WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden’s name was not on the ballot, but history will likely remember Kamala Harris’s resounding defeat as his loss, too.
As Democrats pick up the pieces following President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory, some of the vice president’s supporters are expressing frustration over Biden’s decision to wait for re-election until this summer — despite voters’ long-standing concerns about his age and also the discomfort about inflation after the pandemic. as the U.S.-Mexico border — all but sealed his party’s loss of the White House.
“The biggest burden of this loss falls on President Biden,” said Andrew Yang, who ran against Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2020 and supported Harris’ failed bid. “If he had resigned in January instead of July, we might be in a very different place.”
Biden will leave office having led the US out of the worst pandemic in a century, mobilized international support for Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion and passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that will impact communities for years to come.
But after running against Trump four years ago to “restore the soul of the country,” Biden will make way after just one term to his immediate predecessor, who overcame two impeachments, a felony conviction and an insurrection launched by his supporters. Trump has vowed to radically overhaul the federal government and roll back many of Biden’s priorities.
“Maybe in 20 or 30 years, history will remember Biden for some of these achievements,” said Thom Reilly, co-director of the Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy at Arizona State University. “But in the shorter term, I don’t know if he will escape the legacy of the president who defeated Donald Trump to usher in a new Donald Trump administration four years later.”
The president remained out of sight for a second straight day on Wednesday, offering congratulations to Democratic lawmakers who won the downballot races, as well as to Trump, whom he invited to a White House meeting that the president-elect accepted.
Biden will give a Rose Garden speech on the election on Thursday. He issued a statement shortly after Harris gave her concession speech on Wednesday, praising Harris for running a “historic campaign” under “extraordinary circumstances.”
Some senior Democrats, including three advisers to the Harris campaign, expressed deep frustration with Biden for failing to recognize earlier in the election cycle that he was not up to the challenge. The advisers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
Biden, 81, ended his reelection campaign in July, weeks after a terrible debate performance sent his party into a spiral and raised questions about whether he still had the mental acuity and stamina to serve as a credible candidate.
But polls well in advance showed that many Americans were concerned about his age. About 77% of Americans said in August 2023 that Biden was too old to be effective for another four years, according to a poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs.
The president resigned on July 21 after receiving not-so-subtle pushes from Democratic Party power brokers, including former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He endorsed Harris and turned his campaign operation over to her.
Harris managed to generate far greater enthusiasm than Biden generated among the party base. But she struggled to discern how her administration would differ from Biden’s.
Harris appeared on ABC’s The View in September and could not identify a decision that would have seen her split from Biden. “There’s nothing that comes to mind,” Harris said, giving the Trump campaign a clear picture of Election Day.
The strategists advising the Harris campaign said the compressed campaign schedule made it even more difficult for Harris to distinguish herself from the president.
If Biden had stepped aside early this year, they said, it would have given Democrats enough time to hold a primary. Going through an intraparty contest would have forced Harris or another eventual nominee to more aggressively explain differences with Biden.
The strategists acknowledged that overcoming broad dissatisfaction among the U.S. electorate over rising costs in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and broad concerns about the U.S. immigration system weighed heavily on the minds of voters in key states.
Still, they said Biden had left Democrats in an untenable place.
Harris senior adviser David Plouffe called it a “devastating loss” in a post on X. Plouffe gave no blame. He noted that the Harris campaign was “dug from a deep hole, but not enough.”
During the vice president’s concession speech on Wednesday, some Harris supporters said they wished the vice president had had more time to make her pitch to American voters.
“I think that would have made a huge difference,” said Jerushatalla Pallay, a Howard University student who attended the speech in the middle of her campus.
The Republicans are ready to control the White House and the Senate. Control of the House has yet to be determined.
Matt Bennett, executive vice president of the Democratic-leaning group Third Way, said the moment was the most devastating thing the party has seen in its lifetime.
“Harris has been dealt a very bad hand. Some of it is Biden’s doing and some of it may not be,” said Bennett, who served as an aide to Vice President Al Gore during the Clinton administration. Would Democrats do better if Biden had stepped back sooner? I don’t know if we can say for sure, but it’s a question we’ll be asking ourselves for a while.”
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Associated Press writer Matt Brown contributed to this report.
