The blame game for Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House has already commenced among Democrats. And there are a lot of causes being tossed around.
The commentariat and some Democrats have zeroed in on their favorite target: wokeness. Democrats, they say, need to stop saying “Latinx,”embrace the public’s opposition to certain trans rights and stop policing language and the shows politicians appear on. Those on the left argue that Democrats need to embrace rhetoric and an agenda more focused on the working class ― and actually deliver on those ideas.
Whatever the merits of these arguments, one thing is clear: Democrats never got to have an argument about which path to take before the election because President Joe Biden did not step aside until it was too late. While the myriad possible reasons for Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss will undoubtedly be analyzed (and re-analyzed, and re-analyzed) in the months to come, it’s undeniable that Biden’s choices put an extra millstone around Democrats’ collective necks. Monday morning quarterbacking may be frowned upon, but it’s worth looking back at why Biden should not have chosen to run again ― and how his failure to back out may have furthered the Democratic spiral by denying Harris more time to separate herself from the administration or giving a candidate from outside the White House a chance to secure the nomination.
Even before the question of age-related decline made Biden’s candidacy undeniably untenable, the fundamentals ― approval ratings and economic measures ― showed an incumbent heading for a big loss. Biden was the most consistently unpopular president who could run for reelection since Harry Truman. (Truman did not run in 1952 for a third term when he could have.) Other presidents with similar levels of unpopularity ― Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and, yes, Trump ― lost reelection.
Economic metrics showed that the American public absolutely hated the state of the economy. Though many measures showed strong performances for gross domestic production, the stock market, economic equality, employment and wage gains for the lowest-paid workers, they largely missed on the most crucial factor: inflation.
The key measure of public dissatisfaction is the price of food and gas, which is not included in the core inflation metric used by the Federal Reserve. These are the basics that most people feel acutely in their spending every week but that Federal Reserve interest hikes have little or no power to change. This “anti-core” inflation metric, as Bloomberg’s John Authers called it, spiked above 21% in the summer of 2022, the highest inflation for these goods in at least 70 years. Concerns about price increases weren’t just perceptions influenced by the press or by unnecessary DoorDash orders. They were very real.
President Joe Biden’s performance in a presidential debate with Donald Trump on June 27 exposed concerning effects of his advanced age and led him to withdraw from the race. Justin Sullivan via Getty Images
Food and gas inflation, therefore, was worse in 2022 than during the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and during the aftermath of the Iranian revolution in 1979-80. The inflation caused by the oil embargo no doubt helped sour the public’s mood toward Richard Nixon as he faced pressure to resign over Watergate. And in 1980, inflation toppled Jimmy Carter and put Ronald Reagan into office. Sometimes history does repeat itself.
Just as inflation worsened the public’s mood, COVID-era income supports for food, housing and health care expired, increasing cost pressures on some families.
The Biden administration did little to respond to this. It relied chiefly on the Federal Reserve to tackle inflation through interest rate increases. And though this did eventually bring down inflation in 2024 to the 2% target, it also increased inflation for new mortgages, car loans, credit card debt and other kinds of financing. This pushed credit card and car loan debt to record highs while credit delinquency rose to levels not seen since the Great Recession of 2008, according to the New York Fed. Higher mortgage rates fed into the broader sense that life had become unaffordable as the cost of buying a home skyrocketed.
Some economists and policymakers proposed in 2022 that the administration adopt alternative policies to fight inflation, including price controls, a windfall profits tax and higher taxes on the rich. But these would all require approval by Congress, and Democrats often relied on a razor-thin margin that required the votes of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), both of whom hold conservative economic views. Still, the administration did not try to address the public’s concerns until perceptions were already fixed.
All of this would have been enough to doom an incumbent party, but Biden’s age, 81, added an insurmountable burden. Though we may be debating when Biden’s mental acuity began a decline, he showed other signs of aging throughout his presidency. His gait stiffened, his voice grew hoarser and his speech patterns became more erratic and halted.
A key part of the presidency in the modern media age is the performance of action and competence. This can often be mocked as “theater criticism,” but the public’s relationship with politicians is mediated through television and the internet, and politicians are very much conscious of this fact. They know they are performers. And this type of performance was becoming more difficult for Biden.
He held the fewest press conferences of any president since Reagan. He gave significantly fewer interviews to the press than either Trump or Barack Obama. He declined interviews during the Super Bowl, the most-watched TV event in the country, in both 2023 and 2024. (Trump also declined a Super Bowl interview in 2018, although over partisan politics.)
When finally forced to speak in an unscripted setting at the June 27 presidential debate with Trump, Biden’s incapacity was revealed to the public. He mixed up words, couldn’t complete sentences, went off on tangents about golf and, most important, could not make the case for his reelection.
Had Biden’s condition and his broad unpopularity been acknowledged sooner, Democrats could have had a competitive primary to produce a candidate who could speak to voters’ pain over inflation while also maintaining distance from Biden’s record. This was something Harris refused to do in her now-infamous answer on “The View.”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said when asked if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden. “And I’ve been part of most of the decisions that have had impact.” It was a boon to GOP ad makers, who ran Harris’ response in a blitz of ads in swing states in the closing weeks of the campaign.
Biden welcomed President-elect Trump to the Oval Office on Wednesday, where Biden has a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt displayed as an inspiration for his presidency. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Could Democrats have run against the fundamentals of the election presented by the dim view the public had of the economy and the incumbent’s extremely high disapproval rating? It’s hard to know. But Harris’ loss in the popular vote will ultimately land somewhere around 1.5 percentage points ― the closest election since 2000. She did beat the fundamentals, but not by enough. We’ll never know if a non-Biden administration candidate could have done better.
The Biden administration blinded itself to both the growing dissatisfaction over inflation and Biden’s age. This refusal to face reality cost Democrats the ability to distance themselves from his unpopularity and the opportunity to really deliberate how to run in this election.
It also proved fatal for Biden’s raison d’être for running for president in the first place.
Biden repeatedly claimed that his 2020 run was inspired by the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, 2017, when, as he recounted, “the forces of hate and violence were summoned from the shadows as neo-Nazis, Klansmen and white supremacists descended on a historic American city.” His campaign was a “fight for the soul of America.”
What got lost in all of Biden’s talk of democracy and the rule of law was what really mattered to voters. And that was their household finances. President Franklin Roosevelt, whom Biden sought to emulate, knew that countries which descended into dictatorship and autocracy did so because of how regular people experienced their material well-being.
To avoid the people succumbing to authoritarianism, Roosevelt said in his 1937 Constitution Day address in the midst of the Great Depression, “our constitutional democratic form of government must meet the insistence of the great mass of our people that economic and social security and the standard of American living be raised from what they are to levels which the people know our resources justify.”
“Only by succeeding in that can we ensure against internal doubt as to the worthwhileness of our democracy and dissipate the illusion that the necessary price of efficiency is dictatorship with its attendant spirit of aggression,” he added.
The New Deal wasn’t just an economic and governing revolution that responded to the Great Depression, it was an anti-fascist agenda.
Biden did not deliver a rising standard of living for Americans, despite enacting important pieces of legislation that may very well do that sometime in the future. Perhaps this was unavoidable, as the only tool Biden was willing to rely on to fight inflation was an unelected Federal Reserve. But that seems to imply futility in the face of the authoritarian march ― something Roosevelt rejected.
It appears that Biden’s fight for the soul of America is lost ― for now. Democrats see their party as in crisis. The real crisis of Trump’s reelection, after all that came before, is with liberalism itself. And this is Biden’s tragic legacy.
