Democrats Continue to Blame Joe Biden in Post-Election Fallout

Democrats are increasingly blaming President Joe Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris losing this year’s presidential election to President-elect Donald Trump.

Trump achieved a surprisingly decisive victory over Harris on Tuesday, with the three-time presidential candidate winning the Electoral College for the second time and appearing likely to win the national popular vote for the first time, although millions of votes have yet to be counted.

The scale of Trump’s win was a shock to the system for Democrats, many of whom have suggested that Biden running for reelection before making the decision to drop out of the race in July may have doomed their hopes of retaining the White House.

Democratic Congressman Pat Ryan of New York said during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday that he agreed with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that Biden choosing not to seek reelection earlier might have given Democrats a better chance.

“I think there was a real unique opportunity for President Biden to have this Washingtonian moment and show he wasn’t in it for himself, he was in it to put, really, country and party over self,” Ryan said.

“And if he had done what he said during the campaign and talked about being a bridge to this new generation … I think if the president had given space of that, we might have had a different outcome,” he added.

Newsweek reached out for comment to the White House via email on Friday night.

Biden did not explicitly pledge that he would not seek reelection during his 2020 campaign, although he did hint at the possibility by describing himself as a “transition candidate” and a “bridge” to a younger generation of Democratic leaders.

While the president changed course and announced that he would likely run for reelection only months into his term, he faced immense pressure to drop out this year following a disastrous debate performance with Trump on June 27.

Biden resisted the calls to drop out for weeks, saying that he was sure he was “the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024” before eventually changing his mind. Some political scientists have argued that he may have been right.

“The deposing of Biden will remain a great source of controversy within the Democratic Party,” political scientist and analyst Steven Schier previously told Newsweek. “It’s clear that Biden, even with his cognitive disabilities, would have performed better than Harris in states like Pennsylvania.”

Pelosi, in an interview published by The New York Times on Thursday, maintained that this year’s election might have had a different outcome if Biden had “gotten out sooner.”

“And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time,” Pelosi added, referring to Biden’s decision to endorse Harris directly after dropping out on July 21. “If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

During his CNN interview on Friday, Ryan argued that the Democratic Party has “a lot of reasons to be optimistic” despite losing the presidency, pointing to “rising stars and leaders” and the fact that some Democrats, like himself, performed better than expected despite an overall shift toward Republicans.