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"Biden, the White House and his campaign insist he has no plans to drop out of the race. He told reporters Friday he was “completely ruling that out.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back against the tenor of attacks against Harris, particularly Trump’s decision to invoke a decades-old relationship.
“I think it’s gross, I think it’s disturbing,” Jean-Pierre told reporters Friday aboard Air Force One. “She should be respected in the role that she has as vice president. She should be respected like any other vice president before her who was in that room. It is appalling that, I’m going to be careful here, that a former president is saying that about a current vice president. And we should call that out — it is not OK.”
It remains unclear how Harris would fare against Trump, compared to Biden. Replacing a candidate this late in a presidential cycle — much less an incumbent president who has already sailed through the Democratic Party’s primaries — would be unprecedented in modern history, and the mechanics are complicated and potentially messy.
Polling shows that Harris’ favorability ratings are similar to Biden’s and Trump’s. A June AP-NORC poll found about 4 in 10 Americans have a favorable opinion of her. But the share of those who have an unfavorable opinion is slightly lower than for Trump and Biden, and about 1 in 10 have no opinion of her yet.
Harris, at 59 years old, would be a marked generational contrast to Trump, who is 78 years old and has also shown signs of aging. As the first woman, the first Black person and the first person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president, she would also chart a potentially barrier-breaking candidacy that could draw the support of women, minority voters and younger people — groups with whom Trump has been working to make significant inroads.
Harris has also been the Biden administration’s leading voice on abortion rights, an animating issue for Democrats since the overturning of Roe v. Wade that could again motivate turnout this fall.
Trump’s campaign, however, said it was confident in Trump’s chances regardless of his opponent and dismissed the idea that Harris might pose a greater challenge to Trump, seeing her as a more polarizing figure than the president.
“President Trump will beat any Democrat on November 5th because he has a proven record and a agenda to Make America Great Again,” LaCivita and Wiles said in their statement.
One campaign official suggested the focus on Harris was more of a reflection of the current media focus on the Democratic ticket than a belief that she will ultimately replace Biden.
While the party has plenty of opposition research on Harris at the ready thanks to her 2020 campaign and her years as vice president, at the end of the day, they argue, the Biden record is the Harris record, and if she were to replace Biden, Trump aides wouldn’t face a totally different race."
