Joe Biden Put Kamala Harris in an Impossible Situation

There is a lot of blame to go around in the Democratic Party, as losing a two out of three series to Donald Trump creates a lot of culprits, but I want to make one thing crystal clear as we unpack the broad-based failure of the party on election night.

No one person is to blame, but if any one person is to blame, it’s Joe Biden. And it’s not remotely close.

We are here because of him. Because of his ego. Of his megalomaniacal and destructive belief that he alone can beat Trump. Voters raised concerns about Biden’s age in 2020, and heavily implying without ever outright saying that he was going to be a one-term president was one of the biggest contributors to his win in 2020. Running again in 2024 was a betrayal of the voters’ trust he earned last election, and the time he wasted stubbornly staying in a race he was unfit to run did untold damage to the party. All those days the Democrats wasted melting down over him saying things like “Vice President Trump” could have been used to sharpen and hone a better message instead of the constant state of damage control that defined the first half of the year.

We are forced to live with the consequences of Joe Biden’s hubris. Like he said in his last interview proving he was not remotely up to this job, he’ll be “fine” under Trump. His selfishness put his own legacy above the safety of the country, and he failed at his fundamental job of protecting us. He lost ground with practically every single political constituency, especially his youthful progressive base he did such a good job of courting in 2020. Refusing to do things that past presidents like Ronald Reagan have done to try to reign in Israel‘s genocide helped author the most stunning electoral result of my lifetime, as Donald Trump won America’s largest Arab American district in Michigan.

Biden’s failed foreign policy across the globe, save for his huge win against China on semiconductors, eroded what little moral high ground the famed liberal international order had left in people’s eyes, further demoralizing key parts of the Democratic base. His sanctions have helped immiserate the people of Afghanistan, and the A/B test of bogging Russia down in Ukraine and supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza makes it clear to the rest of the world where America’s priorities lie. As a senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times, “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

In service to defending his unpopular agenda, Biden fostered an environment of antagonism towards the left and towards those insufficiently appreciative of his economic policies he failed to articulate, and then he put it all on Kamala Harris to undo the massive damage he did in a very short period of time.

Make no mistake, Kamala Harris made plenty of mistakes. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, who is Uber’s chief legal officer, reportedly convinced her to ditch Biden’s attacks on big business to play footsie with Mark Cuban and other wealthy executives. Keeping on so much of Biden’s provably inept campaign team was a calamitous mistake, and history will remember her gobsmackingly idiotic decision to run in lockstep with a wildly unpopular incumbent as an all-time own goal that candidates around the world will learn from for centuries.

But all that pales in comparison to the environment that Biden created for her and forced her to fix for him in a very short period of time. Bidenomics was his pitch to sell his economic plan, but he never successfully described what specifically it all did for people, and his team pitched the term as they saw it, not as voters did. Folks just saw their pandemic assistance run out under a Democratic president while everything costs so much more than it did in 2019, and the Wall Street Journal even accepts that “greedflation is real,” all while Democrats told them that actually the pain they were feeling was a social media distortion and Biden’s recovery was going great for everyone.

Wall Street recovered from a crisis much faster than Main Street did under a Democratic president.

Again.

Democrats do not understand how unpopular they are—how they are becoming an older, whiter, elitist party consuming a mainstream media diet distrusted by the vast majority of the populace. They are obsessed with educational attainment in a political world defined by its ever-widening educational gap that now is spilling over into every demographic, throwing into question what the Democratic base actually is now outside of MSNBC viewers.

What the hell was Kamala Harris supposed to do with this shitshow in three-plus months? It’s genuinely impressive that she was able to dig out of the gigantic hole Biden left for her and make this race close. She royally blew it at the finish line, but she did a hell of a lot better than Biden would have. Given the dramatic shifts rightward in the northeast, a big part of me thinks Biden would have lost New Jersey.

It’s easy to dismiss this election as more proof of the inherent racism and sexism in a country where women have had the vote for fifteen years longer than slavery was a legal institution, and it absolutely is a major reason behind Trump’s appeal, but any country that votes for Barack Obama and Donald Trump back to back is a lot more complex than just being a bunch of stupid sexist racists.

Voters very clearly want change from a decaying status quo that benefits the elite at the expense of everyone else, and they are willing to back a wide range of candidates if they feel they can bring it. Kamala Harris made the boneheaded mistake of running as a status quo candidate in a change election, but she’s not the one who created the reality she was punished for.

Joe Biden could have made good on the implied promise he made to voters in 2020, and announced he would not run for a second term the day after the 2022 midterms. This would have given the Democratic Party time to run a real primary, and it would have given Kamala Harris more time to develop a more coherent and tested campaign message. That in her three-month sprint she pivoted to courting the cable news constituency says a lot about the default stance of the Democratic partisan mindset, but if she had started campaigning in late 2022, this election is entirely different. Even if she would have still won the primary, she would have had a way more effective message than “Dick Cheney likes me and I’m gonna do more of that inflation stuff you hate.”

As 2020 demonstrates when contrasted to 2024, there is a big difference in the Democratic message when there is no lefty primary challenge. That election proved that lefty challenges are to the Democrats’ benefit, as Biden ditched a lot of the Democratic Party’s longstanding corporate ideology in order to make peace with the left and bring it into the coalition. That populist strain helped him portray himself as a true change candidate who understood the plight of the working class.

Going through a primary sharpens your message and helps you get a better grasp on the electorate, and as the herded polls this year proved, there is no better data on what Americans really want than an election. Joe Biden prevented Kamala Harris from ever gaining those skills and knowledge, leaving her with a broken campaign way behind in the polls searching in the dark for answers. She found a lot of them, but not enough. There may have not been enough out there anyway given what Biden left her with. A lot of Democrats are responsible for Donald Trump’s second term, but none more so than the president whose legacy will be tied to Trump forever.