As Hurricane Milton barrels toward the Florida coast, all eyes are on President Biden. For Vice President Kamala Harris, this is not an ideal situation.
She has under a month left to make her case to the American people that she should lead the nation. But even as she tries to show that she is more than Mr. Biden’s understudy, events at home and abroad are pushing him to the forefront in ways that serve only to underscore her current role as the No. 2.
It was Mr. Biden who spoke from the White House on Tuesday, warning Florida residents to “evacuate now, now,” as Ms. Harris urged them to do the same thing on ABC’s “The View.” The previous evening, Mr. Biden announced on social media that he had spoken about the storm with Florida’s Republican governor just minutes after CBS broadcast the vice president’s interview on “60 Minutes.”
A week earlier, when Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles into Israel, the world saw Mr. Biden in the Situation Room, managing the crisis. Days later, he walked into the White House briefing room to talk to reporters — his first such visit in his presidency — even as she began to speak about her support for union workers at a campaign event in Flint, Mich.
There is nothing to indicate that Mr. Biden is trying to upstage his vice president, whom he heartily endorsed soon after dropping out of the race. But taken together, the moments show the difficulty for Ms. Harris and her campaign of owning the news cycle as she tries to stay the focus of the Democratic Party’s attention.
Perhaps the most stinging example occurred on Friday, when Ms. Harris’s aides were given only a few minutes’ warning before Mr. Biden entered the White House briefing room, promoting a better-than-expected jobs report just as the vice president was speaking in Michigan. As he detailed the numbers, he extended credit to Ms. Harris. But he could not resist taking a question about whether he would reconsider dropping out of the presidential race.
“I’m back in,” Mr. Biden said, laughing before cracking a smile and offering a wave of his hand, as if to say, “I wish.”
Within Ms. Harris’s campaign, reactions to the president’s impromptu appearance ranged from calling it unhelpful to genuine anger and incredulity, according to several aides who insisted on anonymity to detail private reactions.
The events of the past week have highlighted just how much the work of being vice president can interfere with being the candidate. It was Ms. Harris’s duty, her advisers said, to retool her campaign travel to be with Mr. Biden in the Situation Room over the course of several hours, when the president directed American naval forces to help defend Israel against the barrage of Iranian missiles.
And it was her duty, they said, not only to stand back and let Mr. Biden be the first to visit areas affected by Hurricane Helene but also to pause campaigning, return to Washington and receive updates on the storm.
White House officials point out that Mr. Biden has gone out of his way to say how central Ms. Harris has been in the series of recent crises. He told reporters on Tuesday that she had been helpful during the response to the hurricanes.
It could also damage the vice president’s campaign if Mr. Biden did not appear engaged during a natural disaster or a national security episode. If he did that, former President Donald J. Trump would no doubt attack Ms. Harris for being part of an unresponsive administration.
“President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris partner closely on essential matters for the American people that require both of their attention, such as hurricane preparations, response and recovery, and defending our ally Israel from Iran,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
Still, the past week has shed light on the complicated nature of Ms. Harris’s relationship with Mr. Biden, who dropped out because he worried about igniting an intraparty fight, not because he thought he would lose.
Though the president and some of his most loyal advisers remain bitter toward Democratic leaders for his ouster, he is also feeling a newfound sense of freedom in the final weeks of his term, two people familiar with his thinking have said.
As her campaign hits its most crucial phase, Ms. Harris has publicly and privately been loyal to Mr. Biden. But there has been anxiety within her orbit about how much she should break with the president to further define herself.
In an appearance on “The View” on Tuesday, Ms. Harris offered a glimpse of what that might look like when she was asked whether there was a thing Mr. Biden had done in office that she would have done differently.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Ms. Harris replied — an answer that she had to give to remain in lock step with Mr. Biden, but which Republicans quickly seized on to exploit the president’s unpopularity.
But later, she offered a view of how her leadership might differ from his, and referred to an earlier promise to name a Republican to her presidential cabinet: “I don’t feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea,” Ms. Harris said.
Although Mr. Biden delivered his remarks about Hurricane Milton around the same time, White House officials said that few people watching “The View” would have left the program to watch Mr. Biden on one of the cable networks.
On matters of policy, Ms. Harris has praised Mr. Biden’s leadership and has not diverged from him, particularly on how to handle the Mideast war, even though the administration’s support for Israel threatens to endanger her standing in crucial states, including Michigan.
James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, said that Ms. Harris did not need to break with Mr. Biden to further define herself, but needed to contrast herself with Mr. Trump on the economy and other issues that a majority of voters say they care the most about.
“She’s not totally filled out,” Mr. Carville said. “I think they could up their game on this, day to day.”
He thought the campaign should rely on surrogates like former President Barack Obama, who is traveling to Pennsylvania on Thursday to make the case for Ms. Harris, to talk about popular policies, including the Affordable Care Act, which remains a target of Republicans. He also recommended putting President Bill Clinton on the airwaves “in every swing state in the country.”
He said Mr. Biden was best left to do his job: “To say the least, he’s a busy man,” Mr. Carville said.
Mr. Biden visited Wisconsin and Pennsylvania on Tuesday and was recently in Michigan — three important battleground states. But he has not been an avid campaigner for the vice president, as he had previously promised, which aides to both have said represents a lack of urgency from Ms. Harris’s campaign about sending him into battleground states. Mr. Biden’s policies are broadly popular with Americans, but he is not.
And Mr. Biden is still focused on buttoning up his legacy: On Tuesday, he traveled to Wisconsin to highlight the administration’s work to upgrade lead pipes throughout the state.
That is the type of event expected of Mr. Biden at this stage, according to a Harris campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail strategy. The official said that Mr. Biden could be useful at get-out-the-vote events targeting union workers and older voters, including older Black voters, but that it ultimately helped Ms. Harris if Mr. Biden continued to focus on being the president.
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