Though Democrats officially lost the 2024 election last month, Astead Herndon suggests they effectively lost it early last year, “when they rallied around the reelection of Joe Biden, back when there was a lot of evidence the country didn’t want that.”
Herndon, a New York Times national politics reporter and host of The Run-Up podcast, recalls on the latest episode of Inside the Hive how Biden’s unpopularity had been apparent for years if you looked outside the DC bubble, and how the 2020 coalition that brought him to power was “always fairly tenuous.”
“One of the things that I think blew my mind was I remembered the discussion of Biden’s age, even back at the time,” Herndon says. “I remember talking to voters who were concerned he was too old to serve for second terms, and I remember the efforts that the Biden campaign did to kind of imply that maybe that’s something that they could deal with down the road. And that, for a lot of people, was a message that worked. They simply said, ‘Hey, we’ll deal with that come four years from now, but right now it’s about stopping Donald Trump.’”
Although Biden could count major legislative accomplishments in his first two years in office, events perceived as “wins” among Democrats and framed as such in the political media, many Americans weren’t feeling the effects. And yet Biden, now in his 80s, was running for reelection with the party behind him. “Democrats, I think, got trapped in kind of believing their own hype more so than I think working from the premise where a lot of Americans started from, which is that Joe Biden was there to get rid of Donald Trump. And so what came next?”
While Biden never explicitly ruled out running for a second term, his 2020 vow to be a “bridge” to “an entire generation” of Democratic leaders was perceived by many that way. “In some ways, Kamala Harris running in 2024 was exactly what a lot of people expected to happen in 2020,” Herndon notes. “What changed was that Joe Biden and Democrats retrenched on that implication and robbed themselves of a primary.” Herndon says that if Biden had considered Harris his successor early on for the 2024 race, he “could have acknowledged that from the start and set her up for success” or “if that wasn’t the person he wanted, he could have chosen a different person who he did want to set up for success.”
“I think there’s a lot of other different options that could have taken place,” he adds. “I just think that they kind of chose the worst one. They sidelined the person then, and kind of argued it could only be him, then had to shift to the person in a crisis with three months left.”
Herndon, a National Magazine Awards finalist for his 2023 profile of Harris, says he “thought Joe Biden’s age was an undeniable ticking political crisis. No matter what.” To Herndon “it was just a matter of when and how they would deal with Kamala Harris because she was going to be the obvious person.” So “even if he won,” he adds, “there would have been a democratic crisis in 2025.”
