For most of the election cycle, I remained cautiously optimistic about Donald Trump’s chances. It didn’t take long for me to see that Trump’s victory was inevitable on Election Night. When I saw just how much Trump overperformed in Florida — one of the first states to report its results— and continued to exceed expectations as the night progressed, not only did an Electoral College victory seem inevitable, but a national popular vote victory did as well.
And now, Democrats are kind of trying to figure out what went wrong for them. The party is in major need of some serious soul-searching, but right now, I’m seeing a lot more of the blame game going on, and one person being targeted a lot in this blame game is Joe Biden.
In one sense, Biden is responsible for Trump’s victory because he embraced radical leftist policies and his administration was incompetent. But many of the people who are blaming Biden don’t see it that way, they blame him for not dropping out sooner.
According to former Obama advisor David Axelrod, “the story might have been different” had Biden “made a timely decision to step aside.”
“If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place,” said former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
Rep. Seth Moulton, (D-Mass.) said that “it would have been better if we had a primary, even if Harris was the eventual victor.”
Some have even suggested that Biden shouldn’t have run at all.
“He shouldn’t have run,” Jim Manley, a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told Politico. “This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings. He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”
None of these people understand that none of that would have made a difference.
Remember, Biden claimed during the 2020 election that he was going to be president for all Americans. Instead, his administration rammed through a radical left-wing agenda. He took office with his party in control of the House and Senate, and they completely own the Biden agenda as much as he does and bear responsibility for it.
Related: Rasmussen Reports Completely Vindicated by 2024 Election Results
Trump’s victory was a historic political comeback, bigger than many expected. He swept the battleground states. Despite being vastly outfunded and outspent, Kamala Harris underperformed across the board compared to Biden four years earlier. The shift to Trump was so large that he became the first Republican in twenty years to win the national popular vote.
It's true that following Biden’s exit, Democrats suddenly found some enthusiasm with Harris drawing crowds and ActBlue setting fundraising records. But in hindsight, this was all a mirage. The fundamentals of this election hadn't changed just because they put a new candidate forward. Biden was going to lose no matter what. And no other Democrat would have won either, whether Biden dropped out earlier or simply hadn't sought a second term in the first place.
Remember, the right track-wrong track numbers were so bad that anyone belonging in the incumbent party would have been doomed to fail. That's why we didn't see any Democrat challenge Kamala, and why Kamala was clearly a placeholder — a sacrificial lamb that the party knew would lose.
It's as simple as that. Joe Biden doesn't deserve the blame for Kamala's defeat. The Democratic Party as a whole is responsible. They're the ones who embrace soft-on-crime policies, open borders, radical gender ideology, and massive spending that sent inflation to historic levels. They created an environment where no Democrat could win.
