| BRIDGE TO NOWHERE — New York’s lieutenant governor came right out and said it: Joe Biden should have never run for a second term. Antonio Delgado’s announcement last week in the very public forum of a New York Times op-ed was widely noticed, but it didn’t generate a tremendous amount of buzz. It’s an opinion that’s been held by many Democrats for a long time. Various operatives and activists have been saying it privately and aloud since Biden’s catastrophic debate performance in July, and especially in the aftermath of Election Day. But prominent Democratic officeholders have not been saying it publicly. And they haven’t been saying it quite so explicitly as Delgado. Yet a frank discussion of Biden’s personal culpability in Donald Trump’s victory is a necessary first step on the party’s long road back to winning the trust of the American electorate. Democrats need to better understand why turnout dropped off. They need to figure out why so many of their traditional constituencies shifted right. And the party also must take an unflinching look at whether Biden’s vanity cost them the White House. The discussion about what went wrong has already started. Referring to the Nov. 5 election results as “a cataclysmic event for the Democratic party,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, for one, circulated a strategy memo last week noting that “[o]ur future success as a party hinges on our ability and our willingness to listen to what voters are telling us.” In Murphy’s assessment, Democrats must reclaim their identity as the party of the working class. But no serious election post-mortem can sidestep the role Biden’s decision to run for a second term played in shaping the landscape. He never actually said he’d only serve one term as president, but it was strongly implied by his advanced age (77 years old when he ran in 2020), and his reference to himself as a “bridge” to an “entire generation of leaders.” Within two years of his taking the oath of office, voters made clear they were ready to move on: According to 2022 exit polls in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — four of the seven swing states in 2024 — more than two-thirds of voters said they didn’t want Biden to run again. Yet he ran anyway, with disastrous consequences. His approval rating remained underwater the entire time he was a candidate. Despite signs he was physically slowing down, party officials closed ranks around him, squelching any debate about his fitness for a second term. It all caught up to him after a debate performance so calamitous that he had to end his bid, handing the nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris. She had roughly four months to mount a campaign. The issue isn’t so much about pointing fingers at Biden, who achieved much in his four years as president. It’s about assessing whether Americans felt their president broke an implied promise not to run again, and whether they punished his party for enabling him to do so — both wittingly and unwittingly. Americans had already noticed signs he might not be up to the task of serving another four years in the White House. Yet they were repeatedly told none of their concerns were valid. Biden can't be pinned with the responsibility for losing every swing state, for the loss of the Senate or for the splintering of the Democratic coalition. There were plenty of other forces at play. But it’s still worth exploring whether Biden’s reluctance to give up power alienated voters, as well as the party’s willingness to facilitate him. When Delgado, for example, called for Biden to drop his reelection bid in the immediate wake of the July debate, he was browbeaten for his lack of fealty and accused of undermining Democratic efforts to defeat Trump. Biden, who hasn’t publicly reflected on his defeat so far, insisted even after dropping out of the race he would have beaten Trump. But that’s not a commonly held opinion. The point is moot in any case. What’s more important for the party is understanding the damage done by the president’s decision to run again, rather than his decision to leave the race, and to have those discussions in the open — not off the record. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmahtesian@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie.
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