Is President Joe Biden making any decisions anymore? Who knows? Probably not. Heck, it was debatable from day one whether he was the one actually in charge of his administration. Well, now he’s made it crystal clear that he’s utterly disconnected from reality.
According to White House insiders, Biden is reportedly lamenting his decision to to drop out of the presidential election, and—try not to laugh—he still believes he could have easily defeated Donald Trump had he stayed in the race.
Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.
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The president stepped aside – to be replaced as his party’s nominee by the US vice-president, Kamala Harris – after mounting pressure from fellow Democrats, who cited polling evidence that appeared to show him heading for a near-certain election drubbing from Trump, who was seeking a historic return to the White House as the Republicans’ nominee.
Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket led to a surge of enthusiasm and improved poll numbers but ultimately ended in a decisive electoral college and popular vote defeat.
While Biden and his aides have been careful not to blame Harris, they apparently believe the result would have been different if he had stood his ground, according to the Washington Post’s reporting.
Many Harris supporters dispute the belief that Biden could have won the election had he stayed in. They believe that Biden waited too long to withdraw, leaving Kamala with insufficient time to build an effective campaign.
Of course, they’re wrong, too. Trump’s strength in the 2024 was, for all intents and purposes, baked into the cake. The Harris-Walz campaign raised and spent $1 billion, but failed to win a single battleground state, highlighting the futility of their efforts. It really didn’t matter whether Biden ran or not, or had dropped out earlier; the Democratic Party brand was already in the toilet due to the failures of the Biden-Harris ticket.
Still, Biden’s perception of how the election would have played out is indeed a curious mix of denial and delusion.
In a “Pod Save America” episode last month, former Obama staffers Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor openly criticized Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign, called his decision to run again a “catastrophic mistake,” and revealed that Biden team’s internal polling showed Trump poised to win 400 electoral votes—a detail kept quiet while Biden’s camp pushed the narrative that he was the strongest candidate.
“So they were shiving Kamala Harris to reporters while they told everyone else ‘not a time for an open process,’ and his vice president can’t win, so he’s the strongest candidate,” Favreau said. “Then we find out, when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling, at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was gonna win 400 electoral votes. That’s what their own internal polling said.”
Biden was never going to be able to win the election, nor was Kamala Harris. No Democrat would have been able to win, either, because the election was a referendum on the incumbent party. And for Biden to even suggest he could have one proves he’s not in touch with reality.
