Even Harris, who became the administration’s top post-Dobbs proponent of abortion rights, could not adequately articulate — either as vice president or as the last-second nominee — what she would do about the matter, other than run on it.
In a sense, Dobbs defeated the Democrats twice over. Not only did it undermine abortion rights, but by improving the party’s midterm performance, it reaffirmed the belief among Biden and his advisers that he had enough support, in the public and in the party, to seek re-election. We know how that turned out.
Persistent inflation and a permissive border policy became dead weight on the Democrats’ 2024 prospects, but even Biden’s signature accomplishments failed to deliver much political gain. “Biden defied cynics as he pushed through a massive legislative agenda during his first two years,” Zelizer writes, citing the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. “However, legislative success did not translate into political strength.” His ambitious climate policies likewise “failed utterly as a political strategy,” writes Paul Sabin, a Yale historian, and “yielded few political benefits in the 2024 electoral campaign, where climate change was barely mentioned.”
Politicians’ constant compulsion to blame the gap between policy victories and political support simply on poor communications, or worse, poor “messaging,” is a bit too pat, both self-serving and self-exonerating. If only they knew about all the great things I’ve done! But Biden — who, by late in his term, “had become among the most inaccessible presidents in modern history,” Timothy Naftali of Columbia University writes — did himself few favors on that front.
“He did not just fail to tout his achievements; he seldom even tried,” Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown, complains. On education policy, Biden’s “lack of a declarative, coherent message largely ceded to his opponents the upper hand in defining his education legacy,” writes Natalia Mehlman Petrzela of the New School.
