When Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election, President Joe Biden was bound to regret his decision to step down from the top of the Democratic ticket.
Biden associates now claim that the outgoing president regrets dropping out of the race and believes he could have defeated President-elect Donald Trump.
Unless the 22nd Amendment is repealed soon, Biden will always be able to claim that he is the only politician to have defeated Trump in a national election. While the Democratic sample size is small, Trump has defeated approximately two dozen Republicans, including some of the party’s top political talent.
Both times Biden was discouraged by Democratic leaders from running for president, deferring to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then passing the baton to Harris this year, Trump won the presidency.
It is not surprising that Biden, who has been actively campaigning for president since at least 1987 before finally being elected in 2020, would have second thoughts.
“Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out,” according to the newspaper.
“Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated Trump, according to people familiar with their remarks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Aides say the president has been careful not to blame Harris or her campaign.
Concerns about Harris’ electability contributed to the weeks of uncertainty between Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance and his July 21 withdrawal from the race. Biden, however, immediately backed his vice president, defying Democratic critics who had hoped for a more competitive process to replace him as the nominee. The primaries had already ended, and Biden had won nearly all of them.
Biden is likely to have outperformed Harris among private sector union members. Both the Teamsters and the International Association of Firefighters declined to support a presidential candidate this year. Polls of the rank and file revealed that they would have supported Biden but preferred Trump to Harris.
Teamsters later complained that Harris, who went on to lose all seven battleground states, was arrogant in her interactions with them.
“And her declaration on the way out was, ‘I’m going to win with you or without you,'” Teamers President Sean O’Brien told Tucker Carlson. O’Brien claimed he called former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, who now leads the NHL Players’ Association, and asked, “Excuse my French. “Who does this f***ing lady believe she is?”
It’s also possible that Biden would have been less reliant on celebrity endorsements than Harris was, with the question of whether Beyonce would perform at one of the vice president’s events becoming a recurring disappointment in her campaign.
At the same time, Biden would have had a much more difficult time attracting younger and nonwhite voters than Harris. As far back as 2022, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that 94% of Democrats under 30 preferred a different candidate.
“I’m just going to come out and say it: I want younger blood,” a 38-year-old preschool teacher from northern Michigan told the outlet. “I’m so tired of all the old people running our country. I do not want anyone knocking on death’s door.”
Biden would have faced the same Gaza splits that cost Harris Michigan and contributed to her decision not to run with Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA). He may have received a lower percentage of the black and Hispanic vote than Harris.
The Biden campaign would have been run by the majority of the same people who oversaw Harris’s, with the exception of some former Barack Obama staffers. Because it was largely inherited from Biden, the Harris campaign maintained its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.
The president would have leaned even more heavily on the democracy protection themes that proved ineffective, and he would have likely remained more defensive about the economy, which exit polls showed was the most pressing issue.
“Then we find out when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling, at the time they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes,” Pod Save America host and Obama alumnus Jon Favreau said in November.
When Biden dropped out, he was trailing by only 3.1 points nationally in the RealClearPolitics polling average, but some public and private polls showed Trump’s lead was more than double that.
The final results in Virginia, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and New Jersey all showed Harris as the nominee, raising the possibility that Biden could have lost those states.
Biden was also less competitive in the Sun Belt states, and he could have lost Arizona or Nevada by a significant margin, changing the outcome of their Senate races.
Republicans took control of the Senate with 53 seats, but slightly larger Trump coattails could have flipped seats in Michigan and Wisconsin as well.
As Trump enters his second term, there will be a long debate over whether an underappreciated Biden should have continued his campaign or if his decision to run again near his 82nd birthday doomed any Democrat who would eventually succeed him, particularly Harris, who had difficulty distancing herself from him.
However, many of Biden’s ardent supporters will be members of his inner circle, which will shape his legacy in the future.
