What to do with Joe Biden’s legacy?

Although Democrats officially lost the 2024 election last month, Astead Herndon suggests they effectively lost it early last year “as they rallied around the re-election of Joe Biden, Back when there was a lot of evidence that the country didn’t want that.”

Herndon, a New York Times national political reporter and host of The lead-up Podcast, remembers the latest episode of In the beehive how Biden’s unpopularity has been evident for years looking beyond the D.C. bubble, and how the 2020 coalition that brought him to power was “always pretty weak.”

“One of the things that I think blew me away was that I remembered the discussion about Biden’s age, even back then,” Herndon says. “I remember conversations with voters who were concerned that he was too old for a second term, and I remember the Biden campaign’s efforts to kind of suggest that maybe this was something they could deal with down the road.” And that was a message that worked for a lot of people. They just said, “Hey, we’ll deal with this in four years, but right now it’s about stopping it.” Donald Trump.‘“

Although Biden scored major legislative successes in his first two years in office, events that were perceived as “victories” by Democrats and portrayed as such in the political media, many Americans did not feel the impact. And yet Biden, now over 80, ran for re-election with the party behind him. “I think Democrats are caught in the trap of believing, more than I think, their own hype, starting from the premise that many Americans are starting from, which is that Joe Biden was there to get rid of Donald Trump.” And what came next?”

While Biden never explicitly ruled out running for a second term, his 2020 promise to be a “bridge” to “a generation” of Democratic leaders was perceived that way by many. “In a way Kamala Harris “The 2024 run was exactly what many people expected in 2020,” notes Herndon. “What changed was that Joe Biden and the Democrats abandoned that implication and deprived themselves of a primary.” Herndon says that if Biden had considered Harris early on as his successor for the 2024 race, he “would have had that of “Be able to recognize them from the beginning and set them up for success” or “if that wasn’t the person he wanted, he could have chosen another person he wanted to lead to success.”

“I think there could have been a lot of other options,” he adds. “I just think they somehow chose the worst option. They then left the person out and sort of argued that it could only be him, and then had to turn to the person who was in crisis with three months to go.”

Herndon, a National Magazine Awards finalist for his portrait of Harris in 2023, says he “thought Joe Biden’s age was an undeniable political crisis.” No matter what.” For Herndon, “it was just a matter of when and how “We would deal with Kamala Harris because she would be the most obvious person.” “Even if he had won,” he adds, “there would have been a Democratic crisis in 2025.”