When was the last time you thought about Joe Biden? If the answer is “recently,” that’s probably a sign that you should consider taking up a hobby or joining a club—anything, really, that doesn’t involve politics.
An irrelevancy from the moment he belatedly ended his campaign in July of 2024, the former president has kept a low profile since leaving the White House. And for good reason. His arrogant insistence on running for re-election rather than making a dignified exit from office doomed his party and the country. Perhaps no single decision played a larger role in Donald Trump’s return to power.
But Biden could never resist the limelight, and now he’s back to haunt the Democrats. Last week, he waded into two primaries, endorsing candidates who had worked for his 2024 campaign and who asked for his support this year. As Semafor’s David Weigel has observed, Biden nostalgia is also creeping into other races, particularly California’s cramped gubernatorial primary, where the ascendent Xavier Becerra regularly touts his service as Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Biden, battered by post-pandemic inflation and hounded by concerns about his age and health, left office with an abysmal approval rating in the high 30s. To the extent that he’s seen a post-presidency bump, it’s mostly thanks to comparisons with his disastrous successor: 51 percent of voters told a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll that Trump was doing a worse job than his predecessor, compared to 49 percent who said he was doing better. Still, there isn’t exactly a mass reconsideration of Biden’s presidency underway: A Newsweek poll this month found just 44 percent of voters viewed him favorably.
Biden is unpopular—so what? Trump is the president now. Even if there were something to gain from re-litigating 2024, the focus now is on the horrors the current administration is unleashing on a daily basis. With immigrants, LGBTQ people, protesters, judges, journalists, federal workers, and others under assault, plus trade wars and literal wars being waged around the world, there are far more pressing issues that demand Democrats’ attention in this midterm election cycle and beyond. The past is an afterthought, as it should be.
But Biden’s sudden reemergence can’t be so easily waved away. It makes him a potential issue in every election, and not just primaries. That’s a problem for Democrats more broadly, even if his support is helpful to some of them. A year and a half after the end of his presidency, he is not only deeply unpopular but a reminder of what a great many voters did not like about the party in 2024. His presence risks undercutting the party’s best message, which is that Trump’s policies are causing a massive spike in everyday costs, and neuters a pretty good one, which is that Trump’s mentally unfit for office.
The Democrats have absolutely no reason to talk about Biden—but if he keeps popping up in races, they’re going to have no choice but to do so. It’s a conversation that no one is ready for.
Last month, the pollster Elliott Morris looked at how voters view both parties and—surprise—found that they really don’t like either of them. If Republicans came off worse, it was hardly surprising given that they control all three branches of government. Voters hated Democrats only somewhat less: 30 percent viewed the party “very unfavorably” compared to 42 percent who felt that way about the GOP.
Still, it was a good poll for Democrats for a couple of reasons. The first is that voters’ primary criticism of the party is far from fatal. Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters were at the party for not doing enough to fight Trump, but most said they planned on voting for the party anyway. So they were disaffected, but still on board. And that criticism of the party’s weakness can likely be addressed if and when the Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress this fall, which would endow them with oversight powers they currently lack.
The second is that independents like Democrats a lot more than Republicans—three times more, in fact. But they had unique concerns. Per Morris:
Two specific themes show up that don’t appear in the Democratic column: The first is a lingering Biden grievance: independents in our open-end repeatedly cite the party “lying about Biden’s health,” keeping his campaign going “far too long,” and “anointing” Kamala Harris as the nominee without a competitive process. The second is a leadership vacuum complaint—variations on “lack of leadership” and “I don’t know what they stand for.”
This is good news, too, in a way, because these are easy concerns to address. To win back the trust of these voters, Democrats can simply acknowledge that Biden was too old for the job and that he held on too long. That doesn’t mean embracing conspiracy theories about Biden’s health or even denigrating his administration’s accomplishments. It does, however, require being honest about his age, his disastrous decision to run for re-election, and his even more disastrous refusal to end his campaign until it was too late—as well as the broader party’s failure to force Biden’s hand in time to allow for a competitive primary. There can be no equivocation here, no hemming and hawing to placate party elders.
Biden may be broadly unpopular, but he remains popular among Democrats. The Newsweek poll found that 85 percent of Democrats view him favorably. This creates perverse incentives. It means his support—or, as in Becerra’s case, ties to him—can be an asset on the campaign trail. But touting his endorsement or regularly praising his presidency is a poison pill. It suggests that the party hasn’t really changed, that it hasn’t learned any lessons from the debacle of 2024. If Democrats want to run on the economy and concerns about Trump’s mental and physical fitness, why would they embrace someone who oversaw a huge spike in inflation and whose presidency was undone by similar concerns about his fitness?
The counterargument is that none of this really matters when compared with the Boschian nightmare that is Trump’s second term. Voters don’t like Biden but he’s not the president—and they really hate the president. The list of things that they care about more than Biden is long. There’s good reason to shrug off concerns about his reemergence.
But candidates will not have that luxury when they’re asked on the campaign trail or on the debate stage about Biden—something that is significantly more likely if the former president keeps making endorsements. Democrats should be talking about other things, but Biden’s reemergence will make it harder for them to do that. And every minute spent talking about Biden is one less minute spent talking about inflation, the Iran war, ICE, and so on.
Do Democrats need to engage in a mass Maoist denunciation of Biden? Obviously not. But they do need to make it clear that that they’re not stuck in the past. Biden isn’t ready to move on, but Democrats need to.
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