Breaking past Biden

House Democrats are giddy about a Kamala Harris-Tim Walz administration as a clean break from the long-simmering perception that the Biden team favored the Senate, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: "The House would get screwed [under President Biden], we'd get asked to take tough votes and then after those votes were on record, he'd veto or do whatever he did," one senior House Democrat told us.

• "It was apparent on so many occasions he had what [Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi] would call Senate-itis," said Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) — referencing the decades Biden spent in the Senate before becoming vice president.

Between the lines: There was a strong feeling Biden favored the Senate during his first two years in office.

• He let then-Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer run the show during negotiations over his signature pieces of legislation.
• Staffing mattered too: Louisa Terrell, Biden's first head of legislative affairs, had a Senate-stacked resume before joining the White House. Shuwanza Goff, Biden's second head of legislative affairs, is a House person and that has helped smooth things over a bit.

Zoom in: Several Democrats pointed us to an incident last year in which Biden left House Democrats fuming by waiting until after they'd voted on a controversial D.C. police reform bill to give senators cover to vote against it.

• Another example: Some rank-and-file House members held off on calling for Biden to drop his bid for re-election out of a belief that he would only listen to input from senators and a handful of House icons like Pelosi.

Zoom out: Gov. Walz's 12-year tenure in the House is "one of the reasons" Pelosi pushed Vice President Harris to pick him as her running mate, the senior House Dem told us.

• Harris would focus on building relationships with House Democratic leadership, especially House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.).
• "I think Tim is going to become a de facto office of congressional relations ... he's got, obviously, a huge reach in the House," said Takano.

The bottom line: "I am very hopeful and biased that they are the right partnership to work with us," Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), a former Black Caucus chair, told us in an interview.