CNN reports:

Neither aides in the Harris campaign nor the Biden White House would commit to another joint campaign event between now and the election.

Harris wants to create space, top aides say, but not too much space. She wants to be loyal — but she also wants to win. She is still planning to lean on Biden, who is flying to Milwaukee on Tuesday for an event trumpeting more projects made possible by administration efforts, to buck up union members or to park himself in battleground Pennsylvania for political stops in the final weeks. But no one on the vice president’s team is upset that Biden is headed to spend a whole week of October overseas on a non-pressing diplomatic trip to Germany and Angola. Some wish he’d go away for longer.

Part of leading Democrats’ focus on Biden is seeing him as the albatross embodiment for the unsettling feeling spreading among Democrats that the vice president is not — or at least, not yet — where she needs to be to win in just over four weeks. Still haunted by the 2016 election, they’re frustrated and despairing that even now, seemingly no number of Donald Trump’s offensive statements, lies, lack of plans or legal problems can shake his support.

“I’ll go to my grave not understanding why, but I know it’s a fact that this is going to be a margin-of-error race,” is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s line voicing this sentiment on the trail.

The former president and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, are trying to make Harris out to be the incumbent, talking as if she had been the one signing executive orders for the past three years. The balance is tricky for a vice president squeezed between battered voters desperate for change; Republicans responding to her every new proposal by asking why she hasn’t implemented them already; and an incumbent president whose numbers have been going up with some of the core constituencies she needs.

Biden’s and Harris’ separate appearances surveying Hurricane Helene damage on Wednesday is like much of what’s to come: “singing from the same song sheet,” as Biden put it on Friday — but rarely having them side by side.

Even that was a source of tension: Biden’s decision to go to North Carolina earlier in the week meant that Harris had to hold off on her own trip to a state that she is in an intense fight to win. [Continue reading…]