Opinion | This Is All Biden’s Fault

Kamala Harris lost the election this week, but I mostly don’t blame her. At least, I don’t blame her because of anything she did recently. Since she became the unofficial nominee in July, she played a difficult hand about as well as she could have, running a disciplined campaign that sought to reassure Americans about the economic issues that trouble them most, in a political environment that was very rough for Democrats and for incumbent parties around the world.

But where did that bad hand come from? It was dealt to her by two people: President Biden, who produced a governing record she could not effectively defend or run away from; and herself, with all the toxic position-taking she did in 2019, generating endless attack ad fodder for Donald Trump. And Mr. Biden even bears blame for Ms. Harris’s pre-2020 baggage, since he put her on the ticket in full awareness that she was carrying it.

In his own campaign rhetoric, Mr. Biden focused on the idea that democracy itself was on the ballot this year. But if democracy was on the ballot, his actions should have matched his rhetoric at every turn to ensure Democrats would win the election. Instead, he prioritized his own ego and profile.

His electoral instincts weren’t always so misguided. During the 2020 primary campaign, Mr. Biden seemed to understand that the left-wing fever dreams that drove that Democratic cycle were electorally hazardous. So, unlike Ms. Harris, he never pledged to ban fracking or abolish private health insurance. He never even filled out the A.C.L.U. questionnaire that prompted Ms. Harris to support federally funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners and detained immigrants.

After winning the nomination, Mr. Biden made his first big mistake that would set Democrats on a path with no route to win the 2024 election: He selected Ms. Harris as his running mate.

Perversely, Ms. Harris’s apparent weakness as a potential presidential candidate was an asset to Mr. Biden. It helped insulate him from calls to step aside. The case for him running again was simple, and I even made it myself, before June’s disastrous debate: Ms. Harris had run a terrible campaign in 2019, and at the time she regularly polled worse than he did; if Mr. Biden did not seek re-election, it was highly likely that she would end up as the nominee; therefore, he had better run again.

If Amy Klobuchar or Gretchen Whitmer were vice president, the calculus would have been very different, and I think that the calls for Mr. Biden to step aside would have come much earlier and much louder — and if he had stepped aside in favor of one of them, we would have had a much stronger nominee who could not so easily be attacked as extreme and out of touch. That woman might well be the president-elect right now.

Once in office, Mr. Biden undermined Ms. Harris. He assigned her responsibility for addressing “root causes” of illegal migration in early 2021, but it wasn’t until this year that he issued an executive order aimed at the abuse of our asylum system and stemmed the wave of irregular migration that defined most of his presidency. He both failed to try to resolve the border problem and ensured that Ms. Harris would bear more than a vice president’s usual share of blame for it.

Mr. Biden’s border failure ended up being Democrats’ second-biggest political problem in this election. The biggest was inflation — a global phenomenon, to be fair, though here in the United States, Mr. Biden did make matters worse by signing the excessively large American Rescue Plan, which overstimulated the economy in 2021.

He failed to prioritize disinflationary policy — where, for example, was permitting reform? — and instead spent much of 2022 looking for ways to pass the spending demanded by Democratic interest groups. As a result, prices were too high, and the Federal Reserve bore the brunt of fighting inflation through raising interest rates.

In the midterms, assisted no doubt by the furious reaction to the repeal of Roe v. Wade and despite Mr. Biden’s sagging approval ratings, Democrats escaped disaster, especially in Senate races, where they actually picked up one seat. They lost the House of Representatives, but not by as wide a margin as many people expected.

Mr. Biden apparently took this middling result as an endorsement of his leadership, and he pressed on toward re-election. He also failed to pivot policy toward the center — serious efforts toward a bipartisan border security deal, for example, did not emerge until late 2023, and the deal collapsed in early 2024. By then, Mr. Trump was well on his way to being the Republican nominee and had the influence to kill the package and deny Democrats both a policy victory and some of the tools needed to best mitigate the problems at the border.

All the while Mr. Biden and his close associates worked to conceal from Democratic Party leaders and the public the fact that his faculties were declining. Even after the June debate debacle, Mr. Biden and his minions still spent a month insisting that he was fine.

By the time he stepped aside in July, it was most likely too late for anyone other than Ms. Harris to succeed him as the candidate. Mr. Biden endorsed her immediately. This may have been the best choice for the party — a chaotic convention fight would have consumed time and resources and would probably still have ended up with Ms. Harris as the nominee, but a little more beaten up after a last-ditch intraparty campaign to replace her. (The need to contest the nomination and impress progressive activists might also have made it harder for her to shake the Etch A Sketch by, for example, repudiating her past support for a fracking ban.)

If Mr. Biden had stepped aside earlier — say, shortly after the midterm elections — there would have been time for a primary campaign that could have produced a different nominee with less baggage, someone like Ms. Whitmer or Josh Shapiro. It’s impossible to know whether a different nominee would have produced different results, but that candidate would have had much more liberty to criticize Mr. Biden’s record.

Once Mr. Biden finally did step aside, he mostly stayed out of the way. But there was still a parade of on-background news stories about how bitter and dejected the president and his closest associates were about the fact that he was pushed aside — why do these people whine to reporters instead of to their therapists? — and he could not bring himself to stay off the campaign trail even though he was, at this point, a hindrance, not a help, for Ms. Harris.

In the last week of the campaign, he stepped on her “closing argument” speech by suggesting on a Zoom call that Trump supporters are “garbage.” One gaffe most likely didn’t matter for the final result, but it showed that Mr. Biden too often could not find the best way to help Democrats win, even when the way was something as simple as shutting up.

He failed at that, as he had many things, and he deserves to be judged harshly for it.

Josh Barro writes the newsletter Very Serious and is the host of the podcast “Serious Trouble.”

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