“I was the only person who would preserve [Joe Biden’s] legacy,” former Vice President Kamala Harris writes in her new campaign memoir, 107 Days. “At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him — and all the good he had achieved — right under the bus.”

The pose Harris struck and held through her unsuccessful 2024 campaign for the White House is called the good soldier. It’s an important role for vice presidents and vice presidential aspirants to play in modern American politics, and it serves a number of purposes: it helps to drive their shared agenda forward, encourages party cohesion, and reassures party donors, among other things.