a way, it was about him, too: “VP Harris proved she’s the best choice to lead our nation forward. We’re not going back.”

Meridith McGraw and Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report.