There can be no question that President Biden is bitter about the political results of 2024. Not after he told a USA Today reporter that he thinks he could have beaten Donald Trump if he had stayed in the race.
It’s the nature of every politician to believe he can win, and Biden’s response at the end of a long interview (you can read the transcript at usatoday.com) only accounted for a tiny part of the conversation. It was the reporter’s second-to-last question. But the outgoing president simply is fooling himself if he thought he was going to beat Trump.
The 2024 results, in which Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in all seven of the swing states — Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada — most likely would have been no different if Biden had remained the Democratic nominee.
The results and the exit polls say the defeat wasn’t because Biden is 82 years old or because of his poor debate performance against Trump in the summer. Nor was it the fact that Harris was late getting her campaign started and was too liberal for what is generally a slightly right-of-center electorate.
All those elements may have played a part. But Trump won largely because of widespread unhappiness about the economy, specifically rising prices. Voters held the vice president accountable for inflation and they most certainly would have held Biden accountable too if he had ignored Democratic pressure to drop out.
In 2021, Biden’s first year in office, he followed Trump’s lead from 2020 and got Congress to approve government assistance for individuals and businesses to get the country through the covid-19 pandemic. When supply chain problems made goods scarcer with extra trillions of dollars trying to buy them, it was a recipe for higher prices, and for more than a year the country dealt with inflation rates that had not been seen since the 1970s.
Now, there is an argument to be made that in a time of crisis, which 2020 and 2021 were, the risk of high inflation is worth taking when millions of people had been laid off and many businesses were shut down. The idea of refusing to help people get through a pandemic isn’t very appealing, either.
But from a political standpoint, the next time there’s a pandemic, or a Great Recession, or whatever emergency afflicts the American economy, you can bet the people in Washington will look at what happened in the 2020s — and tread very carefully.
James Carville’s famous sign, “It’s the economy, stupid,” in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign headquarters really did speak the truth.
A candidate can win an election for any number of reasons. But an incumbent president can be beaten by a bad economy. Biden and Harris were not the first to endure this indignity; Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Herbert Hoover in 1932 are two prominent examples of what voters do when they’re unhappy.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
