Vice President Kamala Harris again attempted to deflect scrutiny over her prospects on a 2024 presidential ticket, dismissing talk of a shake-up as “gossip” as trouble mounts in Washington for President Joe Biden.
“I’m sorry, we are thinking about today,” Harris told NBC’s Craig Melvin in response to a question about whether Democrats intend to run the Biden-Harris ticket again. “Honestly, I know why you are asking the question because this is part of the punditry and the gossip around places like Washington, D.C.”
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Asked whether she and Biden had discussed the 2024 race, Harris said she was focused on the work at hand. “The American people sent us here to do a job, and right now, there’s a lot of work to be done,” she said. “And that’s my focus, sincerely.”
Nearly one year into office, Biden and Harris face steep odds on a slew of ambitious legislative promises. The president’s Build Back Better proposal has stalled, while an effort to reform the filibuster in order to pass Democrats’ voting rights legislation appeared to collapse Thursday as two key senators reiterated that they did not back Biden’s plan.
The administration is also wrestling with record inflation and charges that it was ill-prepared for a surge in coronavirus cases.
Biden’s popularity has dropped, falling to 33% approval in a recent Quinnipiac poll amid concerns over his handling of the economy and COVID-19.
The question of whether the vice president will remain on a presidential reelection ticket is not unusual, particularly as a president’s reelection begins to look uncertain.
This week, a New York Times editorial by Thomas Friedman, one of the few print reporters to interview Biden since the president was elected, urged the president to mount a 2024 bid with Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on the ticket.
Harris said she had not read the story when asked about it by NBC’s Melvin. “I really could care less about the high-class gossip on these issues,” she added.
“Speculation about whether a VP will remain on the ticket is a constant of most presidencies,” St. Louis University Professor Joel Goldstein, an expert on the U.S. vice presidency, told the Washington Examiner.
Talk surfaced during the last administration about whether former President Donald Trump would run again with then-Vice President Mike Pence, and former President George W. Bush weighed his prospects for a second bid without his vice president, Dick Cheney, who volunteered to step off the 2004 ticket. Bush decided against it, believing that to do so would suggest that he questioned his original choice.
“In fact, in modern times it’s very difficult to remove a VP, and VPs almost never get dumped,” Goldstein said. “In the last 75 years, only one incumbent VP has been removed from the next ticket, when [President Gerald] Ford asked [Vice President Nelson] Rockefeller to remove himself from consideration for 1976.”
In 2011, top aides to former President Barack Obama weighed whether to replace then-Vice President Biden with Hillary Clinton in the 2012 race.
“You have to remember, at that point, the president was in awful shape, so we were like, ‘Holy Christ, what do we do?’” Obama’s chief of staff at the time, William Daley, told the New York Times in 2013. The president’s popularity at the time had plummeted, and Daley called the move a matter of “due diligence.”
The idea was shelved after Obama’s aides determined that the shift would not offer enough of a boost to justify the upheaval.
While Harris’s avoidance of questions about 2024 has drawn scrutiny, Goldstein said her approach was not surprising.
“The ticket is the president’s decision, not the VP’s, so VPs never discuss their future, at least not this far out,” he said, adding, “Their focus is on governing not 2024.”
Biden has said repeatedly that he intends to run for reelection. But he’s also suggested a rematch with Trump would make him more interested in another campaign. In December, the vice president set tongues wagging upon telling the Wall Street Journal that she and Biden had not discussed whether they plan to mount a reelection bid.
She also said she didn’t know whether Biden was running for a second term.
“I will tell you this without any ambiguity: We do not talk about nor have we talked about reelection because we haven’t completed our first year, and we’re in the middle of a pandemic,” Harris said.
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As for whether Biden would run again, the vice president responded, “I’ll be very honest: I don’t think about it, nor have we talked about it.” Harris has been talked about as a likely 2024 presidential nominee if Biden declines to run, but her staffing and polling struggles have undercut Democratic confidence that she would improve their prospects.
In response to the vice president’s comments about not discussing reelection, the White House reiterated that Biden plans to run again and said he intends to do so with Harris at his side.
