WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden has privately complained to allies about how his name and accomplishments have virtually disappeared from the national conversation and how quickly the party he served for more than five decades appears to have moved away from him, six say people familiar with his comments.

Biden has at times pointed out that Vice President Kamala Harris, who took his place at the top of the Democratic ticket in July, has not mentioned him in her campaign speeches of late, including when she talks about an economy that his policies are affecting The view is aimed at a positive development, these people said.

And it particularly hurt him when she spoke about him recently – during this month’s debate with former President Donald Trump, three people familiar with his comments said.

“I’m clearly not Joe Biden,” Harris said at the time, adding, “And I’m certainly not Donald Trump. And what I’m offering is a new generation of leadership for our country.” She made the remark in response to Trump’s Claiming that “she’s Biden” as he tried to argue that Harris’ and the president’s economic policies were no different.

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Details of Biden’s mixed feelings about the messaging of a campaign he painstakingly abandoned offer a glimpse into the way he has come to terms with his extraordinary decision to withdraw from the Democratic nomination and support his running mate . His private comments also reflect a shift in Harris’ campaign as she stakes out her own position as a candidate and grapples with a key question voters have about her candidacy: How would she differ from Biden?

This report on the president’s private comments comes from 12 people with knowledge of the Biden-Harris dynamic, including administration and campaign officials as well as allies involved in handing off his campaign to his vice president. They were granted anonymity to speak freely about the inner workings of the campaign and the White House.

They all made clear that Biden wants Harris to win in November — a development he believes will also shape his legacy — and that he wants to do everything he can to help her.

The president relayed this personally and repeatedly to Harris, according to a senior campaign official and another person familiar with the dynamic.

“He just keeps saying to her, ‘The most important thing is that you win,'” the senior campaign official said, adding that Harris and Biden had a productive lunch together last week and said their campaign was about ” to look forward.”

“We need to tell people who she is and what she would do,” the campaign manager said. “When he was running there was no real interest in hearing about his successes. That’s still the case.”

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement accompanying this article: “These uninformed claims are the exact opposite of the truth.”

“President Biden welcomes the American people’s strong response to Vice President Harris’s leadership and policies that move us into the future, away from dangerous agendas of the past like MAGAnomics and abortion bans,” he added.

The six people with knowledge of Biden’s private comments said he understands the political reasons for shifting the campaign message away from the public, even if it frustrates him at times.

“He completely understands that ‘Bidenomics’ and ‘Joe Biden’ are generally not mentioned. “Politically, he understands that,” said one of the people familiar with the dynamic.

A senior Biden adviser said the president asks daily whether there is anything more he can do to help Harris and that the two talk regularly.

“He wants nothing more than to do everything we can to support them,” the senior Biden said. “He’s 100% into it.”

But while Biden is cognizant of the political reality, he has also expressed a range of emotions about his exit from the race — from feeling that his legacy rests on a Harris victory to worrying that his imprint disappearing from the national stage, those familiar with him say his private comments.

They described a president who feels loyal to his vice president – and she to him – and less bitter than he was immediately after he left the race, when he felt pushed aside by people he considered his friends, but also by them , who he thought were his friends Times when I felt left behind.

“It’s very complex,” said one person familiar with his thinking.

In the month after she declared her candidacy on July 21, Harris regularly spoke about Biden on the campaign trail – she repeatedly opened her rallies by bringing “greetings” from the president. Those mentions have declined in her campaign speeches in recent weeks, although she praised Biden at a White House event last week and appeared with him on Sept. 14 when both spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus’ Phoenix Awards Dinner. The two also appeared together at a Labor Day rally this month.

“History will show what we know here,” Harris said at her Sept. 2 event. “Joe Biden was one of the most transformative presidents we have ever seen in the United States. And it comes from the heart.”

Harris, however, did not mention Biden’s name once in a 40-minute campaign speech on the economy in Pittsburgh last week. And while she used to say things like “Our country has come a long way since President Biden and I took office” in her campaign speeches, Harris now routinely says “we” when discussing the work of the Biden-Harris administration.

“Over the last three and a half years, we have made great progress in recovering from the health and economic crises we inherited,” she said in her economic speech last week, for example.

By contrast, Biden — who is expected to headline for Harris in October — and members of his administration have dramatically increased the frequency with which they mention her publicly since she became a presidential candidate.

“She needs to become her own person,” a Harris campaign official said. “She has to do this to win.”

While Harris led Trump in a new NBC News poll this month on which presidential candidate better represented change, 40% of registered voters said they were more concerned that she would continue the same approach as Biden ( compared to 39% who were more). fears that Trump would continue the same approach from his first term as president).

Harris feels genuine affection for Biden and their relationship remained strong during the three and a half years they shared the White House, people familiar with their relationship said. They said Biden expressed his appreciation for their loyalty, especially during the most difficult times, when he was under pressure to drop out of the presidential campaign and felt other Democratic Party leaders had turned against him.

“She loves the president. She idolizes the president. She’s proud of the record they have,” said a person familiar with Harris’ strategy. “But I think the hard thing for a lot of people is that this is going to be the Harris administration. It won’t be Biden Part Two.”

Since Harris declared her candidacy, her campaign advisers have debated how to handle the question of whether she would be an extension of Biden’s agenda, and she has broken with him on some policies. But she and her team have been focused on how to win in November, and much of that has to do with explaining who Harris is, independent of Biden.

Some of her advisers believe Harris needed to say “I’m not Joe Biden” rather than “I’m not the president” because the latter could give the impression she wasn’t capable of doing the job, four people with knowledge of Discussions said.

“So she has to say, ‘I’m not him.’ She can’t say, ‘I’m not the president,’ because people would say she’s not ready for that,” one of them said. “He understands that. It still doesn’t burn any less.”

Harris repeated that phrase a few days after the presidential debate when asked in a radio interview how she differs from Biden. “Well, I’m obviously not Joe Biden,” she said. “I offer a new generation of leaders.”

Appearing on ABC’s “The View” last week, Biden insisted he would have defeated Trump if he had stayed in the race.

“I never quite believed the allegations that there was somehow this overwhelming antipathy to me running again,” Biden said. “The fact is, my polls have always been close to this guy.”

Three people interviewed for this article attributed any discomfort with Harris’ campaign to Biden’s former inner circle and said they had done him a disservice by not being realistic enough about his chances of winning, even in the face of stubbornly low approval numbers.

However, since Biden dropped out following his disastrous debate performance in June, the polls have shifted in Harris’ favor. While the race between Harris and Trump remains close overall, the Democratic map has expanded since Biden’s departure, bringing North Carolina into play as well as Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Excitement has grown across the party since Harris took over the leadership from Biden on July 21. It’s filling venues in battleground states like Biden has never done before, attracting tens of thousands of new volunteers and inspiring staggering fundraising numbers.

But allies said Biden will ultimately feel vindicated not only by the selflessness of his decision to resign for Harris, but also by what Democrats see as a four-year term filled with accomplishments.

“I’m sure reality is hitting him,” John Morgan, a longtime Biden ally and Democratic donor, said of Biden watching the Democratic campaign unfold without him. “But the big reality for Joe Biden, when we see through all of this, is that his four years have been a masterpiece.”