Joe Biden’s legacy rests with Kamala Harris. Can he help her win?

In short order, Joe Biden’s world has transformed. 

Less than two weeks ago, the president was pursuing what looked increasingly to be a failing reelection campaign. After a poor debate performance, he was sinking in polls, fundraising had plummeted, and calls from top fellow Democrats to drop out of the race had reached a frenzied pitch. 

Now an ex-candidate, President Biden is a lame duck. But he’s also liberated, freed from trying to do two full-time jobs simultaneously – running for reelection while also serving as president of the United States. In this new reality, he faces both challenges and opportunities. 

Mr. Biden can spend his remaining time in office focused on two things, political analysts say: cementing the legacy of what Democrats see as a consequential one-term presidency; and helping get his vice president, Kamala Harris – as of Friday, the party’s formal nominee – elected as his successor. His overarching goal remains the same, preventing Donald Trump from returning to the White House. 

Thursday’s massive, multinational prisoner swap with Russia presented Mr. Biden, who has long championed international alliances and the power of diplomacy, with a major victory on the global stage. The swap, which involved cooperation from European allies, included the freeing of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich after 16 months in captivity.

Going forward, “Any positive news that happens in the real world is something that Biden can now announce without an overt political lens,” says Dan Schnur, a former Republican campaign strategist, now an independent. “It won’t translate in quite as partisan a way as if he were the one actually on the ballot.”

Still, it did not go unnoticed that national security adviser Jake Sullivan mentioned Vice President Harris multiple times in discussing the prisoner exchange at the White House briefing Thursday. He credited her with playing a role in the deal by engaging with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the matter in February at the Munich Security Conference.

In the evening, Ms. Harris accompanied Mr. Biden to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to greet the freed Americans, and both spoke to reporters on the tarmac. Expect to see Ms. Harris playing a more visible role in the weeks to come, with or without Mr. Biden at her side. 

Even amid questions about Mr. Biden’s energy level, there was no doubt Thursday that he was engaged – and happy to celebrate a triumph of diplomacy. Though Mr. Biden’s public schedule isn’t nearly as busy now, with a sudden dearth of campaign events, political analysts see ways for him to remain active in public life. 

“If he’s paced properly, if he chooses what he says in public strategically, then I don’t see why he couldn’t finish successfully,” says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former policy adviser in the Clinton White House.

The president has already seen his job approval numbers rise since dropping out of the race. But his legacy will ride in no small part on whether Ms. Harris wins in November.

From candidate to featured speaker at DNC

In Chicago later this month, instead of accepting his party’s nomination for a second term, Mr. Biden will be the featured speaker on the first night of the Democratic National Convention. 

And on the campaign trail, the president can still play a role. 

“Biden was certainly a weak candidate, but he still did have strengths,” says Mr. Schnur, now a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of communications. “He can still be of use to the Harris campaign with working-class voters in Rust Belt states and with older voters.” 

And, Mr. Schnur adds, there’s no reason Mr. Biden shouldn’t be campaigning in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – two key battlegrounds – closer to Election Day, either at Ms. Harris’ side or on his own. He also suggests the campaign could use targeted media featuring Mr. Biden in its outreach to white working-class voters and to seniors, two demographics with which he polls more strongly than Ms. Harris.

The risk is that Mr. Biden is famously gaffe-prone, and he could take her campaign off-message. 

More broadly, Ms. Harris also owns Mr. Biden’s record, for better or worse, be it on the economy, immigration, or the escalating war in the Middle East. Ms. Harris is seen as more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than Mr. Biden, which could help her in battleground Michigan, with its large Arab American community. But Ms. Harris also can’t risk alienating Democratic supporters of Israel. 

“If [Mr. Biden] can accomplish some sort of breakthrough on the Middle East that stabilizes the situation and makes it less of a central issue, that would be helpful to the Democratic ticket,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, in an email. “Moreover, any major progress on domestic issues, even using executive power, could be beneficial since Harris’s record is tied to his.”

This “highly unusual moment” differs from 1968

Certainly, the dynamic between Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris is easier than the last time a sitting president, Lyndon B. Johnson, dropped his reelection bid – in 1968 – and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, tried to run on his record. Mr. Humphrey saw a late surge in support, but only after crossing President Johnson over Vietnam War policy. He lost anyway. 

“This is a highly unusual moment, different than 1968, given how polarized the electorate is, how many people dislike Trump, and how despite being Biden’s VP, [Ms. Harris] represents much more than a continuation of the status quo,” Professor Zelizer writes. 

Indeed, while Mr. Biden’s decision to drop his reelection campaign, rare in American politics, is often likened to President Johnson’s shocking decision to quit his reelection bid, a better role model for the current incumbent might be President Ronald Reagan.

By the end of his second term, Mr. Reagan was slowing down and ready to pass the torch to his vice president, George H.W. Bush. Mr. Bush won what is sometimes called Mr. Reagan’s “third term.” 

The analogy falters, however, not only because of today’s intense polarization but also because of Mr. Biden’s inability to score much above 40% in public approval. Mr. Reagan left office above 60%. But analysts don’t rule out Mr. Biden’s ability to shift his political capital to Ms. Harris, particularly with certain key demographic groups, including white working-class voters. 

Today, Mr. Biden’s legacy is on the line, and a loss by Ms. Harris would wipe it out, says Mr. Galston, the Brookings scholar. If Mr. Trump retakes the White House, then the Biden presidency would effectively be just an “interregnum” between two Trump terms.

“Biden would be seen as a kind of failed president, in the way that Jimmy Carter is,” Mr. Galston says. “Biden’s historical standing is really riding on the outcome of the election.”