Democrats Face a Joe Biden Litmus Test

The ex-president has been out of sight since inauguration. But party luminaries feel he is still casting a shadow.

Joe Biden on December 3, 2024. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

The Biden stench lingers

AN IMPORTANT PART OF RECOVERY is owning up to mistakes and taking full responsibility for the harm they caused. And as the Democratic party tries to earn back the trust of voters, its leaders are publicly grappling with one of their biggest missteps from 2024: how they handled Joe Biden.

Nearly five months after the election, the ex-president’s legacy lingers over the party like the stench of rotting food—a reminder that while a good meal was once enjoyed, they were too late in clearing the table.

Party officials have grown more comfortable admitting that Biden’s decision to run again was a mistake. They feel at ease saying that his stubbornness cost Kamala Harris a chance to ramp up a better campaign. Voters, some of whom voted for Joe Biden in 2020 under the belief that he would not seek re-election, now regularly say they felt misled when he ran and gaslighted when party leaders and White House officials said Biden was capable of serving another four years, despite his visible frailty and declining faculties.

Increasingly, it appears, Biden himself will become a litmus test: Prospective leaders will be assessed by whether they are comfortable declaring that he harmed the party. At least one donor said that would be a line he draws.

“You can’t get well unless you admit you’re sick,” Democratic megadonor and one-time Biden bundler John Morgan told The Bulwark from his house in Maui, adding that he wouldn’t give money to a presidential candidate who is unable to acknowledge that Biden should not have run.

All political parties conduct postmortems after big election defeats. Rarely, however, do those episodes of introspection center so squarely on the decision of one individual. But Biden’s insistence that he was best suited to beat Donald Trump—until the evidence against that claim became incontrovertible—was of such consequence that it now shadows the party he once led.

Revisiting 2024 has been uncomfortable at times for party luminaries, especially those who stayed conspicuously quiet in the weeks after Biden’s infamous June debate against Trump. But it’s become virtually impossible for them to duck the matter.

At a recent Harvard Institute of Politics event, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) was pressed on whether it was a mistake for the party to not have planned to hold a competitive primary from the jump.

“I thought he was just going to do it for one term because that’s what he said,” Jayapal, who supported Biden even after the debate, said in response. “We would have had a really strong Democratic primary with a lot of good candidates, and then we would have the full election season to fight it out and to actually get somebody who could win.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, the first Democratic governor to publicly urge Biden to step aside after the debate, was asked whether the party is properly reckoning with what happened in 2024. She, too, called out Biden for running: “It would have been a different story if the president had decided a few years ago that he was going to do what he said he would do, which is serve one term,” Healey said. “Then we’d have the opportunity for full engagement in a primary and the like. That didn’t happen.”

Some strategists told The Bulwark that the party shouldn’t shy away from these questions. Confronting Biden’s decision to run in 2024 head-on, they argued, provided a good opportunity to repair the party’s deeply damaged brand and regain trust among voters.

“Authenticity matters enormously in American politics and if you are pretending everything’s fine when voters can see with their own eyes that it’s not, then you’re in trouble,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “We’ve gotta come clean with voters and say that we got it wrong—and he got it wrong.”

The question hovering over the party is whether Biden will let them trample on him without pushing back. The ex-president and his top aides have fiercely defended his record since the start of his administration, and they’ve continued to defend his initial decision to run for a second term since the election. Biden recently signed with the talent agency CAA and has plans for a book, which could give him a platform to share his own point of view on that 2024 decision.

Speaking at another recent Harvard Institute of Politics event, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described the post-debate push from Democratic officials to get Biden to drop out as “hurtful” and like a “firing squad around a true patriot.” Long-time Biden senior adviser Mike Donilon, also speaking at Harvard last month, said plenty of candidates have bad debates, but “usually the party doesn’t lose its mind.”

But those views are hardly representative of all Biden staffers. Although a small group of loyal aides have stuck with him to set up his post-presidential office—they’re currently working out of a small office in downtown D.C.—the ex-president has morphed into something of a lightning rod even for those who worked with him. Even those who occupied the upper echelons of White House and administration staff have copped to genuine anger and despair over his decision not to step back sooner.

“He was the leader of the party and did not care one iota about the party. It was all about Joe Biden,” a former White House adviser told The Bulwark.

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DEMOCRATS ARE CLEAR-EYED about the fact that they have a brand problem. Public polling shows that the party is historically unpopular. A CNN survey released on Sunday found that their favorability rating among all Americans stands at just 29 percent, a record low since the network started polling in 1992. An NBC News poll also released on Sunday found that just 27 percent of registered voters have a positive view of the party, also an all-time low since they started polling in 1990.

What the party is less clear on is why their numbers are so horrifically low. Some officials say that while Biden’s presidency clearly sparked a drop in trust for Democrats, the contributing factors are much broader.

“Democrats need to acknowledge mistakes not just from this cycle but from decades of allowing jobs to go overseas and factory towns be de-industrialized,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told The Bulwark. “No one associated with these colossal mess-ups should be part of leading this party’s future.”

Another open question is how much good comes from looking backwards. Much of the polling indicates that Democratic voter dissatisfaction is driven not by anger towards Biden but by a desire to see the party push back more aggressively against Trump.

“If I’m being pragmatic, I think focus a little less on the past and entirely on winning,” former Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) told The Bulwark. Phillips, as you may recall, was one of the few Democratic officials warning all the way back in 2023 that voters thought Biden was too old. He ultimately launched an unsuccessful primary challenge that was widely mocked by the party establishment.

But moving on is easier said than done. “The sad truth is, there’s not a single remaining member of Congress—not a single Democrat, not a single one, and probably not a single one that will be on that debate stage in 2028—who had the courage to point out the truth and risk their career and lead Democrats to the Holy Land,” Phillips said. “Instead, it’ll be filled with people who chose to be quiet and preserve their futures and subjugate their principles.”

Compounding the problem is the fact that questions remain unanswered about how aware party leaders were of Biden’s health concerns. In an interview with the New York Times on Saturday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who played an important part in forcing Biden to step down, was asked if he knew about “Biden’s declining faculties” before the debate. “No. . . . I didn’t realize, because my dealings with him were just fine,” Schumer responded.

Whether Democrats want to move on from Biden or stomp on him may end up being moot. The ex-president’s conduct throughout the 2024 campaign is the subject of a handful of books slated to be released this spring. An excerpt published last week from one of those books—FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes—detailed how Biden personally demanded Kamala Harris remain loyal to him and not criticize his presidency, setting off a fresh round of anger even among those who worked for the president.

“American democracy is supposedly on the line, and yet that’s what he focused on,” another former White House official fumed when I asked for their thoughts on the excerpt.

(Why Harris acceded to Biden’s demand is a topic for another time.)

🫏 Donkey Business:

— Sen. Chuck Schumer is still feeling the heat from his handling of the government funding bill (you can catch up on all of that in the previous edition of The Opposition).

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday criticized Schumer’s leadership, telling reporters, “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing” (a very Pelosi-like diss). And at a town hall on Tuesday night, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) became the first member of Congress to call on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down from leadership. Of course, it will take a lot more than that to get Schumer to give up his post. But it’s clear that the anger isn’t going to mellow over anytime soon.

My open tabs:

— Former Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones writes for The Bulwark about the “reckoning” coming for his party.

— Vanity Fair has dubbed Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow “the Democratic Party’s future.”

— Democratic data scientist David Shor has new data out this week that helps make sense of the 2024 election. It’s pretty fascinating stuff. I recommend spending some time with it, either in this Vox piece or this New York Times interview.

— It’s tough out there for Gen Z.