Democrats are publicly and privately blaming President Joe Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris’s election loss. They should be blaming themselves.
Biden is being blamed because other Democrats think he should have dropped out sooner so that Harris could have had more time to introduce herself to voters. While it is undoubtedly true that Biden’s selfish lifelong pursuit of presidential power made this election unwinnable for Democrats, there is a litany of problems with blaming him and him alone for the predicament in which the party found itself.
The biggest reason this blame game fails is because Democrats always had the option of forcing Biden out of running for reelection, which is what they eventually did after his disastrous debate performance against President-elect Donald Trump. Democrats knew behind closed doors that Biden’s advanced age was affecting his mental competence. Yet, they and their media allies repeatedly argued that Biden was actually running circles around his younger aides in private and that questioning his mental state was disinformation.
Democrats knew this was unsustainable. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) ran a futile primary campaign against Biden because he saw the writing on the wall. Biden’s mental deterioration was an open secret among Democrats, and it only became a problem when it became an unavoidable public display during the debate, coupled with Biden’s terrible poll numbers.
In that same vein, Democrats also tried to gaslight voters into thinking that everything in the country was going well under Biden and that his policies did not lead to rampant inflation that caused gas prices and grocery prices to rise exponentially. Democrats defended Biden’s mental acuity up until the debate, but they defended his terrible policies beyond that point while trying to justify giving another four years to his vice president. They did this even as voters expressed dissatisfaction with the economy and the direction of the country.
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Finally, it did not matter that Harris had fewer days to “introduce” herself to voters than a normal campaign because she actively hid from even mildly adversarial interviews and tried to hide her own policy preferences from voters on every single issue other than abortion. Harris didn’t want more time to introduce herself to voters (she is the incumbent vice president), she wanted to deceive the public with vague positions to try and appeal to voters across the spectrum without convincing them of anything.
Democrats could have forced Biden out of the race sooner or renounced his failing policies, but they did not. They could have pushed Harris to actually chart a vision for the country, but they did not. Biden deserves some blame (especially for making Harris his running mate in the first place), but Democratic politicians, operatives, and media figures were all complicit in Biden’s attempts to cling to power. They deserve as much blame as he does for this loss.