When Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election, it was inevitable that President Joe Biden would regret his decision to step down from the top of the Democratic ticket.
Biden associates now say that the outgoing president regrets dropping out of the race and believes he could have beaten President-elect Donald Trump.
Unless the 22nd Amendment is soon repealed, one thing Biden will always be able to say is that he is the only politician who has ever beaten Trump in a national election. While the Democratic sample size is small, Trump has defeated upwards of two dozen Republicans, including some of the party’s top political talent.
Both times Biden was dissuaded by Democratic leaders from seeking the presidency, deferring to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then passing the baton to Harris this year, Trump won the White House.
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It is therefore not surprising that Biden, who has been actively campaigning for president since at least 1987 before finally winning the office in 2020, would have second thoughts.
“Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out,” the Washington Post reported. “Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Aides say the president has been careful not to place blame on Harris or her campaign.”
Concerns about Harris’s electability factored into the weeks of limbo between Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance and his July 21 withdrawal from the race. Biden nevertheless immediately threw his support behind his vice president, thwarting Democratic detractors who had hoped for a more competitive process to replace him as the nominee. The primaries were already over and Biden had won nearly all of them.
Biden would likely have outperformed Harris among private sector union members. Both the Teamsters and the International Association of Firefighters declined to endorse a presidential candidate this year. Polls of the rank and file showed they would have backed Biden but preferred Trump to Harris.
Teamsters officials later complained that Harris, who would go on to lose all seven battleground states, was arrogant in her dealings with them.
“And her declaration of the way out was, ‘I’m going to win with you or without you,’’ Teamers President Sean O’Brien told Tucker Carlson. O’Brien said he called former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, now head of the NHL Players’ Association, and asked, “Excuse my French. Who does this f***ing lady think she is?”
It is also likely that Biden would have been less reliant on celebrity endorsements than Harris was, with the question of whether Beyonce would perform at one of the vice president’s events becoming a recurring disappointment of her campaign.
At the same time, Biden would have had an even bigger problem turning out younger and nonwhite voters than Harris did. As far back as 2022, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that 94% of Democrats under the age of 30 preferred a different nominee.
“I’m just going to come out and say it: I want younger blood,” a 38-year-old preschool teacher in northern Michigan told the outlet. “I am so tired of all old people running our country. I don’t want someone knocking on death’s door.”
Biden would have dealt with the same splits over Gaza that helped cost Harris Michigan and contributed to why she did not choose Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as her running mate. He might have received a lower percentage of the black and Hispanic vote than Harris did.
The Biden campaign would have been run by most of the same people who oversaw Harris’s, sans some old Barack Obama hands. The Harris campaign remained headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, because it was largely inherited from Biden. The president would have leaned even more heavily into the democracy protection themes that proved ineffective and would probably have remained more defensive about the economy, which exit polls showed was the top issue.
“Then we find out when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling, at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes,” Pod Save America host and Obama alumnus Jon Favreau said in November.
While Biden was behind by just 3.1 points nationally in the RealClearPolitics polling average when he dropped out, some public and private polls showed Trump’s lead more than twice that.
The final results in Virginia, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and New Jersey were all close enough with Harris as the nominee to suggest Biden could have lost those states. Biden was also less competitive in the Sun Belt states and could have lost Arizona or Nevada by a big enough margin to change the outcome of their Senate races.
Republicans won control of the Senate with 53 seats, but somewhat bigger Trump coattails could have flipped seats in Michigan and Wisconsin as well.
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As Trump enters his second term, there will be a protracted debate over whether an underestimated Biden should have continued his campaign or his decision to run again approaching his 82nd birthday doomed any Democrat who would eventually replace him, especially Harris, who had trouble distancing herself from him.
But a lot of the Biden diehards will be people from his inner circle, coloring his legacy going forward.