Former President Joe Biden sat for an interview Wednesday with BBC Radio in which he seemed entirely oblivious to the role he—and his decision to run for a second term—played in the Democratic party’s loss to Donald Trump in 2024.
Start here: Biden said that the reason “it was hard to say, now I’m going to stop” was because his administration had been “so successful.”
While it’s far too early to judge Biden’s presidency in historical terms, the reality of the 2024 race is that voters did not see him as a successful president. At all.
The last Gallup poll taken before his disastrous June debate performance showed him at 38% job approval. The highest his approval rating rose in the early months of 2024 was 40%. A majority of voters had been saying for months that they thought Biden was too old to run for a second term. That included large numbers of Democrats.
Biden is, of course, entitled to his own opinion about his presidency. But he is not entitled to his own facts.
Later in the interview, Biden was asked whether the final outcome in the election might have been different if he had ended his candidacy earlier. “I don’t think it would’ve mattered,” he said.
Look, it’s impossible to prove a hypothetical. Biden didn’t get out earlier. Kamala Harris lost. We know this. But consider what Biden staying in the race as long as he did meant:
Tens of millions of Americans watched the June debate and the Democratic panic that followed as the party tried to push Biden out. That happened right as the party would normally be building buzz for its convention and trying to define [THEIR OPPOSITION/MESSAGE AGAINST?] Trump. None of that happened until—at the earliest—September.
Biden [GOT MORE?] unpopular. I know I made this point already but consider this: Democrats had a guy who less than 4 in 10 Americans approved of as their standard-bearer until the end of July! Every time swing voters thought of Democrats in that time, they thought of Biden! Not good!
And there was no primary. Biden simply handed the Democratic presidential nomination to Harris. She received a total of zero votes from Democrats; she faced no opposition for the nomination. Had Biden dropped out a year earlier, in July 2023, there would have been a robust campaign to replace him on the ticket. Harris might have won anyway—I think she probably would have—but she would have earned the nomination in the eyes of voters rather than having it handed to her by a guy that the country didn’t approve of anyway.
Biden is trying to re-emerge a bit of late—he will be on The View tomorrow—as he seeks to polish his legacy. I get it. But his comments to the BBC suggest to me he still really, really doesn’t get it. And that’s bad news for Democrats as they try to understand what actually happened last year and how to rebuild ahead of 2028.
The post Opinion: Joe Biden Proves He Is Still in Denial About 2024 appeared first on The Daily Beast.
