By the time Vice President Kamala Harris officially secured the backing of enough Democratic delegates to secure her party’s presidential nomination on Aug. 6, precious little time remained for her to convince skeptical voters that she, not Donald Trump, was the candidate of change.
A Gallup poll taken that month found that just 25% of voters were satisfied “with the way things are going in the United States at this time,” while 73% said they were dissatisfied.
While Harris’s entry into the race sent a jolt of energy through a Democratic Party that had been despondent since President Biden’s much-criticized debate performance in late June that effectively ended his candidacy, disentangling herself from the president many Americans blamed for high inflation and a surge of undocumented immigrants remained a tall order.
Nothing ‘comes to mind’
In early October, it had become clear that Harris was struggling to distinguish herself from Biden. An ABC/Ipsos poll found, 74%–22%, that voters of both parties said they would like to see Harris “go in a new direction as president rather than continue the policies of the Biden administration.” The same poll found that 65% of voters believed that Harris would continue Biden’s policies, while 33% said she would embark on a different path.
Amid that backdrop, Harris appeared on The View, where she was asked whether she would have done anything differently than President Biden over the past four years.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris responded, gifting Trump a line to use in campaign ads, “in terms of, and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”
Harris quickly realized her answer was insufficient, and added that, unlike Biden, she would appoint a Republican to a Cabinet position if elected.
Inflation
While inflation was a global problem in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, voters in the United States blamed the Biden-Harris administration for its impact in the United States. Though inflation had fallen significantly since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2023, Republicans had hammered Biden and Harris relentlessly for its steep rise shortly after Biden took office. That left Harris once again in the unenviable position of needing to distinguish herself from the president.
“Costs are still too high,” Harris said in a campaign speech in North Carolina in August, “and on a deeper level, for too many people, no matter how hard they work, it feels so hard to be able to just get ahead.”
When discussing inflation at her October CNN town hall, Harris focused on her plan to reduce housing costs by building millions of new homes but was measured in her criticism of Biden.
“For too long, frankly, both administrations, both administrations and both parties, Democrats and Republicans, haven’t done enough to deal with the issue of housing. We need a new approach,” she said.
Pressed by moderator Anderson Cooper on how her plan to go after price gouging would help people looking for help with the high cost of groceries, Harris asserted that price gouging was a real and ongoing issue in states like Georgia and North Carolina, which were trying to recover from Hurricane Helene. “I took this issue on because it affects a lot of people,” she said.
Immigration
A week before becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris signaled that she understood that Trump and his Republican surrogates would go after her on immigration. At her first big campaign rally in Atlanta, Harris sought to flip the script, declaring that even on the issue of immigration, she would “proudly put my record up against his any day of the week.”
A month later, in an interview with CNN, Harris reiterated her promise to sign into law the bipartisan border security bill scuttled by Trump in February. But her pledge did not serve to distinguish her from Biden, who had already signaled his desire to sign the compromise that would have further funded one of Trump’s signature policies, the construction of a wall on the southern U.S. border with Mexico.
Moreover, Republicans had already spent years portraying Harris as the “border czar” who presided over a record number undocumented migrant crossings. While Harris could counter that Biden had given her no such title, there was no obscuring the fact that in March 2021, he had tasked her with heading up his administration’s efforts to address the “root causes” of migration from Central America.
During her CNN town hall in late October, Harris again struggled to explain why the administration’s executive actions signed in early June that had significantly reduced the number of migrant border crossings had not been undertaken sooner.
“Because we were working with Congress and hoping that actually we could have a long-term fix to the problem instead of a short-term fix,” Harris responded, adding that “ultimately this problem is going to be fixed through congressional action.”
The Biden handoff
Ultimately, despite Harris’s efforts to run her own campaign, there was no escaping the unprecedented way she had become her party’s nominee. As much as Biden’s halting performance at the June 27 debate threw into question his ability to defeat Trump, it also raised questions about why those around him, including Harris, had supported his intention to seek a second term.
“The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m no Biden fan,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago press conference after Harris had secured the nomination. “From a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away, and people are saying he lost after the debate and he couldn’t win.”
Along with the nomination, Harris inherited the baggage of a president with an approval rating that was 17 points underwater on July 21 when Biden announced his exit from the race. Historically, no incumbent had ever won reelection with an approval rating as low as Biden’s. As she eventually found out, that latter association proved difficult to shed.
