Kamala Harris was prevented from distancing herself from Joe Biden’s unpopular policies in advance of her debate with Donald Trump when Biden simply told her: ‘no daylight, kid.’
The failed Harris-Tim Walz campaign has been passing around blame like a hot potato post-election, with everyone from the candidates themselves to top staffers taking the heat.
However, already many have blamed Biden, 82, for being an albatross on the neck of his potential successor.
A new book – FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes – suggests that the president demanded complete loyalty from Harris.
On the day of Harris’ first debate with Trump, Biden allegedly called the vice president for a pep talk.
However, it turned out to be more instructions to protect Biden’s legacy, with a three-word warning.
‘No daylight, kid,’ Biden reportedly said to the then 59-year-old Harris.
Biden would regularly use that phrase to tie John McCain to George W. Bush ahead of the 2008 election when he ran with Barack Obama.
Joe Biden told Kamala Harris that there can be ‘no daylight, kid’ between his presidency and her election campaign ahead of the vice president’s first debate with Donald Trump
The losing Harris-Tim Walz campaign has had the same blame game post-loss that every failed campaign has, with everyone from the candidates themselves to staffers taking the heat
The authors posit that whether Harris won or lost, ‘she would only harm him by publicly distancing herself from him.’
Biden’s staffers remained with the Harris campaign, making it even more difficult to publicly refute the president.
Sean Clegg, a Harris advisor not trusted by the Biden staffers, was helping her prepare for a joint appearance with Walz when she started listing things that she and Biden accomplished when he stopped her.
‘Wait, wait, wait! Let’s not do this. Let’s not go down memory lane,’ Clegg said, according to an excerpt published by The Hill.
Clegg was reportedly disinvited from future media prep sessions by longtime Dem communications staffer Stephanie Cutter.
Harris aides previously claimed that the Biden team was deliberately not working with them as a result of the president being forced to drop out..
Previously, Biden was blamed by senior Harris advisor David Plouffe, but for refusing to drop out earlier in the race after his June debate disaster.
Plouffe claimed no Democratic candidate could have won without a proper primary process—what he called ‘the cardinal sin’ of this race.
On the day of Harris’ first debate with Trump, Biden allegedly called the vice president for a pep talk. However, it turned out to be more instructions to protect Biden’s legacy, with a three-word warning: ‘No daylight, kid’
A new book – FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes – suggests that the president demanded complete loyalty from Harris
And he said he was shocked by the internal polling numbers when he finally joined the team after Joe Biden dropped out with less than four months to go, a situation he described as ‘catastrophic.’
‘When I got in, it was the first time I saw the actual numbers under the hood. They were pretty gruesome,’ he told The Atlantic.
‘The Sun Belt was worse than the Blue Wall, but the Blue Wall was bad. And, demographically, young voters across the board—Hispanic voters, Black voters, Asian voters—were in really terrible shape.
‘When the switch happened, some of that stuff got a little bit better, but nowhere near where we ended up or where we needed to be. This was a rescue mission.
‘It was catastrophic in terms of where it was.’
Biden finally bowed to pressure from allies and stood aside on July 21.
The party quickly coalesced around his vice president to become the candidate, avoiding a drawn out contest that some feared would divide Democrats and hand the election to Trump but to no avail.
‘I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won,’ said Plouffe.
‘But if we had a primary in which a bunch of people ran and auditioned … through that process, whoever emerged … would have been a more fully formed person, would have had more time to mount a general election campaign.
‘[Not having that process] is the cardinal sin.’
And then they had to condense a campaign down into a little more than 100 days.
‘Our first week, it was like, “Well, we need a biography ad, we need to talk about the border, we need to lay out an economic contrast, we need to get health care in there, abortion,'” Plouffe said.
‘If you have six, seven, eight months, you storyboard all this stuff, you have a narrative arc. Everything was smashed and collided here.’
Biden and Harris’ teams blamed each other for wasting over $1 billion in donor cash on a disastrous presidential campaign.
Vice Presidential flop Tim Walz blamed himself and Harris for the Democrats ‘ ‘mess’ after their losses at the top of the ticket in November.
Walz and Harris lost every single swing state to Trump, leading to an electoral college blowout, becoming the first Democrat ticket to lose the popular vote since 2004 and just the second since 1988.
