There’s a preposterous idea circulating the elite political class: former President Joe Biden‘s stubborn refusal to step down cost his party the presidency.
“Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities and that’s how Trump won,” George Clooney is quoted as saying in a recent New Yorker article.
And in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book on the cover-up of Biden’s mental decline, Democratic strategist David Plouffe echoed Clooney, saying, “It’s all Biden. He totally f****** us.”
According to this theory of the case, Democrats would have held on to the White House if Biden hadn’t lost his mental acuity or if former Vice President Kamala Harris had had longer to campaign against President Donald Trump. But neither claim holds up to scrutiny. Both are indicative of an elite political class that still hasn’t figured out what happened in November — and probably never will.
To be sure, Biden’s steep mental decline, which was apparent to anyone outside the Washington, D.C., media bubble even before his 2020 campaign, did not help his party’s prospects in 2024. But it wasn’t the decisive factor some make it out to be. Trump’s victory was the result of Democratic policies, which wrecked the economy and flooded the nation with 10 million undocumented immigrations, and of cultural progressivism’s toxicity in the woke era.
There wasn’t a pitchman alive who could have convinced a majority of Americans to reinforce this agenda. From open borders to progressive indoctrination in schools to a foreign policy that saw armed conflict break out worldwide, the Democratic brand became synonymous with failure and decay. Sure, Biden’s obvious cognitive deficits made matters worse and raised startling questions about who was actually running the country. But Americans pined for Trump regardless. They saw him as a bulwark against the moral degradations and governing missteps perpetrated by Democrats.
They also rightly saw that Trump was unfairly targeted by the Justice Department, a transgression (or a “broken norm,” if you will) that they were unwilling to let go unpunished.
A healthy, quick-witted Biden wouldn’t have changed any of this.
There’s even reason to suspect that a healthy Biden would have made matters worse. It’s likely the case that his staff would have done a better job running the country than he would have, and that he would have torpedoed his own reelection campaign if given the chance. Biden was never very popular to begin with. Far from a sharp tactician, his capacity for gaffes was the stuff of legend. Take it from Biden’s old boss, who famously warned allies to “never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”
The idea that Harris could have won with more time on the trail is equally ridiculous. Her only real momentum came early in the race, and it seeped away with every shallow and off-putting utterance. There’s a reason her handlers wouldn’t allow her to do an interview for the first month of the campaign — they knew what would happen if she were allowed to speak.
And they were right. The early polling bump she experienced upon taking over the top of the ticket — she led by nearly four points nationally in August, according to FiveThirtyEight — evaporated steadily until Election Day. Her cringeworthy appearances in the final weeks of her campaign, including an interview on The View during which she was stumped by a softball question from co-host Sunny Hostin about how she differentiated from Biden, as well as a CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper during which she couldn’t name a single weakness, showed a candidate who was cratering, not ascending.
More time on the campaign trail would have meant an even bigger electoral wipeout. Democratic media is making it seem as though Harris was steadily gaining on front-runner Trump, but couldn’t quite reach him before running through the tape. It’s pure fiction.
Harris’s 2020 bid for the Democratic nomination followed the same trajectory: burst out of the gate, limp to the finish line.
The media circus surrounding the Biden cover-up must make Trump giggle himself to sleep at night. Who has ever been blessed with such pitiful opponents?
BIDEN COMEBACK TOUR ISN’T HELPING THE DEMOCRATS
The false spin Democratic elites are attempting to convince themselves of — that Biden’s decline was the real reason they lost, not their ideas — means they aren’t serious about fixing the problems in their party, which Trump has gleefully exploited for a decade.
By scapegoating Biden, Democrats continue to miss the memo. Their real problem is the fake news media that propped him up all those years.