WASHINGTON – Even though the president Joe Biden isn’t on the ballot in November, voters will still be evaluating his legacy.
As vice president Kamala Harris moves to take his place as the Democratic standard-bearer, Biden’s accomplishments remain at great risk if Republicans donald trump prevail.
How Biden’s single term — and his decision to step aside — will be remembered will be intertwined with Harris’ electoral success in November, especially as the vice president clings tightly to the Biden administration’s achievements.
Biden will have the opportunity to defend his legacy – sweeping domestic legislation, renewing alliances abroad, defending democracy – on Wednesday night when he delivers an address in the Oval Office about his decision to abandon the race and “what’s next.”
And no matter how frustrated Biden is about being sidelined by his party — and he is pretty upset — he has too much at stake simply to wash his hands of this election.
Biden endorsed Harris shortly after she announced on Sunday that he would end his candidacy, effectively giving him an edge over potential challengers and helping boost a candidacy primarily focused on continuing his own agenda.
“If she wins, it will be confirmation that he did the right thing in fighting the threat that is Trump, and will be seen as a legend in the name of democracy,” said presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Presidential Library of Washington at Mount Vernon. “If she loses, I think there will be questions about whether he resigned too late? Would the Democratic Party have been more effective if he had said he would not run?”
What if similar situations happen at the end of each presidency. But Biden’s defiance in the face of questions about his fitness for office and beyond his belated submission to his party’s crisis of confidence raise the stakes.
The last vice president to run for the top job was Democrat Al Gore, who sought to distance himself from President Bill Clinton during the 2000 campaign following the president’s affair with a White House intern and subsequent impeachment.
Harris, on the other hand, has spent most of the past three years praising Biden’s accomplishments — meaning any attempt to distance herself now would be difficult to explain. And she has to rely on the Biden political operation she inherited to win the election, with just over 100 days left until the polls close.
Speaking to campaign staff on Monday, Harris said Biden’s legacy of accomplishments “over the last three and a half years is unmatched in modern history.”
Trump and his allies, for their part, were eager to tie Harris to Biden’s record even before the president dropped out of the race — and not in a good way.
A campaign email to supporters declared “KAMALA HARRIS IS BIDEN 2.0 – Kamala Harris owns Joe Biden’s terrible record because it’s her record too,” denouncing high inflation and border policies, among other things.
Biden this week promised staffers from his previous campaign that he would still “be on the road” as he handed the reins of the organization to Harris, adding, “I’m not going anywhere.”
His advisers say he intends to hold campaign and fundraising events to benefit Harris, albeit at a much slower pace than if he himself had remained on the ballot.
Harris’ advisers will ultimately have to decide how to position the president, whose popularity has waned as voters on both sides of the aisle question his fitness for office.
The president’s allies insist that, whatever happens, Biden’s place in the history books is intact.
Biden’s victory in 2020 “was that election that protected us from a Donald Trump presidency,” said Rep. Steven Horsford, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. four more years, the damage, the destruction, the decay of our democracy would have gone even further.”
Matt Bennett, co-founder of the center-left think tank Third Way, predicted there will be a difference between short-term memories of Biden and his legacy if Democrats lose in November.
“It’s true that if we lose, it will cloud things for him in the short term” because Democrats will have to confront Trump, Bennett said. “In the long run, when history judges Biden, they will look at him on his own terms. They will judge him by what he did or didn’t do as president, and they will judge him very favorably.”
Biden’s decision to end his candidacy lifted the spirits of Democrats in Congress, who feared that the incumbent president would harm their prospects of keeping the Senate and retaking the House. An all-Republican Washington would threaten to do even more damage to Biden’s legacy.
Republican congressmen have already tried to unravel pieces of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, a central Biden achievement that passed along party lines in 2022. And they could succeed next year, with a President Trump expected to sign a repeal of the law.
GOP lawmakers could also vote to roll back key federal regulations that arrived late in the Biden administration.
“If the Republicans get double majorities, they are going to take back as much as they can, they are going to undo everything they can and that will not only be a disaster for America and the world, but it will also be very bad for Biden’s legacy,” he said. Bennett.
Biden aides point to the so-far ongoing nature of Harris’s takeover of his political apparatus, as evidenced by the president grooming his vice president to run successfully based on their shared track record. But the final test of this organization will come in November.
No one will be rooting for her more than the president.
As Biden told Harris, “I’m watching you, kid.”
