One of the defining issues of the 2024 campaign will be whether Vice President Kamala Harris can successfully escape President Joe Biden’s shadow.
Harris is running as Biden’s successor. The reason she has been anointed the Democratic nominee without going through the primary process and has inherited the Biden-Harris campaign funds is that she is Biden’s vice president. Her nearly four years in that office are implicitly a big part of what has prepared her to move up.
But it wasn’t just age that hobbled Biden’s reelection campaign, though that is what ultimately proved politically fatal. Voters were broadly unhappy with Biden’s record on most of the issues defining the election, including the economy and immigration.
That’s why Harris has already tried to redefine herself on the border. Next up is an attempt to flip the script on the economy, with a coming speech on higher prices and her own agenda.
“She will lay out an approach relatively light on details,” the New York Times reported being told by sources familiar. “It will shift emphasis from Mr. Biden’s focus on job creation and made-in-America manufacturing, and toward efforts to rein in the cost of living. But it will rarely break from Mr. Biden on substance.”
“Light on detail” appears even in the story’s headline.
Other accounts suggested a starker Harris economic rebrand.
“Now, she wants to be not-Biden on inflation — arguably the biggest domestic topic of this campaign — by proposing clearer, more urgent solutions,” Axios reported. “Harris doesn’t want to be completely defined by the Biden-Harris record, advisers tell us.”
You don’t say?
A major task of former President Donald Trump’s campaign is to not let her get away with this.
“I was listening to Kamala Harris give a rally recently where she said she’s going to ‘tackle the affordability crisis’ on Day One,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Trump’s running mate, said in Michigan on Wednesday. “Kamala, ‘Day One’ was January of 2021 — ‘Day One’ was four years ago!”
“Because of your policies,” Vance continued, “too many children can’t afford a nice meal.”
“Under Kamala Harris, everything costs 20 percent more than it did under President Trump, working families are having to spend 30 percent more for baby food, and the price of gasoline is up 50 percent,” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement on “Kamalanomics” on Wednesday. “America cannot afford another four years of Kamala’s failed economic policies.”
“You’re paying the price for Kamala’s liberal extremism at the gas pump, at the grocery counter, and on your mortgage bill, and on everything else,” Trump said himself Wednesday in North Carolina, where Harris will give her economic speech later this week. “We’re not going to let this incompetent socialist lunatic keep breaking our economy for four more years, it’ll destroy our country.”
“The big question for Democrats was ‘How do you move past Biden?’” a Republican pollster told the Washington Examiner. “The next big Harris argument is, ‘Trump is the past, I’m the future.”
“She is essentially a generic Democrat,” the pollster said.
Trump and his allies will cast doubt on the Harris rebrand’s authenticity, much like they have tried to do with varying degrees of effectiveness to the vice president herself.
“Trump could claim Biden was exactly what he appeared to be: a dangerously weak, liberal failure,” wrote veteran Republican consultant Alex Castellanos. “To stop Harris, the Trump campaign must explain the opposite: Harris is not what she appears to be at all.”
In Castellanos’s telling, Harris is caught between being branded as too liberal or as an untrustworthy flip-flopper. “Damned if they are lefties. Damned more when they claim they aren’t,” he concluded. “In the end, your opponent is disqualified, not only as a leftist but as a figure no one respects: a politician.”
A similar version of this tactic could be applied to Harris’s positioning on Biden. She is either the understudy to what she claims is a successful president or she is conceding there were problems with his administration a generational change alone won’t fix. Her record is either substantially that of Biden’s but a little to his left, or it doesn’t exist at the national level.
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This can be a difficult transition to manage even when an incumbent vice president is running on their boss’s popularity. When George H.W. Bush vowed a “kinder, gentler nation,” Nancy Reagan is said to have asked, “Kinder and gentler than whom?”
Harris took over in a political emergency. Whether Trump can make her own that troubled record could decide the election.
