Democrats are directing their rage over losing the presidential race at Joe Biden, who they blame for setting up Kamala Harris for failure by not dropping out sooner.
They say his advancing age, questions over his mental acuity and deep unpopularity put Democrats at a sharp disadvantage. They are livid that they were forced to embrace a candidate who voters had made clear they did not want — and then stayed in the race long after it was clear he couldn’t win.
“He shouldn’t have run,” said Jim Manley, a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings. He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”
According to interviews with nearly a dozen officials and party operatives, Biden squandered valuable months only to end in disaster on the debate stage. And by the time he decided to pass the torch, he had saddled Harris with too many challenges and far too little time to build a winning case for herself.
The fresh anger at Biden came as Democrats devolved into a round of recriminations following Tuesday’s decisive loss to Donald Trump, with officials struggling to explain why a majority of the electorate voted Republican for the first time in 20 years.
Democratic leaders had hoped Harris could separate herself from Biden’s deficiencies after taking over the nomination with just 107 days to the election. The candidate switch in July generated a fresh surge of enthusiasm with voters and appeared to instantly reset the race, bolstering the theory that she could eke out a win against an opponent as divisive as Trump.
But any gains Harris made during her abridged campaign were swamped on Tuesday by the enduring backlash against the Biden administration over inflation and cost-of-living concerns — and a president who proved incapable of selling the electorate on his accomplishments and whose apparent overconfidence kept him in the campaign despite growing signs that he wasn’t up for the job.
“She ran an extraordinary campaign with a very tough hand that was handed to her,” Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said of Harris. “The truth of the matter is, Biden should have stepped aside earlier and let the party put together a longer game plan.”
The loss, said supporters and critics alike, will put a lasting dent in a legacy that Biden built steadily over more than a half-century in politics, culminating in what he envisioned would be a resounding defeat of Trump and his divisive brand of politics. Instead, Biden’s presidency will now be inextricably linked with Trump’s return to the Oval Office and his legislative accomplishments risk getting undercut by his successor. It’s in part a consequence, some Democrats concluded, of Biden letting pride and ego cloud the sharp political judgment that had aided his long ascent to the White House.
“There was a Biden weariness,” James Zogby, a three-decade veteran of the Democratic National Committee, said of the shift among the electorate in recent years. “And he hung on too long.”
Biden on Wednesday afternoon phoned Trump to congratulate him on the victory and praised Harris in a statement, saying that “under extraordinary circumstances, she stepped up and led a historic campaign.” He plans to make his first public remarks on the election in a national address on Thursday.
Inside a somber White House, aides still processing the results bristled at the second-guessing of Biden’s decision to run for reelection, pointing to the legislative record he’d racked up in his first two years and better-than-expected midterm results that suggested Democrats had political momentum. There were similarly few immediate regrets over Biden’s decision to drop out and endorse Harris, short-circuiting the potential for a messy fight to replace him.
Instead, aides and allies contended, Tuesday’s defeat was so comprehensive it’s unclear any Democrat could’ve won under such circumstances. The anti-incumbency anger ignited by inflation that had swept across Europe in recent years finally arrived in the U.S. And as working-class voters shifted decisively toward Trump, they expressed doubt Harris could’ve cobbled together a workable coalition even if she’d had more time to campaign.
“People, for whatever reason, feel it was better four years ago — and I don’t think we could fight that,” said one longtime Democratic operative, pointing to the growing percentage of Latinos and Black voters who flipped to Trump. “We just have a bad brand right now.”
Marty Walsh, Biden’s former Labor secretary, acknowledged in an interview that the administration’s messaging too often “just didn’t resonate with people.” But he warned that those shortcomings were not tied to Biden or any other candidate; rather, the party as a whole hasn’t figured out how to effectively reach and educate voters.
“It’s not a pointing fingers day. It’s a reflection day,” he said.
Much as she did during the campaign, perhaps to her detriment, Harris has also declined to criticize Biden in public or private, telling confidants that she gave it her best, but that it ultimately wasn’t enough, according to a person familiar with the matter who was granted anonymity to describe the conversations.
Still, Biden has become a central target in the intensifying debate among Democrats over what went wrong.
Several Democrats pointed to the administration’s handling of a spike in inflation as a key misstep. The White House initially dismissed it as a temporary phenomenon, and it took months for Biden to grasp the impact it was having on the electorate. The episode cost them credibility with voters and overshadowed the economic strides being made elsewhere.
“They didn’t jump on it fast enough,” said Mike Lux, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Democracy Partners, who defended Biden’s record but lamented that it never took hold with working-class voters. “It was really hurting people, and we just didn’t respond in the way that we could have and should have on policy, to an extent, but definitely on communications.”
But beyond the policy turning points, critics faulted the president and his close advisers for badly misreading Democrats’ 2020 victory as driven by a groundswell of support for Biden himself — rather than a temporary expression of dissatisfaction over the pandemic and an unpopular incumbent in Trump.
Biden, who had at one point in the 2020 campaign pledged to be a “bridge” candidate to a new generation, later based his run for reelection on the belief that only he could defeat Trump — even as he showed clear signs that, at 81, he was not the dynamic candidate of even four years ago. In polling dating back to 2023, more than three-quarters of Americans believed Biden was too old for office.
“They failed to see his inability to step up his game,” Zogby said of Biden’s top aides. “There was this sense that there was nobody out there who could do it.”
The decision froze several would-be successors in place, linking the party to a candidate who his advisers insisted would gain momentum as the race progressed. And despite mounting worries among Democrats about Biden’s effectiveness, it took until June’s catastrophic debate for those concerns to go public. Even then, Biden spent nearly a month trying to salvage his run before dropping out — leaving little time for Democrats to audition new candidates.
“It would have been better if we had had a primary, even if Harris was the eventual victor,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), one of the first congressional Democrats to publicly call for Biden to step aside after the debate. “And it was necessary for the Democratic nominee to separate him or herself from an unpopular incumbent, as much as we love Joe Biden. None of those things happened.”
Instead, Harris inherited the race with just over three months to go, forced to rely on Biden’s campaign infrastructure while developing her own presidential platform on the fly.
Biden, to his credit, took an immediate back seat as Harris tried to establish her identity as a candidate and make up ground to Trump, the president’s critics said. But by that point it was too late — both for his reputation and the fortunes of the Democratic Party.
“He’s a good man who can be proud of his accomplishments. But his legacy is in tatters,” Manley said. “The country is headed in a very dangerous direction and it’s due in part to his arrogance.”
Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.
Leave a Comment