Former President Joe Biden isn’t exactly a beloved figure among Democratic Party members these days.
Many blame him for the return of President Donald Trump to the White House in 2024, after beating the Republican incumbent four years earlier. The politically vicious downward spiral for Democrats had begun with Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate performance against Trump, followed by the failure of Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, to close the deal in a 107-day “vibes”-based campaign as the stand-in Democratic nominee.
Biden, a 36-year Democratic senator from Delaware and then vice president for eight years, exited the 2024 race facing historically low approval ratings for an incumbent, not just among Republicans and some independents — a significant number of Democrats were also concerned over his age and mental fitness.
Since Biden left office, fundraising for his planned presidential library has been sluggish. Some past Democratic donors have said they’re reluctant to give money amid discontent over how Biden left office and helped pave the way for Trump’s presidential comeback.
Yet Biden, 83, while hardly a Democratic icon like President John F. Kennedy, or even his one-time boss, former President Barack Obama, isn’t a Jimmy Carter pariah figure — at least the failed-president version of Carter that became a caricature for much of his nearly 44-year ex-presidency. (Historians, journalists, and others have since offered a more nuanced and at times positive view of Carter’s single term in office.)
Biden retains residual support among Democrats for policies enacted or attempted during his single White House term, including the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act (climate and healthcare), and the CHIPS and Science Act. Plus, the Biden administration’s major student loan forgiveness law, though the Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch lacked authority to cancel the debt without congressional approval.
Those are the kind of policy arguments that matter in Democratic primaries, and it all puts former Biden administration officials running for office in 2026, and potential 2028 White House candidates, in a tricky position of talking up the former president’s accomplishments. Or, more precisely, their own while at the same time fending off inevitable questions over what they saw and witnessed up close of the president’s physical and mental decline.
That’s a political dilemma facing New Mexico gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland, who was interior secretary from 2021 to 2025 under Biden. In the Land of Enchantment, she faces a fight for the Democratic nomination in the June 2 primary against an aggressively anti-Trump district attorney. It’s not a primary crowd likely to be particularly eager to hear about Haaland’s Biden administration role.
The most prominent ex-Biden administration official isn’t (yet) on any ballot. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is eyeing a 2028 presidential run after losing the 2020 Democratic nomination to Biden and then joining his Cabinet. Now out of office, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor-turned Michigan resident is free to roam the country bashing Trump and the Make America Great Again coalition more broadly rather than focusing on his record heading the transportation department from 2021 to 2025.
More immediately, several Biden White House team members are running for office this year, including New Mexico gubernatorial hopeful Haaland. There’s former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, a Democratic California gubernatorial candidate who polls show could nab a spot in the June 2 all-party primary.
Another is the Biden administration wartime ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, who is running for the Democratic nomination in a swing Michigan House district. Brink faces a crowded Democratic primary field in the 7th Congressional District, covering the Lansing area and northwestern Detroit exurbs. The Aug. 4 Democratic primary winner will run against freshman Rep. Tom Barrett (R-MI) in a congressional district, which, along with its similarly shaped Lansing-based predecessors, has frequently flipped between the parties over the past half-century-plus.
Brink was tapped by Biden for the ambassadorship and won Senate confirmation in May 2022, months after Russia invaded Ukraine in what remains an ongoing war. Brink held the uber-sensitive Kyiv-based diplomatic post until three months after Trump reentered the White House. Brink, now a congressional candidate, cites her resignation as a way to bash Trump rather than tout her Biden administration experience.
“April 21, 2025 was my last day as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. I was the first female Ambassador to serve in a war zone and I am proud of our work to fight back against Russia’s aggression and protect democracy. But when Trump kept appeasing Putin, I had to resign and speak out,” Brink said in an April 21 X post.
That type of attempted political dexterity is likely to be a common thread among ex-Biden administration personnel running for office in 2026, said Jesse Lehrich, who was foreign policy spokesman on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and now a podcaster and political analyst.
Among Democratic primary voters, “I don’t think there’s outright hatred of Joe Biden. Just being associated with the Biden administration isn’t going to be disqualifying,” Lehrich said in an interview. “I think for the most part people will try to avoid talking about him at all.”
Keeping the old boss at a distance
In California’s chaotic gubernatorial race, Becerra is only a recent contender. Becerra, 68, entered what would become a crowded field on April 2, 2025. But he failed to gain much traction, languishing in the low single digits of polls even as a familiar face on the California political scene.
After all, he had represented a House district centered on Downtown Los Angeles for 24 years, including a stint in Democratic leadership. Becerra then was California’s attorney general for four more years, a high-profile perch from which he frequently sued the first Trump administration. Biden, once president, tapped Becerra as HHS secretary, where, among other actions, he tried to boost enrollment in the Affordable Care Act, the singular domestic achievement of Obama’s presidency.
Becerra recently got a second political wind in the California governor’s race with the campaign and political career implosion of former Rep. Eric Swalwell. The Bay Area Democrat, who had been rising in California gubernatorial polls, fled the political scene and may still face criminal prosecution over sexual assault charges from multiple women, all of which he denies.
With the primary fast approaching, Becerra is focusing on Trump-bashing rather than talking up his Biden administration record. It’s a sound strategy in a state as deep blue as Lake Tahoe.
“Trump’s war on Iran is driving up costs here at home, with Californians paying the price at the pump. We need steady, responsible leadership, not governance by tweet,” Becerra said in an April 20 X post.
To the east, across the U.S.-Mexico border, New Mexico gubernatorial candidate Haaland, facing a contested Democratic primary field, is taking a middle course of sorts on the Biden legacy. She has more than her Biden administration role to talk up with New Mexico voters. Haaland, 65, was a House member for a bit over two years before joining Team Biden. She was the state Democratic Party chairwoman from 2015 to 2017. Haaland is a Native American and an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe.
The New Mexico governorship is coming open in the 2026 election cycle because Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is being forced from office due to state term limits. Haaland faces a fight for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination from Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman.
As the top prosecutor in New Mexico’s most populous county — home to Albuquerque — since January 2023, Bregman has some name recognition. Bregman was also a state Democratic Party chairman, immediately preceding Haaland during the Obama era. Though Sam Bregman is likely best known, at least to a certain subset of sports fans, as the father of Alex Bregman, the starting third baseman for the Chicago Cubs and MLB player since 2016, including as a member of the World Series champion Houston Astros in 2017 and 2022.
Haaland, on the campaign trail, sometimes mentions her role as interior secretary in the Biden administration, said Gabriel R. Sanchez, a University of New Mexico political science professor.
Tying herself to Biden carries some political risks but is inevitable, Sanchez said in an interview.
“His approval ratings were about as low as you can get at the end there. I know her strategy is going to be, ‘You can’t run from your record,’” Sanchez said. “She’s definitely not shying away from her bio. But we’ll see if that works.”
Still, national politics have played a lesser role in the New Mexico gubernatorial campaign so far.
“She’s really been focused on bread-and-butter issues. I think she’s going to be focused primarily on the economy,” Sanchez said.
That’s a contrast with her and her Democratic primary opponent, Bregman.
“The primary opposition here has been extremely aggressive. His campaign ads are going directly after Trump. Saying he’ll arrest [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents. I haven’t seen Haaland try to match that intensity at all,” Sanchez said.
Buttigieg’s balancing act
Hovering over the 2026 midterm campaigns are fierce fights in both parties for their 2028 presidential nominations. Buttigieg, 44, is clearly keeping his options open. As a top-tier Democratic contender, he is actively building support and appearing at key political events to criticize Trump’s economic policies and promote a new generation of leadership.
Buttigieg has clearly given some thought to unavoidable questions over what he did, or didn’t do, as a Biden administration member amid the then-president’s mental decline.
Buttigieg road-tested his Biden-distancing approach in an April 10 appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box. The former transportation secretary slammed the Trump White House over spiking gas prices and a newly released inflation report that showed the worst of Trump’s second, nonconsecutive term, as the war in Iran sent consumer prices surging at the fastest monthly pace in four years.
“When we left, inflation was lower than it is today,” Buttigieg said when asked about sky-high Biden-era inflation, before pivoting to a jab against Trump.
“This president took the inflation rate up,” Buttigieg added. “It’s 2026 — they’re in charge.”
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Lehrich, the former Democratic consultant and now podcaster, said the Buttigieg approach to his Biden administration job makes sense at this early stage of the Democratic primary fight. Though questions about Biden’s mental fitness and health while in office could heat up as the primary and caucuses approach.
“It may not dominate the 2028 primary, but the Biden question will come back and continue to be a thing throughout the primary process,” Lehrich said. Buttigieg “doesn’t seem that evasive. He has a pretty good answer, which is that [Biden] should not have run; he was obviously too old. But every time I needed something for the president, he came through.”
David Mark (@DavidMarkDC) is the managing editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.