Biden’s legacy bookended by two Trump victories

Lloyd Doggett wishes he had called on President Biden to step aside far earlier. 

The Texan was at the forefront of what helped lead to a dramatic change in this year’s presidential election when he urged Mr. Biden to end his reelection bid in July, becoming the first Democrat in Congress to publicly break with the commander-in-chief after a disastrous summer debate performance against Donald Trump. 

In the weeks that followed more than 30 Democrats called on the president to exit the contest, but Mr. Biden’s eventual decision to leave the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris failed to stop Trump from winning back the White House, the outcome many in the party feared would come to pass if Mr. Biden had remained at the top of the ticket. 

This is the season of second guessing on the left, a time of what-ifs and maybes. Doggett, 78, believes almost everyone holding elected office in his party bears “some responsibility for the catastrophic defeat” he says they were handed. In addition to losing the presidency and the Senate, Democrats also failed to take back control of the House from Republicans. 

“President Biden, as far as legacy, has many successes to point to,” Doggett said. “But the most important success would have been had he stepped aside a year ago and given us a better chance of preventing Trump from coming back and doing all the damage that he will do to our country.” 

Mr. Biden ran for the White House four years ago in an attempt to end Trumpism, touting his wisdom as an experienced political hand who had spent decades in the U.S. Senate and service for eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president. He’ll soon leave office at the age of 82, with his White House tenure wedged between Trump’s first and second terms as president and a Republican-led Congress riled by Mr. Biden’s tenure leading the nation. 

“Jimmy Carter is going to be very happy now that he wasn’t the worst president of my lifetime,” Florida GOP Rep. Carlos Gimenez gloated. “….[Biden’s] policies got pretty soundly defeated in this last election.”

As Democrats sort through the aftermath of what went wrong, among those in Congress who helped push him out of the 2024 race, there remains respect for what Biden accomplished. 

“For where America was going at the time, he saved our democracy, at least for four years,” Illinois Rep. Mike Quigley said. 

But hindsight has also brought about the belief that acting sooner might have made a difference. 

“[Harris] ran a pretty good campaign, actually a really good campaign, and she had the disadvantages of not having the time to distance herself from Biden,” California Rep. Scott Peters said. “Every campaign you make mistakes. And because she had such a compressed time frame, she didn’t really have time to recover from the mistakes. But I thought it was certainly better than the alternative. I think if the president had been on the ticket, it would’ve just been a slaughter.” 

Back in 2019, Biden said he believed history would look back on four years of President Trump “and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time.” His campaign carried the implicit hope for Democrats that while Trump may have changed politics for the time being, defeating him would bring back a measure of civility in a nation that increasingly appeared to have long moved past wanting such courtesy. 

Now, Trump has found his way back to the White House after trying to overturn his loss in 2020 and spreading falsehoods that the election was stolen, claims that stirred the mob of his supporters who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. 2021 and scarred the normally peaceful transfer of power. He overcame indictments and a group of younger Republican primary challengers. He survived two assassination attempts and won a clear victory this fall, becoming the first man in over a century to be elected to non-consecutive terms as president. 

In this last election, many voters sided with a far different vision for America than the one espoused by Mr. Biden. Trump’s approach is far more combative, his agenda centered around undocumented immigration and a vow to conduct mass deportations along with moves enticing the far right, like potential pardons for Jan. 6 rioters. He’s also promised tariffs and tax changes targeted at Americans’ economic concerns. 

Before July, Democratic leaders publicly shook off concerns about Mr. Biden’s age and ability to win again, choosing instead to overhaul the party’s primary process at his own urging, paving the way for him to face little resistance about his decision to run for reelection until after his fateful debate performance. 

In his lone White House term, Biden led the nation out of the coronavirus pandemic and worked with Democrats’ narrow congressional majorities at the time to pass a $1.9 trillion relief proposal during his first 100 days in office, relying on that same power more than a year later to put in place a landmark plan to fight climate change, both being party-line initiatives praised by Democrats and fiercely opposed by Republicans. 

He signed into law major bipartisan bills on infrastructure, gun safety and domestic production of semiconductor computer chips. He helped bolster support for Ukraine as it faces Russia’s brutal invasion, work that may soon be undercut given that notable Trump administration picks either haven’t been supportive of providing continued assistance to Ukraine or have advocated for a negotiated end to the war. 

But inflation troubles drowned out other aspects of Mr. Biden’s economic record while the border, immigration, and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan were key issues that Biden’s presidency struggled with as he asked Democrats to get behind him for another term. 

“Look, there’s going to be a lot of punditry, a lot of election experts who are going to have their opinions, who are going to have their thoughts, but the president is very, very proud,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters after the election. “Very proud of what he’s been able to accomplish and incredibly impressed for what the vice president was able to do.” 

A source familiar with the president’s standing at the time said internal campaign polling “showed a slight hit” from the June 27 debate and contended that “it wasn’t until the circular firing squad picked up and there was regular coverage of Democrats calling for an exit that we really took more damage.” 

Yet among the Democrats who called on him to leave the race before Mr. Biden dropped out on July 21, there is a sense that they were right, that they did what needed to be done even if it didn’t get them where they wanted to be. 

“In retrospect, I feel certain that Biden was facing certain defeat and that we were certainly going to see the loss of the House and the Senate, and I felt the House would be much worse than it is now,” said California Democratic Rep. Mark Takano, who still regards Biden as having had an “amazing run as the president.” 

Others didn’t share the same introspection. 

Even after going public with his call for Biden to end his campaign, Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown lost his own contest, a defeat which helped give Republicans the Senate and unified control of Washington. Reeling from his loss and facing reporters as he hurried through the Capitol a few days after the election, Brown said “I don’t have any thoughts on Biden’s legacy.” 

“I’m just focused on what we need to do here these last few weeks,” Brown said. “I’m not a pundit.”

And the man who defeated Brown didn’t hesitate to credit Mr. Biden for helping bring Trump back to power.  

“Biden was the greatest thing to ever happen to President Trump because he showed the country how insane the left has gotten,” said Bernie Moreno, the Republican who ousted Brown from his Senate seat. 

Mr. Biden isn’t quite an afterthought in Washington — however, the spotlight that was so squarely trained on him for most of the last four years has drifted to Trump and the vision his allies on the right have for the president-elect’s return to power. 

In these waning days of his presidency, Mr. Biden isn’t the only one quietly finishing his tenure. Political life in the nation’s Capitol rarely ends in climactic fashion, with most leaving the halls of power because of retirement or defeat rather than one final victory before calling it a career. 

Like Mr. Biden, Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney is a former party standard bearer. And like the president, his political career is coming to an end as a man they both opposed prepares to retake the White House, that “aberrant moment” Mr. Biden once described returning for an encore. 

“President Biden is a good and fine man,” Romney said. “But I think he badly misread the American public.” 

contributed to this report.