CHRIS CRUCIAL: Joe Biden diagnoses the Democratic defeat 🩺
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1. Biden on why Dems lost
Joe Biden hasn’t spoken much about the 2024 election since he dropped out of the race in late July.
Which is what made what he told USA Today’s Susan Page in an interview released today so interesting to me. Here’s the start of that exchange:
PAGE: You talk about your economic successes on jobs and on growth on avoiding a recession which, a lot of people thought that wasn't possible. But one reason that Donald Trump won in November was the support he managed to get from working class voters, voters without a college education, voters who have been part of the Democratic coalition, voters who you as Scranton Joe have long identified with. Why do you think Democrats lost so much of their support in November?
BIDEN: Well, number one, I think that, as I said, if you look around the world, almost every democracy out there "lost" this time, number one. Number two, I think that if you, and it's not a criticism of the press, it's a reality... Turn on the news. Do you ever see any good news? I'm not being facetious. I'm not trying, and I don't say that as a criticism. I say that as an observation. The mindset we're in, it seems like you get no click unless there's something negative. And if you think about it, much of what I had, the hardest thing to do for me in the economy was to think through what were the immediate fixes you could do to make people feel better? But what do we do in the long-term? Put America in a position where you continue to be able to lead the world.
It’s worth unpacking that answer.
Biden effectively lists three reasons for why his party lost: a) 2024 was an anti-incumbent year b) The press only covered “bad news” stories c) There were limited options for him to make policy changes that would improve peoples’ lived economic experience in the short term.
Start with the claim of 2024 as an anti-incumbent year. That is, I think, in the main, true. This chart, via 538, tells that story:
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