Biden’s fateful decision to run in 2024 will be part of his legacy

Who knows what I’m going to be like when I’m 86 years old?”

That was the answer President Joe Biden gave to Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, in an exit interview published last week.

The interview focused mostly on Biden’s record and legacy, but near the end, Page asked the president two brief questions. The first was whether he thought he could have won the election in November, had he continued his candidacy against President-elect Donald Trump. Biden said he believed he would have prevailed.

Her second question was an important follow-up: “Do you think you would’ve had the vigor to serve another four years in office?”

“I don’t know,” Biden said.

As he answered the second question, the president circled back to the 2020 election. He told Page that he had run that year because he thought he had the best chance among all the Democrats to beat Trump. (He also has said he was motivated to run after seeing the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017 that left one young woman dead after a white supremacist drove his car into a group protesting the event.)

But he added this in answering the question about his vigor: “I also wasn’t looking to be president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old,” he said. “And so, I did talk about passing the baton. But I don’t know. Who the hell knows? So far, so good. But who knows what I’m going to be like when I’m 86 years old?”

In the USA Today interview, Biden conceded mistakes - among them that he failed to sign his name to covid checks sent out by the government.

His allies acknowledge that he was not built for this era of politics and media, that his old-school style made it more difficult for him to reach voters and make the best case for himself.

He has much to point to, from an economic recovery out of the pandemic that, despite inflation, is the envy of other countries; to bipartisan legislation to rebuild America’s infrastructure and its semiconductor capacity; to investments aimed at combating the effects of the changing climate. As Biden noted, much of this has not been seen or felt by most voters yet. Many of these projects could take some years to show tangible results.

That’s the record of a single term, a mirror on what has been. The question of whether Biden should have run for a second term is different, and it has been a central part of the discussion among Democrats for the past two years. Also looming is the question of whether Democrats would have fared any better against Trump if he had chosen not to run and Democrats had held a contested primary that would have begun early in 2023.

The latter is one of those unanswerable “What if?” questions of history. Nonetheless, it is pertinent, given all the discussions that surrounded Biden’s decision to seek a second term and later the efforts by Democratic Party leaders to persuade him to get out of the race and yield to Vice President Kamala Harris in what turned out to be a losing campaign.

The issue of Biden’s physical and mental capacity was front and center for months as the presidential campaign took shape. It became unavoidable after the president’s disastrous performance in the June 27 CNN debate in Atlanta.

Biden’s critics have claimed that White House officials and some in the media covered up for Biden’s incapacities for months, if not years. Whenever the issue of his physical or mental acuity arose, whenever he seemed to falter in public, White House officials and other close advisers said consistently that the president was fully on his game, sharp and in charge, and that they saw no noticeable decline in his fitness to serve as president.

A lengthy post-election article in the Wall Street Journal described the efforts by advisers to manage what the story called Biden’s “limitations.” That followed a pre-election article in the Journal quoting various politicians, many of them Republicans, as saying they saw evidence of a diminished president. That article drew a vociferous denunciation from the White House.

History could help to resolve the question of what advisers saw, knew and did during Biden’s term as president, but that will have to await the release of internal White House documents and records, which won’t be made public for many years. Post-presidency books by journalists or the administration could shed some light on the question in the near term.

As to the president’s capacities, however, the differences between the Biden who is preparing to leave office in little more than a week and the Biden of four or eight years ago are evident to all who watch him.

It is difficult to interpret exactly what Biden meant in his answer to Page about whether he thought he would have had the vigor to serve another four years. A simple “I don’t know” from someone who is 82, trying to project how he might feel in four years, is honest. But the answer also does not clearly acknowledge that he believes he would not have the stamina to do the job until he reaches 86.

Still, there is a belief among many Democrats that Biden never should have sought a second term - that he should have held true to his pledge in the 2020 campaign to be a transitional figure. That statement was widely interpreted to mean that he intended to serve for only four years before yielding the stage to a younger generation of leaders in the Democratic Party. History and hubris interceded.

In the late summer and fall of 2022, it looked as if Biden might face a primary challenge if he said he was running again. Despite legislative successes in his first two years and the assembling of a coalition to aid Ukraine after Russia had invaded, his approval ratings were low and anxieties over inflation and concerns about the flow of undocumented immigrants coming across the U.S.-Mexico border were growing.

Had Democrats suffered the typical midterm election losses that historically befall a party that had just won the White House, pressure on Biden not to run probably would have increased significantly. Instead, in part because of the backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion months before the election, Democrats did far better than expected in those midterms.
Instead of facing pressure to not run again, Biden was able to celebrate as a president who had defied the odds, and Democrats joined in toasting his success. That, along with his belief that he was again best equipped to take on and defeat Trump in 2024, made the decision to run again easy.
Whether Biden gave serious thought as to whether he then had or would have years into the future the vigor to serve a second term is something only he, first lady Jill Biden and perhaps a few other close family members know.

They could not have been indifferent to all the evidence that Biden’s age was a principal concern among many voters. Long before the Atlanta debate, distressed Democratic insiders lamented the president’s decision to run as a sign of stubbornness and selfishness.

Biden’s decision to run thus robbed the party of an open primary contest that would have elevated a different candidate to lead Democrats in the campaign and set the stage for the chaotic events that followed the June debate, including the anointing of Harris as the nominee.

The eventual outcome might have been preordained regardless of who the Democrats had as their nominee, given public concerns about inflation and general dissatisfaction with the state of the country. But the absence of open competition for the nomination meant only Harris, in a shortened campaign, got the chance to prove otherwise - and without having dispatched potential rivals to win the nomination.

Biden repeated, during a session with reporters Friday, his belief that “he would have beaten” Trump had he remained a candidate, but that he quit the race to unify the party. Is there a case that Biden would have won?

In terms of the total number of votes, Harris performed worse in 2024 than Biden in 2020, while Trump performed better in 2024 than he did in 2020. Biden got 81 million votes in 2020; Harris got 75 million in 2024. Trump won 74 million in 2020 and increased that to 77 million in 2024.

Nearly all the difference in Harris’s lower totals came in the non-battleground states. In those states plus the District of Columbia, her vote totals were about 6 million fewer than Biden’s in 2020. That includes dramatic declines in several deep-blue states. For example, she received about 1.8 million fewer votes in California, about 600,000 fewer in New York and about 400,000 fewer in both Illinois and New Jersey.

In the seven battleground states, where the Harris-Walz campaign concentrated its efforts, she was only about 50,000 votes below Biden’s totals in 2020, though she lost them all while Biden won six of the seven in 2020. The reason Trump swept the battlegrounds was because of his ability to expand on his 2020 support. He won about 950,000 more votes in those battleground states in 2024.

Harris’s defeat was due not only to questions about her own record and positions but also to voters’ frustrations with inflation and immigration - mistakes by Biden that would have affected his candidacy had he stayed in.

On immigration, the president was slow to act. On inflation, he failed to address it directly and tried to focus voters on jobs and overall growth rather than the pain they felt from higher grocery and gas prices.

The record of his administration, as admirable as parts of it might have been, ultimately was judged harshly by voters in November. On Election Day, the president’s approval rating stood at 40 percent, according to network exit polls. It’s difficult to imagine any sitting president winning reelection under those circumstances, especially at a time when governments around the world were being turned out by disgruntled voters.

Biden will deliver a farewell address on Wednesday evening and have another opportunity to extol his accomplishments and assess the state of the country. That record will be an important part of his legacy. That he chose to run again in 2024 in the face of voters’ broad discontent and on top of the specific concerns they had about his age and capacity will also be a part of that legacy.