Was It All Biden’s Fault?
By 
Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, wrote in a statement recently that his caucus had “defied political gravity,” a reference to the newly released “Wicked” movie that was soon echoed by Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat.
And further down the ballot, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee wrote in its year-end report that the party’s successes in statehouse races represented “one of the most shocking election results in modern history” — even though Democrats lost majorities in chambers in Michigan and Minnesota.
These sunny-side-up views of the election serve as something of an antidote to the notion that Democrats, humbled by their 2024 mistakes, are about to begin rebuilding their party from the ground up.
They also fly in the face of signs of a broad depression within the party. Ratings are down on MSNBC, the liberal television network that has served as the house organ for Democratic officials, as the party’s voters so far show little inclination to revive their resistance to Mr. Trump from 2016.
What’s more, the positive sentiment lets Democrats blame President Biden — whom many of them publicly defended even after his disastrous debate in June — for the party’s poor showing. By arguing that the party’s problems stem from an 82-year-old president who is about to retire from politics, Democrats can avoid tackling tough questions about why they have lost ground among voters of color and working-class Americans while giving donors who invested billions of dollars something to explain why they lost.
Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List, the largest group helping to elect Democratic women, said on the left-leaning podcast “The Downballot” that Vice President Kamala Harris had saved the party from even bigger defeats had Mr. Biden remained its presidential nominee.
“When she entered this race, Democrats were poised to lose and lose big,” Ms. Mackler said. “The energy that she brought, the way that she was able to evaporate that enthusiasm gap, it really mattered.”
As Democrats throw up their hands and point to political headwinds brought on by inflation and Mr. Biden as the cause of their 2024 plight, many are also eliding the fact that they had been optimistic that Ms. Harris would win.
The Harris campaign’s pre-election data showed her winning in Michigan and Wisconsin and within 0.1 percent of Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania, according to an internal post-mortem campaign analysis, reviewed by The New York Times, that was written by Meg Schwenzfeier, the campaign’s chief analytics officer, and Becca Siegel, a senior adviser to the campaign.
The campaign’s modeling underestimated Mr. Trump’s support by an average of 1.7 percentage points across 13 states where it tracked data.
Top officials from the Harris campaign have also suggested that Mr. Biden bequeathed his vice president a perilous political situation. Last month, David Plouffe, a senior adviser, said on the podcast “Pod Save America” that Ms. Harris’s position was “pretty catastrophic in terms of where the race stood.”
In recent weeks, the Harris campaign has circulated a separate, and unsigned, document titled “Tough Q & A [not to share].” It consists of talking points meant to answer questions that campaign officials and surrogates were likely to face after their defeat.
To the questions “How much of this was Biden’s fault? Should he have dropped out earlier/run for re-election at all?” the campaign document suggests a nonresponse.
“It was up to him whether or not to run,” the document states. “He then made the decision to step aside following the June debate. That was the right decision and it put Democrats in the best position to compete — the ground the V.P. was able to make up proves that.”
Ok…..
Look, yes, Biden destroyed his own legacy by choosing to run for a second term. I don’t even know if he comes in as an average president based on this. The post-withdrawal beliefs in this comment section that Biden is a top 3 or top 5 all time president were laughable. I will have more on this, but the short way to understand the Biden administration is generally good on policy and completely disastrous on politics.
But let’s not just blame the Old Man here. There were a bunch of problems. Some of them were structural and some of them were about the bigger failures on the Democratic Party. Yes, any discussion of this election result has to start with the fact that almost every incumbent party who governed over the post-pandemic inflation lost the next election. That obviously matters. But then there’s all the other things–the uninspiring Democratic messaging, the complete inability to educate the public (Republicans may miseducate but that’s still educating), the growing failure to attract working class voters that becomes a bigger problem with each election cycle, outright collapsing among Latino voters, the increasingly baroque issues of extreme identity individualism that just open the doors right up for Republicans to call Democrats elites, the inability to separate ourselves from Republicans because we love billionaires too, etc.
We can debate how important each of these issues were, but what is really happening here is that the people who control the party are patting themselves on the back and saying things are really just fine and that they don’t need to change much of anything, despite the fact that Donald Trump was elected again. That goes very well with the immediate transition in messaging by leading Democrats that started the day after the election that went from Donald Trump is the greatest threat this country has ever faced to everything is more or less OK. That’s not working. It’s probably not going to work either.
In any case, yes, Biden’s ego is a big reason Democrats lost. He should have announced he wasn’t running for reelection the day after the midterms. But it’s not the only reason and we can’t let Democratic leadership off the hook for their failures.