In February 2024, when quizzed on President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ability to communicate his re-election message, Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat, quickly vouched for him.
“I know that he is ready for this campaign,” he told CBS News. “I have seen how effective he has been up close and personal.”
But five months into 2025, Mr. Murphy is on the leading edge of top Democrats aiming to Etch A Sketch away their past endorsements of Mr. Biden’s acuity. He told Politico this week that he had “no doubt” Mr. Biden suffered cognitive decline while in office.
Mr. Murphy, who declined to be interviewed for this article, is not alone in trying to reposition himself from a top Biden surrogate who sat on the campaign’s national advisory board to a truth-teller about what really happened in the 2024 campaign. His pivot is illustrative of a wide swath of the party that is hoping to atone for having fallen lock-step behind Mr. Biden.
Representative Ro Khanna of California, another Biden advisory board member who traveled the country as a surrogate to progressives, said this week that it was “obvious now” that Mr. Biden “was not in a condition to run for re-election.”
Mr. Khanna had vouched for Mr. Biden up until the president ended his campaign. A speech in Detroit that proved to be Mr. Biden’s last as a candidate “broke through” the political noise, Mr. Khanna said five days before Mr. Biden dropped out.
In an interview Friday, Mr. Khanna said he “was a surrogate based on information that the president gave.” He said he had no reason to apologize for his actions as a surrogate who has since changed his mind about the former president’s campaign.
As the Democratic Party faces record low approval ratings, many party strategists and officials believe it must rebuild trust in its brand. That process, some argue, must begin with confronting how the party handled the 2024 race.
For most of Mr. Biden’s term, many Democrats lived a bifurcated political life. In public, they remained staunchly behind the president, lauding him as sharp and fit to serve. But in private conversations, they fretted about his shaky gait, rambling speech and tendency to forget key details, like the names of foreign leaders.
As recently as a year ago, Democrats saw publicly vouching for Mr. Biden and dismissing concerns about his age as the best path to holding the White House and safeguarding their own political futures. The power of incumbency, Democratic officials argued, outweighed well-documented concerns from their voters about his fitness for the job.
In a poll from The New York Times and Siena College published in March 2024, for example, a majority of voters who supported him in 2020 said he was too old to lead the country effectively.
Now, as Democrats jostle for influence in a demoralized party, their incentives have changed. And those who were closest to Mr. Biden appear to be in the trickiest position.
Pete Buttigieg, who served as the transportation secretary in the Biden administration, told reporters in Iowa this week that “maybe” Democrats could have done better without Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket. Few Democrats were more forceful in vouching for Mr. Biden’s than Mr. Buttigieg, who four years earlier had run a primary campaign against him arguing the party needed generational change.
And Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania now says that he began warning Mr. Biden directly about his standing in his home state shortly after Mr. Shapiro was elected as governor in 2022.
“I was very clear with the president privately about some of the risks that I saw in Pennsylvania,” Mr. Shapiro said. “I communicated that to him and to his staff. And they made the judgment that they made to continue on with their campaign.”
Still, some of the country’s most prominent Democratic governors, many of whom are said to be considering their own presidential runs, refused to engage in the round of second-guessing.
“I was busy working,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who was a co-chairwoman of Mr. Biden’s campaign, said on CNN. “I didn’t see the president frequently. I can’t speak to that directly.”
Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Tim Walz of Minnesota have largely dodged questions about the former president’s fitness, saying in interviews only that Mr. Biden should have dropped out before the primaries began.
“If we’d have had more time, could we have had a better shot? Yeah, I think probably,” Mr. Walz, whom former Vice President Kamala Harris eventually chose as her running mate, said in a recent interview. “I don’t think we’d have been in a worse spot, that’s for sure.”
Many Democratic officials have complained that White House aides kept Mr. Biden cloistered as his condition worsened. A book set to be released next week, “Original Sin,” details those efforts.
Mr. Biden’s spokesman declined to comment for this article.
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, one of the first lawmakers to call for Mr. Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee after his disastrous debate performance in June 2024, said lawmakers had not fully known Mr. Biden’s mental and physical state.
But, he said, Democrats must now openly admit that the former president was unfit for a second term and should not have run.
“If you don’t say it, you don’t self-reflect,” he said at an event hosted by Politico this week. “Why is it hard for us to be more honest?”
And then there are the Democrats who think fingers are being pointed in the wrong direction. Mr. Biden himself said on “The View” that most Democrats wanted him to stay in the race, an assertion that runs counter to reality.
Former Representative Max Rose of New York said the focus on Mr. Biden’s condition was misplaced. After all, he said, it was Ms. Harris who ultimately lost the election.
“People seem to be forgetting that the Harris campaign are the ones that lost,” Mr. Rose said Friday. “There are people involved in doing this who are trying to implicitly send the message that if Vice President Harris had another three months she would have won, which is patently false.”
Some Democrats are already warning that this issue could emerge as a dividing line in the 2028 presidential primary, as candidates try to distinguish themselves in what strategists widely expect to be a crowded contest.
On Wednesday, former Representative Joe Cunningham, a Democrat of South Carolina, offered a bit of “unsolicited advice” to Democrats aspiring to become their party’s next presidential nominee.
“Before attending the B.B.Q.s, Lowcountry boils and picnics, cleanse yourself of any culpability you may have had when you stayed silent while so much was at stake,” Mr. Cunningham, who first suggested that Mr. Biden should not seek re-election in 2022, wrote in an opinion essay.
He added, “As my mother would say: Wash your hands before you come to the meal.”
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
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