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Earlier this month on State of the Union, Jake Tapper challenged Democrats to get their house in order. “The stunning election result traced back to the original sin of the 2024 election, President Biden’s decision to run for re-election,” despite years of serious decline of his mental abilities, Tapper said. With his co-author Alex Thompson, Tapper conducted 300 interviews for the book Original Sin that surely proved that.
As a result, they said, “Democrats are now in the wilderness, and they are trying to figure out how to regain the trust of the American people.”
Many news shows and stories used the book’s launch to explore why the Democratic Party has such low approval now and what they must do to navigate a path back.
But you must be living in a bubble if you believe this “cover-up” is the main reason for the disastrous election last November.
More from Stanley B. Greenberg
At least two-thirds of voters were desperate for change in the election, and nothing was more important than their desperation about the sustained high prices for everything important to their family. In Democracy Corps’s survey right after the election, fully two-thirds choose “inflation and the cost of living” as their top worry. That number stood out almost 20 points above the next problem, “immigration and the border.” And those are the actual “original sins” that drive the distrust of Democrats.
Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain understood that the president had to address the cost of living as prices spiked after the pandemic. To achieve that, he allowed me to edit the “Prep Version” of President Biden’s remarks to the AFL-CIO Constitutional Convention on June 14, 2022. I made a few edits in track changes to the president’s version to show his new priorities.
I deleted “The fact is my plan is working for working Americans.” I replaced it with “The fact is my plan has made working families more resilient in the face of spiking inflation and gas prices hitting them now.”
I cut “we are now living through the strongest—fastest—most widespread and equitable recovery in American history” and substituted new text about helping working families “faced with post-pandemic global inflation.”
But the president rejected those edits to this critical speech to the AFL-CIO.
The president went on to conduct many events on “Bidenomics.” In January 2024, I wrote to his campaign team, “You have conducted an experiment—speaking positively about the economy for two years. Your approval rating has only declined every month.” The perception that we have a “poor economy” only grows.
The president’s insistence on lauding the economy over a two-year period even as people faced continued unaffordable prices led to growing anger with him. Biden was seen increasingly as uncaring, out of touch, and not on your side.
In fact, Biden is not vastly different from earlier Democratic nominees and presidents in talking up the American economy. President Barack Obama cheered the millions of new jobs created on his watch and in 2016 said, “We created 15 million new jobs, incomes are rising, poverty is falling.” Hillary Clinton committed to “build on the progress.” Candidate Kamala Harris said, “It will be my intention to build on the foundation of this progress.”
Some have suggested Democrats apologize for Biden getting the economy wrong. But you first must answer this: Why aren’t Democrats more critical of an economy that has failed so many people? Why do so many economists and commentators describe the economy as “the envy of the world”?
But as daunting as the problems with the economy are, so is the other original sin of President Biden: failing in his responsibility to manage the country’s border and stem the flow of refugees into the country. In my poll, Trump securing “the border” and deporting “illegal immigrants” was by far the top reason to vote for him. And the top reason to vote against Harris was Biden’s “open borders and illegal immigrants in all our cities.”
The consuming worry in my survey if you imagined Harris winning was “The border being wide open to millions of impoverished immigrants, many are criminals and drug dealers who are overwhelming American cities.”
How do you begin to be trusted after such a worry? Democrats might have taken a step if Harris had said, “This is an issue where I differ with the president.” Imagine if she had acknowledged that we’d lost control and should have changed course two years earlier.
That would have been a start, but today Democrats remain deep in the wilderness and continue to lose ground to Republicans on which party people register in and identify with.
I worked to elect President Bill Clinton. So do not underestimate the ability of Democrats to renew their party.
