Democrats are directing their anger over losing the presidential race at Joe Biden, whom they blame for ensnaring Kamala Harris by not dropping out sooner.
They say his advancing age, questions about his mental acuity and deep unpopularity put Democrats at a sharp disadvantage. They’re furious that they were forced to embrace a candidate that voters made clear they didn’t 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 not the time to throw punches or worry 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 officials, Biden wasted valuable months but ended 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 himself.
The new anger against Biden came as Democrats turned to a round of recriminations after 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 two decades.
Democratic leaders had hoped Harris could break away from Biden’s shortcomings after taking over the nomination with just 107 days until the election. The change of candidates in July sparked a new wave of enthusiasm among voters and appeared to immediately reset the race, reinforcing the theory that she could pull off a victory against an opponent as divisive as Trump.
But the gains Harris made during her abbreviated campaign were overshadowed Tuesday by continued backlash against the Biden administration over inflation and cost-of-living concerns — and a president who has proven unable to sell the electorate on his achievements and whose apparent overconfidence held him back in the campaign, despite mounting signs that he was not fit for the job.
“She ran an extraordinary campaign with a very heavy hand dealt to her,” Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said of Harris. “The truth is that Biden should have stepped aside sooner and let the party draw up a longer game plan.”
The loss, supporters and critics alike said, will leave a lasting dent in the legacy Biden has steadily built over more than half a century in politics, culminating in what he envisioned as a resounding defeat of Trump and his divisive politics. Instead, Biden’s presidency will now be inextricably linked to Trump’s return to the Oval Office and his legislative achievements are at risk of being undermined by his successor. It is partly a result, some Democrats concluded, of Biden letting pride and ego cloud the sharp political judgment that had helped his long climb to the White House.
“There was Biden fatigue,” James Zogby, a 30-year veteran of the Democratic National Committee, said of the shift among the electorate in recent years. “And he held on too long.”
Biden called Trump on Wednesday afternoon to congratulate him on the victory and praised Harris in a statement, saying that “she acted under extraordinary circumstances and led a historic campaign.” He plans to make his first public comments on the election in a national address on Thursday.
In a somber White House, aides still processing the results stood irritated at the second-guessing of Biden’s decision to run for re-election, pointing to the legislative record he built in his first two years and better than expected midterm results that suggested Democrats had political momentum. There was also little immediate regret over Biden’s decision to resign and endorse Harris, short-circuiting the chance for a messy fight to replace him.
Instead, aides and allies argued, Tuesday’s defeat was so big that it’s unclear a Democrat could have won under such circumstances. The anger against the established power, fueled by the inflation that had swept through Europe in recent years, finally reached the US. And as working-class voters shifted decisively to Trump, they expressed doubt that Harris could have forged a workable coalition even if she had. more time to campaign.
“People, for whatever reason, feel like things were better four years ago — and I don’t think we could fight that,” said one veteran Democratic official, pointing to the growing share of Latino and black voters who switched to Trump. “We just have a bad brand at the moment.”
Marty Walsh, Biden’s former labor secretary, acknowledged in an interview that too often the administration’s messaging “just didn’t resonate with people.” But he cautioned that these shortcomings were not the fault of Biden or any other candidate; On the contrary, the party as a whole has not yet figured out how to effectively reach and educate voters.
“It’s not a day of pointing fingers. It’s a day of reflection,” he said.
As she did during the campaign, perhaps to her detriment, Harris has also refused to criticize Biden publicly or privately, telling confidants that she did her best but that it ultimately wasn’t enough, according to a person familiar with the campaign. it doesn’t matter who was granted anonymity to describe the conversations.
Still, Biden has become a central target in the growing debate among Democrats about what went wrong.
Several Democrats pointed to the administration’s handling of a spike in inflation as a major misstep. The White House initially dismissed it as a temporary phenomenon, and it took months for Biden to realize the impact it was having on the electorate. The episode cost them credibility with voters and overshadowed economic progress made elsewhere.
“They didn’t move 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 resonated with working-class voters. “It really hurt people, and to some extent we didn’t respond in the way that we could and should have in terms of policy, but certainly in terms of communication.”
But beyond the policy turning points, critics faulted the president and his closest advisers for grossly misreading the Democrats’ 2020 victory as driven by a groundswell of support for Biden himself — rather than a temporary expression of dissatisfaction with the pandemic and an unpopular sitting president in Trump.
Biden, who at one point in the 2020 campaign had promised to be a “bridge candidate” for a new generation, later based his candidacy for reelection on the belief that only he could beat Trump — even as he showed clear signs that he at 81, he was not the dynamic candidate he was even four years ago. Polls from 2023 showed that more than three-quarters of Americans thought Biden was too old for office.
“They didn’t see his inability to improve his game,” Zogby said of Biden’s top aides. “There was a feeling that there was no one who could do it.”
The decision froze several potential successors, tying the party to a candidate his advisers insisted would gain momentum as the race progressed. And despite mounting concerns among Democrats about Biden’s effectiveness, it wasn’t until June’s catastrophic debate that these concerns became 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 a primary even if Harris was the eventual winner,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), one of the first Democrats in Congress to publicly call for Biden to run after the election to step aside. debate. “And it was necessary for the Democratic nominee to separate himself from an unpopular incumbent president, as much as we love Joe Biden. None of these things happened.”
Instead, Harris inherited the race with just over three months to go, forced to rely on Biden’s campaign infrastructure while she quickly developed her own presidential platform.
Biden, to his credit, immediately took a back seat as Harris tried to establish her identity as a candidate and make up ground for Trump, the president’s critics said. But by then it was too late – both for his reputation and for the fate of the Democratic Party.
“He is a good man who can be proud of his achievements. But his legacy is in tatters,” Manley said. “The country is moving in a very dangerous direction and that is partly due to his arrogance.”
Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.
