Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally Thursday, Aug. 29, 2024, in Savannah, Ga. (AP Photo/Stephen B. Morton)Stephen B. Morton/The Associated Press
As the fight for the White House enters its final round, an issue that was unexpected even six weeks ago has moved to the centre of the national discussion: Is the Kamala Harris campaign a Joe Biden re-election effort in another form, and would a Harris presidency be an extension of the Biden administration?
For Ms. Harris, a failure to differentiate herself from her predecessor could be a political liability.
“The enthusiasm she has triggered tells you that there is a hunger for something different,” said Shannon Bow O’Brien, a political scientist at the University of Texas. “She’s been working under a boss – Joe Biden. The country wants to see what she wants to do now that the boss won’t be there.”
In truth, vice-presidents who seek the White House, as Ms. Harris is doing, seldom campaign as mere extensions of the president they served. And their vice-presidential performances are not reliable predictors of their presidential conduct.
Commentators often refer to vice-presidents as presidential understudies, but they rarely move to the top position, outside of the eight cases when they succeeded chief executives who died in office. Since vice-president Martin Van Buren succeeded president Andrew Jackson in 1837, only one – George H.W. Bush, in 1989 – was elected president at the first opportunity. Richard Nixon attempted the promotion in 1960 but didn’t become president until 1969.
As a result, Ms. Harris is moving into relatively uncharted territory – and is doing so during a campaign of unprecedented brevity.
Donald Trump arguably has been campaigning for the White House since losing the 2020 election. Ms. Harris has been running for president only since July 21.
“Given the time compression, this will be much more like a Canadian campaign for her,” said Christopher Kirby, director of the Center for the Study of Canada at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. “It’s a sprint that lasts a few weeks – not the usual American way. She has a short time to make an impression and argue for change.”
Since she emerged as the nominee, there has been a surge in Democratic excitement, with 78 per cent of Democrats saying they’re unusually enthusiastic about their candidate, according to a Gallup poll – a jump from the 55 per cent who said that in March, when Mr. Biden was the presumed nominee, and a higher figure than the 64 per cent recorded among Republicans for Mr. Trump.
She now faces the challenge that Mr. Bush faced when he sought to retain the Ronald Reagan magic while charting his own course. He embraced some of the Reagan portfolio (lower taxes, a smaller government) but grafted onto his campaign issues of his own, especially education.
In his acceptance speech, he said he wanted a “kinder, gentler” nation, a clear differentiation from Mr. Reagan – so much so that Nancy Reagan, the 40th president’s wife, asked bitingly, “Kinder and gentler than whom?”
Ms. Harris is adopting much the same approach. She is embracing some of the Biden policies (the fight against climate change, for example) and emphasizing some of her own (an even more aggressive attack on opponents of abortion rights than the President has undertaken) while softening some of her previous views (fracking and electric vehicles). In her televised interview Thursday, she spoke of “a new way forward” that would “turn the page.”
Ms. Harris has welcomed some, but not all, of the Biden campaign personnel into her own election drive, but there is fresh evidence of tension between the Biden holdovers and the Harris team. One development that attracted attention: the departure of Mike Donilon, the chief strategist for the Biden campaign in 2020 and 2024.
“It’s hard enough to run in the shadow of someone a VP has run with,” said Christopher Devine, a University of Dayton political scientist who studies the vice-presidency. “But when they take over, the former president has no power over them. They often say they’re building on the former president, maintaining the core elements of their predecessor, but they split off in their own direction.”
Vice-presidents moving into the presidency almost always say that they want to extend the legacy of their predecessors – none more explicitly than Lyndon Johnson, who became president after the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. In his address to a joint session of Congress five days later, he called for the passage of the Kennedy civil-rights and tax-cut bills, saying, “now the ideas and the ideals which he so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action.”
When Harry Truman became president after the 1945 death of Franklin Roosevelt, he retained the FDR cabinet for a time. Eventually, he grew impatient with the holdovers. Within a year, he replaced many of them.
Five vice-presidents-turned-president went in entirely different directions.
John Tyler, who succeeded William Henry Harrison after his death in 1841, so alienated the Whigs whose ticket he ran on that the party expelled him. Andrew Johnson, who became president after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, veered sharply from his predecessor’s conception of post-Civil War reconstruction in the South. Theodore Roosevelt, who became president in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, embarked on a reform program that his predecessor would have deplored.
William Howard Taft, who succeeded his mentor Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, drifted so far from the Roosevelt view that the former president later ran against his protégé. Gerald Ford, who became president after the resignation of the Watergate-disgraced Richard Nixon in 1974, sought to end the combativeness of his predecessor and, in his first month, offered conditional amnesty to Vietnam war resisters, a view Mr. Nixon abhorred.
Mr. Ford took pains to distance himself from the previous occupant of his office. So might Ms. Harris, if given the chance.