He’s back: Biden returns to the campaign conversation

Biden left office as the first one-term Democratic president since Jimmy Carter, with approval ratings under 40%. He angered some allies on the way out, pardoning his son Hunter after promising not to and suggesting that he, unlike Harris, could have won the 2024 election. (Few Democrats believe that, outside of Biden’s inner circle.)

Former President Barack Obama hit the trail for Democrats in last year’s competitive elections, but Biden stayed away. He spoke up after the off-year races were over, addressing Nebraska Democrats at a party dinner as Gaza protesters were kept behind a police line outside.

“We handed Donald Trump, literally not figuratively, the strongest economy in the world,” Biden said in Omaha. That set the tone for his next political speech, a commemoration of his 2020 South Carolina primary win, in which he derided Trump for a net job loss in his first term.

Few Democrats were as committed as Biden to defending his record, but the former president’s allies believe he’s being vindicated by Trump. In national Harvard-Harris polling this year, 53% of voters said that the economy was worse than it had been under Biden, and 62% blamed Trump for the decline.

“The Democratic candidates and party leaders who saw through the endless yelling about his age — and stayed focused on what he actually delivered for the American people — are the ones earning his endorsement,” said Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Fleming Kleeb. “And they will win their elections, because voters see the good Joe Biden did for our party’s infrastructure and for our country’s infrastructure.”

That sentiment may be giving Democrats with Biden ties a real boost with Democratic voters, even when their work for his administration wasn’t particularly well-reviewed. Becerra, whose Cabinet role came about largely thanks to a push from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, now highlights that work as executive experience no other Democrat can match.

“Who has had to declare a crisis, a state of emergency, of the candidates that are running — at the scale of California?” Becerra asked at a town hall meeting in the Central Valley last month. “Only one candidate: Me.”

Republicans and one Democrat, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, view Becerra’s Biden record as a weakness. At their last debate, on April 28, the only mention of the Biden administration came from Mahan, who used it to attack Becerra’s record.

“The secretary has never met a crisis that he couldn’t ignore, whether it was migrant children, the 85,000 who were lost; monkeypox, where we were slow to respond and then blamed the gay community for the crisis; or COVID, where the Biden administration had to sideline him,” Mahan said.

“You’re not wearing a mask, are you, Matt?” Becerra shot back. “You are not worried about catching monkeypox, right? We were able to deal with these crises.”

The grumbling over Biden’s record has been quieter in Georgia, where Republicans nervous about their own messy primary see Lance Bottoms as a weak potential nominee. Republicans quickly blended her Biden endorsement into their messaging, which focused more on the former Atlanta mayor’s single term as well as her perceived mishandling of the pandemic and national unrest that defined the summer of 2020.

“Keisha Lance Bottoms burned Atlanta to the ground,” Trump-endorsed GOP contender Burt Jones said on X. “Now she and Joe Biden want to do it again.”

Unlike Becerra, who endorsed Biden well after he won the 2020 nomination, Lance Bottoms was an early supporter who defended him to the hilt and made an early running-mate list. In her memoir, published last month, Lance Bottoms writes that she turned down an unspecified Cabinet job to finish her mayoral term.

She spent just eight months leading Biden’s Office of Public Liaison, saying on the way out that the president’s “poll numbers have gone up tremendously,” then served on the low-profile presidential export council. As a 2024 campaign surrogate, she did not join the stampede of Democrats urging him to quit after his final debate with Trump.

“I was surprised by the president’s performance,” she wrote of Biden at the time. “I had never experienced a moment with him that made me question his physical or cognitive abilities.”

Like Koh, she asked the former president for an endorsement, and got it. Her Democratic primary rivals saw her record in Atlanta and DC as easy fodder for Republicans. But the ex-president’s popularity with their own voters made it hard for them to attack it first.

Republicans, from the White House on down, enjoy contrasting the Biden record with Trump’s and continue to blame the ex-president for problems popping up now.

“Joe Biden’s administration resulted in massive inflation, open borders, and a coverup of his mental acuity,” said Republican Governors Association communications director Kollin Crompton. “The more candidates that Biden endorses, the more we will make sure voters know about it in November.”

Not to mention, plenty of Democrats believe that voters will reward the candid assessment that Biden stayed on too long and other elderly incumbents need to go.

Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who is challenging Sen. Ed Markey in the party’s primary this year, says that his early role in urging Biden to quit has been an asset with voters.

“Another thing lacking in this party is courage,” Moulton said. “It’s about the courage to speak truth to power and to actually give voice to what people are saying on the ground, but people in Washington are too scared to say on TV.”

Any idea of what ex-presidents should do after leaving office went kaput when Donald Trump became one.

Even before Trump’s comeback, he was picking the winners and losers of GOP midterm primaries after candidates met with him to beg for endorsements. That’s never going to be Biden, who is less influential in party primaries right now than Bernie Sanders is.

What’s interesting, though, is that Biden is trying at all. Jimmy Carter stayed out of party politics until endorsing his vice president, Walter Mondale, for the 1984 Democratic nomination. Barack Obama didn’t intervene in a primary until May 2018, when he endorsed California’s Dianne Feinstein for her sixth and final Senate term. (Feinstein died in 2023.)

Biden, his party’s most in-demand surrogate in Trump’s 2018 midterm, is both enhanced and diminished by his presidency. He isn’t sought after by swing-seat candidates. He is missed by rank-and-file Democrats — even if they also believe his decision to run again when most voters considered him too old helped resurrect Trump and reverse decades of liberal wins.

Here’s another reason why Biden is back: Democrats, while fairly comfortable saying that he should have quit earlier, are uncomfortable explaining what parts of his agenda were failures that they should avoid next time.