In the finger-pointing that naturally follows a stunning loss, a handful of Democratic officials and operatives are putting the blame squarely on Joe Biden. The president, they told Politico, doomed Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign by staying in the race for too long, even as others say that Harris and the party as a whole have no one but themselves to blame.
Before his disastrous debate performance against President-elect Donald Trump, polling indicated widespread concern over Biden's age and mental acuity, which helped tank his approval rating. Even after the debate poured gasoline on the fire, Biden and his allies spent a month resisting calls for him to step aside, leaving Harris with just over three months to define her candidacy.
“[Biden] 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.”
Nearly a dozen Democrats vented to Politico about their anger towards Biden, whose legacy they say is now inextricably linked to Trump's return to power. Many of the Biden's executive and legislative accomplishments are now at risk of being reversed. And much of the fault, they, lies with the president, who let his pride and misplaced ego cloud his political judgment.
Against evidence such as consistently poor polling in a head-to-head matchup against Trump, Biden and his staff insisted that he was uniquely qualified to defeat the GOP candidate and would eventually gain momentum. “They failed to see his inability to step up his game,” said James Zogby, a Democratic pollster. “There was this sense that there was nobody out there who could do it," leaving potential successors like Harris, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear frozen in place.
When Biden did drop out, some Democrats called for an abbreviated primary so that voters could weigh in on his replacement. Instead, party leaders closed ranks behind Harris, who took the nomination at the Democratic National Convention without opposition.
“It would have been better if we had had a primary, even if Harris was the eventual victor,” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., one of the first Democratic elected officials to publicly urge Biden to step down after the debate, told Politico. “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.”
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Some of Biden's allies have come to the president's defense, arguing that additional time offered by an earlier changing of the guard is a poor substitute for a campaign run on an outdated and unappealing message.
“There is no singular reason why we lost, but a big reason is because the Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee, and then signed up as the saviors of the campaign only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn’t Obama,” a former Biden staffer told Politico's Playbook. They added that they would like to take a shot of “whatever they’re drinking if 100 extra days of campaigning for Harris instead of Biden would have changed the results of last night!”
Critics have said that both Harris and Biden doomed their party's chances by failing to address voters' concerns about inflation. The White House initially dismissed a spike in inflation as a temporary phenomenon, and when people continued to express a dim view of the economy even as prices eased up, many Democrats suggested that Americans were simply being misinformed or feeling bad "vibes," citing the strength of the U.S. recovery relative to all other developed nations.
“They didn’t jump on it fast enough,” said Mike Lux, a Democratic strategist who defended Biden’s record but lamented that it failed to connect 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.”
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Harris did incorporate concerns about price-gouging and rent hikes into her campaign, but those costs-of-living messages competed with warnings that Trump was an unhinged fascist and unfit for office — warnings that critics say did not address the most acute concerns of working-class voters, who shifted towards Trump across all demographic groups. She also did not explicitly embrace the Biden administration's more popular antitrust enforcement nor push an aggressively pro-union agenda, largely eschewing UAW president Shawn Fain on the campaign trail in favor of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and billionaire Mark Cuban.
Mark Longabaugh, a former strategist to Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., suggested to Politico that Harris "ran an extraordinary campaign with a very tough hand that was handed to her" by Biden. His old boss, who appeared reluctant to endorse Harris before the convention, disagreed without mentioning the vice president by name.
"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them," Sanders wrote in a statement. "While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right."
Sanders' indictment of the party as a whole would seem to imply that Biden and Harris' apparent missteps were part of a larger structural issue, despite the president holding on to his belief that he would have waged a stronger campaign against Trump. Though Biden stayed largely out of the limelight during the fall campaign, his occasional forays were sometimes marked with gaffes that provided unwanted headlines for the Harris campaign — evidence, some Democrats say, that Biden is wrong in his theory.
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