Harris-Trump showdown: Vice president keeps her distance from Biden in final stretch
President Biden returns to the campaign trail this weekend with stops in the biggest of the battleground states, his native Pennsylvania.
The White House confirmed the president will campaign on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris and down-ballot Democrats when he makes stops Friday in Philadelphia and Saturday in Scranton, where the 81-year-old Biden was born and spent his early childhood years.
But Harris, who with four days until Election Day remains locked in a tight showdown with former President Trump in the race to succeed Biden in the White House, won’t be joining her boss on the campaign trail.
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The vice president has kept her distance from Biden, who, according to polls, remains deeply unpopular with Americans, and her campaign quietly views him as a liability. And that was before the president made two glaring remarks the past two weeks that quickly went viral.
While Harris has noted the policy successes of the Biden/Harris administration the past four years while campaigning, she’s emphasized that she’ll be an agent of change in the White House.
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Giving her closing address Tuesday night at the Ellipse, just yards from the White House, where the president was huddled, Harris emphasized, “I have been honored to serve as Joe Biden’s vice president, but I will bring my own experiences and ideas to the Oval Office.”
It’s been nearly two months since the one-time running mates teamed up on the campaign trail. You have to go back to Labor Day, when they joined forces at a union event in Pittsburgh.
The 81-year-old Biden was replaced by Harris atop the Democrats’ 2024 ticket in July after ending his own bid amid a rising chorus of calls for him to drop out following a disastrous debate performance against Trump. Biden told reporters two months ago he would be “on the road from there on” campaigning on behalf of his vice president.
It hasn’t happened.
And while former Democratic presidents Obama and Clinton have crisscrossed the campaign trail in recent weeks on behalf of Harris, Biden’s efforts have been more limited and less publicized.
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While Biden hasn’t done many campaign events, he has made official trips with political overtones into some of the seven key battleground states whose razor-thin margins decided his victory over Trump in 2020 and will likely determine whether Harris or Trump wins the 2024 election.
The president has showcased the administration’s accomplishments at those events.
“I think they are using him in a targeted way that makes sense,” a political adviser in the president’s orbit told Fox News.
Last week, Biden teamed up with progressive champion Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont at a policy event in swing state New Hampshire to spotlight their efforts to lower health care costs.
The two octogenarians trumpeted a new report by the Department of Health and Human Services that found nearly 1.5 million Medicare enrollees saved almost $1 billion on prescription drugs during the first half of the year.
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But at a political event minutes later, Biden stirred controversy.
Speaking to supporters at the New Hampshire Democratic Party headquarters in Concord, N.H., Biden said of Trump, “We got to lock him up.”
While the president instantly corrected himself, adding “politically lock him up,” the damage was done.
The initial comment gave Trump instant ammunition for his argument that the four indictments against him — and one conviction — are part of an elaborate Democratic Party witch hunt. That’s despite no evidence the president or his administration has played any role in Trump’s prosecutions and despite Trump’s repeated calls over the years to lock up his own political opponents.
Biden dug an even deeper hole Tuesday night, stepping all over the vice president’s closing address with more controversial comments during a video call with Latino supporters.
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Denouncing racist comments made by a comedian at Sunday’s Trump rally in New York City that had dominated news coverage for a couple of days, Biden appeared to call supporters of the former president “garbage.”
Biden tried to clean up the mess, saying he was referring to the “hateful rhetoric” from the Trump rally comedian and not to the former president’s supporters in general.
But the Trump campaign and allies immediately pounced, and Biden’s comments dominated the news cycle two straight days.
Harris on Wednesday morning disavowed any idea of disparaging Trump supporters.
She noted that Biden had “clarified his comments,” adding, “Let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
Even before the Biden remarks, Harris was walking the tight rope that previous vice presidents running for the top job have faced, trying to balance support for the boss and advertising the administration’s achievements while also spotlighting a forward-looking message and showing how they’d be different.
“This election is about Kamala Harris, so people need to see the vision that she has for America. … It’s important that the focus stay on her,” veteran New Hampshire-based Democratic strategist and Harris convention delegate Jim Demers told Fox News.
But Demers, who has also been a longtime Biden supporter and surrogate, noted that “you’re not going to hold Joe Biden back from being on the campaign, and, in the final days, it’s good to see him out there urging people to vote for Kamala Harris.”