While Democrats across the nation are grieving the loss of the 2024 election, President Joe Biden is somewhere biting his tongue.
Early Wednesday, the presidential race was called for former President Donald Trump, who pulled off one of the greatest political comebacks in U.S history.
While Trump celebrates his triumphant return to the White House, the Democratic Party will not only have to contend with the losing campaign it ran in the final months of the election, but also the momentous backroom campaign its party elders led against Biden’s plans to run for a second term.
“The deposing of Biden will remain a great source of controversy within the Democratic party,” Steven Schier, a political scientist and analyst, told Newsweek. “It’s clear that Biden, even with his cognitive disabilities, would have performed better than Harris in states like Pennsylvania.”
Trump not only turned the Keystone State in one of the bigger tipping points this year, flipping Pennsylvania red again after “Scranton Joe’s” 2020 win, but also delivered a liklely clean sweep in the battleground states, taking North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan in addition to Pennsylvania. His victory in the Great Lake states helped him once again break through the “blue wall,” a repeat of his 2016 victory. Arizona and Nevada have yet to be called, but Trump is leading in both vote counts.
Trump’s 2024 victory went beyond the electoral map. For the first time since George W. Bush in 2004, a Republican presidential candidate was on track to win the popular vote.
This year, Trump has received more than 71.8 million votes, compared to Harris’ roughly 67 million, with some votes still being counted. Although that still puts Trump 2.4 million votes short of the record-breaking turnout he received four years ago, Harris massively underperformed Biden’s numbers, falling short by more than 14.2 million of the 81 million votes that her boss received in 2020.
The former and future president also erased the advantages that the Democrats and Biden had in reliably blue states like Virginia and New Jersey, while coming closer to winning New York than Harris came to carrying Florida.
For a moment on Tuesday night, it even seemed like Trump might flip Virginia. Even though the commonwealth was ultimately called for Harris, she won by only 5.2 percentage points. That’s half of the margin of victory Biden pulled off in 2020, when he carried the state with 10.1 points, the best performance by a Democratic presidential candidate the state has seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944.
Harris carried New Jersey by just six points in the 2024 race, the narrowest Democratic victory observed in the reliably blue Garden State in two decades. Kerry carried the state by the same margin of victory over Bush in 2004, while Biden won New Jersey by nearly 16 percent in 2020. Hillary Clinton won New Jersey by almost 14 percent in 2016 and Barack Obama carried it by 13 percent and 16 percent in 2012 and 2008, respectively.
Before Biden made the decision to bow out of the 2024 race on July 21, the president remained steadfast in his belief that he was the best candidate to defeat Trump, according to multiple reports citing people familiar with his thinking. He even said as much at least three times after his disastrous June 27 debate performance.
Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a July 5 interview that he was the “most qualified” person to lead the Democrats against Trump. Still, the calls to step aside from his own party continued.
Three days later, on July 8, he wrote a letter to congressional Democrats, telling them: “I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024.” Three days after that, Biden vigorously defended his ability to serve a second term again during a press conference, telling reporters, “I beat [Trump] once, and I will beat him again.”
Now that a second Trump term has been secured, Biden may have proved himself more right than wrong: He will go down as the only Democrat who successfully beat the real-estate-mogul-turned-reality-TV-star-turned-politician at the ballot box.
Of course, whether he could have repeated that feat as an 81-year-old man, will be one of the great unknowables of U.S. political history.
After Biden’s watershed decision over the summer, Harris offered a breath of new life into the Democratic Party and its base. A fractured Democratic coalition came home to support Harris almost immediately, giving her a honeymoon bump that suggested they were enthusiastic about her candidacy in a way they were not about Biden’s. But those were voters who likely would have eventually returned to the Democratic column as Election Day neared, given their motivation to vote against Trump.
Biden maintained stronger performances among unions voters and men—two groups that Harris struggled with once she was at the top of the ticket and who were particularly critical to Trump flipping Pennsylvania.
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As the first sitting president to walk a picket line, Biden had enjoyed strong union support throughout his presidency, and even earned key endorsements in his reelection campaign before it was cut short. Some of those unions were unwilling to extend their support to Harris.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, for example, declined to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in nearly three decades. Internal Teamsters data released ahead of the decision showed that a majority of its 1.3 million members supported Trump over Harris, 60 percent to 34 percent. Before Biden dropped out, he received 44 percent support from Teamsters members, compared to Trump’s 36 percent. The Teamsters also endorsed Biden in 2020.
The International Association of Fire Fighters, which also backed Biden’s 2020 campaign, issued its own non-endorsement in October after its leadership narrowly decided against backing either candidate.
Both of those non-endorsements would have been unlikely had Biden remained on the ticket. Would they have carried him over the finish line in a state like Pennsylvania? Another unknowable.
Harris’ candidacy raised questions about whether or not a female presidential candidate could garner enough support from male voters to win the White House. Even as pundits become increasingly attentive to the growing gender divide, the 2024 election has highlighted just how crucial men remain as a voting bloc that favors the GOP.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost male voters to Trump by a 9-point margin, 41 percent to 52 percent. Biden was able to catch up in 2020, when he ran behind Trump by just 2 points among men, 48 percent to 50 percent.
Exit poll data suggests Trump beat Harris among men nationally by 10 points. Among white men, Trump won with a 23-point margin. He carried Latino men by 12 points.
During her campaign, Harris received particularly worrying signs from Black men, who drifted away from the Democrats after the vice president became the nominee.
Black voters, who successfully cemented Biden as the Democratic nominee in South Carolina’s primary in 2020 and have long been the backbone of the party base, helped Biden clinch the presidency four years ago, with 92 percent backing his candidacy. Exit polls show that Harris carried Black men by 77 percent this year.
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It was a warning sign Harris received throughout her short campaign. While she had been able to shrink Trump’s support among Black men under age 50 from 27 percent to 21 percent in the final weeks of the campaign, according to an NAACP survey released last week, in the end it was not enough to save her.
Biden also had the advantage of being a well-defined politician who Americans have become familiar with over the 52 years he’s worked in national politics. A seasoned politico and campaigner, the president, like Trump, projected a “what you see is what you get” authenticity over the span of his career.
Harris, on the other hand, was less seasoned. She famously crashed out of the 2020 Democratic primary before any votes were even cast. Before then, she spent her entire political career in deep-blue California and was never subjected to the rigors of a full primary campaign — a weak point that showed in her media appearances during her abbreviated presidential run.
Even though there were signs Democrats were lukewarm about his reelection campaign, Biden still had a chance to bring them back to the party come Election Day—the moment where his “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative” message would be most salient to liberal voters.
But Harris dove into the race fairly undefined, despite being the sitting vice president. Most voters did not associate her with Biden’s policies, for better or worse, and could not point to the issue that she spearheaded on behalf of the administration.
The timing was also terrible for Harris, who had only 107 days to establish herself to voters. That led to a belated media blitz in September, where she sat for podcast interviews with popular shows like Call Her Daddy, appeared on The View, gave an interview to CBS’ 60 Minutes, spoke with Howard Stern and taped a show with late-night comedian Stephen Colbert. Biden wouldn’t have had to do any of that. Voters already knew who he was and what he stood for.
“There were things about Trump [that undecided voters] didn’t like, but also things about Harris they weren’t sure of,” Carter Wrenn, a veteran Republican strategist who managed Ronald Reagan’s campaign in North Carolina during the GOP primaries, told Newsweek.
Wrenn said the voters who were torn between Trump and Harris ultimately wanted to know which of the two candidates were going to correct what they saw as being wrong with the country and “Harris never established herself as a strong figure who could solve the problems in [their] minds.”
CNN exit poll data shows that voters who did not have a favorable opinion of either Trump or Harris — so-called “double haters” — broke for the Republican by 26 points, with 56 percent pulling the lever for Trump in the end, with 30 percent voting for Harris.
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said in the early hours of Wednesday that Biden left Harris with a difficult campaign to inherit because the president “broke faith with the people who voted for him” by running for a second term.
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“Joe Biden made a promise to the American people when I was sitting in this seat four years ago,” Christie told an ABC News panel. “He said, ‘I am a transitional figure.’ The implication of that… was that he was going to serve one term.”
“She’s not going to be able to do that,” Christie said. “Every candidate deserves some measure of blame every times there’s a loss, but I would say this, that Joe Biden should be looking in the mirror tonight and thinking about what did he do, what did his lack of keeping his word on that central promise from 2020 do to this election tonight.”
Plenty of strategists and pundits believe that the Democrats would have lost regardless if it was Biden or Harris at the top of the ticket. The party was facing an uphill battle from the jump, with an anti-incumbent mood sweeping through other affluent democracies around the world.
Michael DuHaime, a veteran Republican strategist who was the chief architect of Christie’s first successful gubernatorial campaign, told Newsweek that Biden leaving the race was not the most glaring mistake of the 2024 election.
The mistake, he said, was the president’s decision to wait until July to do so.
“Harris would have been a far better candidate if she had gone through a tough primary first,” DuHaime said. “She would be sharper with the media, more confident on the trail, and would have a far better campaign operation.”
He said that had the Democrats had time to hold a proper primary, the party “would have a stronger nominee who would have become stronger and more popular by winning a tough primary.”
“Perhaps they would have had a presidential or VP nominee with appeal in one of the battleground states,” DuHaime said.
Ahead of Tuesday’s results, John Conway, the director of strategy at Republican Voters Against Trump, told Newsweek, that despite a Harris loss on Election Day, “I have no no doubts that Joe Biden made the right decision.”
Conway said the electorate would be shaken up with a new candidate on the ballot regardless of timing, but commended Harris for “very quickly, put back together the Democratic coalition.”
“The Democratic coalition was fractured going into the debate, and especially, coming out of the debate. I don’t think that Joe Biden could have done anything to clear up in voters minds the concerns that they had about his age after the debate performance,” he said.
“We’ll never know what the rest of that campaign would have looked like,” he added, “but voters already had major concerns about voting for Joe Biden because of his age ad they were confirmed during the debate.”
In the focus groups that Conway studied ahead of the debate, “voters would say that they weren’t going to let people lie to them about what they saw.”
“They saw their worst fears on that debate stage, and many voters felt that they had been somewhat deceived about what [Biden’s] condition was, and I don’t think there would have been anything that Joe Biden or his campaign could have done to change that,” he said, suggesting that had Biden stayed on, Trump would be basking in an even bigger margin of victory.
“Democratic enthusiasm for Harris was sincere, but borne of desperation,” Schier said. “She seemed a lifeboat to them, but it was a lifeboat in a hurricane of public discontent.”
