Amid all of the Democratic panic-texting prompted by President Joe Biden’s shaky debate performance Thursday, one name was curiously absent from many of those conversations: Vice President Kamala Harris.
Names including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer trended online as potential replacements for Biden on the Democratic ticket, while Harris — by several measures the most obvious and best-positioned candidate — was left to publicly defend Biden at the single worst moment of their four-year-old political partnership.
That was to the chagrin of some Harris allies, who are privately expressing frustration that her name is not being mentioned in the same company as other ambitious Democrats. But they can do little about it: Harris is laboring under a de facto mandate to defend him.
“There’s nothing that she could do externally that would be wise,” Democratic strategist Michael Trujillo said. “Her best strategy is to internally just be an amazing VP.”
She had to perform the role of good soldier almost immediately after the debate, with postmortem interviews having been pre-scheduled with CNN and MSNBC.
As Harris watched Biden’s face-plant, she and her team realized her response would be even more closely scrutinized, according to three aides granted anonymity to describe private discussions — and she quickly made clear to her staff that they shouldn’t try to sugarcoat how badly her running mate had performed.
Harris told her advisers her role was simple, the aides said: project confidence as quickly and clearly as possible as a leader of the party, while preserving credibility by recognizing how weak the debate had been.
“She wanted to have an acknowledgment of what everybody was seeing,” one senior Harris aide said.
Harris’ other two objectives were to zero in on attacking Trump, the aide said, and, perhaps more importantly, move the conversation away from the debate and toward Biden’s record.
“The president said himself that it was not his best performance,” Harris said at a campaign rally on Friday afternoon, before ripping former President Donald Trump for lies he told during the debate.
Harris went on to offer a familiar defense of Biden, one heard from many Democrats who have interacted with him closely.
“I see Joe Biden when the cameras are on and the cameras are off, in the Oval Office negotiating bipartisan deals,” Harris said. “I see him in the Situation Room keeping our country safe, [and] on the world stage meeting with world leaders who often ask for his advice.”
Some allies of the first Black and South Asian woman to be vice president fumed Friday about the lack of attention Harris drew as a possible replacement — not a surrogate — for Biden, passed over in the Beltway chatter for the likes of Newsom, Whitmer and even Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
“The fact that people keep coming back to this is so offensive to so many of us,” one veteran Democrat and Harris ally said. “They still don’t get that the message you’re saying to people, to this Democratic Party, is, we prefer a white person.”
Another added, “If they think they are going to get through South Carolina bashing an effective and qualified Black woman vice president — their instincts are as bad as I thought they were.”
Their frustration is unlikely to translate into an aggressive push for a change atop the ticket, as they are painfully aware that even acknowledging the possibility Biden might step away would spark a potential feeding frenzy. In other words, amid all the wishcasting surrounding other ambitious Democrats, Harris world can’t make her case without making things worse for Biden.
“Her doing anything externally is going to just hand reporters stories,” Trujillo said. “If she gets any text messages saying something critical, my best advice would be to not reply.”
Her biggest asset, in any case, isn’t a marketing machine — it’s political reality. Were Biden to leave the presidential race, hopping over Harris to any other potential candidate would present significant practical challenges. Only Harris, for instance, would have access to the coffers of the campaign she’s already a part of. Any other candidate would be faced with the tall task of building an infrastructure in a matter of months.
“It’s very hard to go from the minors to the Super Bowl, and compared to running for president, everything else is semi-pro,” said Jamal Simmons, a veteran Democratic operative and former Harris communications director.
There’s also the fact that Harris, despite a rocky couple of years in the polls, still has the highest name ID of any plausible Biden replacement. A recent POLITICO poll found that 41 percent of Democratic voters chose Harris as a hypothetical 2028 nominee. The next closest was Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, with 15 percent, and Newsom, with 14 percent.
Harris’ allies and aides believe that the VP has strengthened her profile in recent months, becoming more adept and confident after months of official and campaign travel. They’re also not shy about pointing out the optics of substituting any other candidate (likely White, possibly male) for Harris — a move that they suggest would upset not only Black delegates at the convention but also Black voters with whom the Biden campaign is already on shaky ground.
Still, she faces skepticism from the Democratic rank-and-file, who have been repelled by Harris’ weak polling numbers and see any of the more-popular-if-lesser-known governors as preferable.
“We actually have to win this election,” said one House Democrat who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about a party leader. “We should put someone up who would not only be a good president, but be a good candidate.”
There are no plans for Harris to go on a Biden defense tour, aides said. She is instead focused on fundraising in the coming days, where she will be in contact with now-jittery donors who are expected to bankroll Biden’s reelection. It will be an opportunity for her to both defend Biden and also make an impression, if only implicit, about her suitability as a replacement.
That is a delicate balancing act she might need to perform for weeks — perhaps until the late-August convention — as the ramifications of Thursday’s debate play out in the polls and on the hustings.
“If she didn’t, imagine what people would say: ‘Well, hold up, even the VP is not defending him.’ But it’s also important that people see and hear from a number of different voices and faces and the people who are in the conversation,” one Democrat close to the White House and campaign said.
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