Biden's legacy is a divided Democratic Party.
It's also the same party that nominated him.
As 2024 draws to a close, so does Biden’s presidency. With Trump’s reelection, Biden leaves office without achieving the central promise of his initial bid for office: to move the nation past Trumpism and the threat it poses to the future of democracy and the rule of law. This was the central conceit of Biden’s campaign announcement in 2019, which came months after the first candidates declare their intent to seek the presidency. Biden referred to the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in his announcement video, casting Trump as fundamentally at odds with the American tradition of rejecting Nazism and related political movements. With a nod to the country’s imperfections, Biden made the case for restoration as the main anti-Trump move.
I’m sure we’ll all spend a lot of time trying to figure out what Biden’s main legacy will be – whether it will reflect what Biden has actually done in office, or simply be consumed by the fact that it was followed by another Trump presidency. We can’t understand the legacy question, though, without thinking seriously about the political dynamics that brought Biden to the White House in the first place, including the fissures in the Democratic Party that lingered from the Obama years.
The 2020 Democratic field was crowded - and with a diverse array of candidates, many highly qualified. Spoken, and sometimes unspoken, by the other candidates, were arguments for a different approach: a woman, a person of color, a gay person, a person under 70, a person further to the left. Each of these perspectives made some sense for the Democratic Party coalition, but in the end, a few things drove the nomination. The backlash nature of the 2016 election left the party nervous about nominating a woman or a person of color. The unadulterated coordination problems associated with a huge field and a long contest gave serious advantages to candidates with high name recognition. And we saw this in the two major contenders: Bernie Sanders, who built a national reputation in the 2016 campaign, and Joe Biden, the former vice president. As in 2016, the Sanders wing of the party showed itself to be formidable and important, but not capable of overtaking the establishment wing. Some people think that’s the result of a rigged process; I think it likely reflects the relative numbers of each faction in the party’s coalition at that moment. Either way, the 2020 contest felt like an unfinished competition between these two perspectives. The pandemic ended the primary with an eerie debate between Biden and Sanders with no audience, but it’s unlikely that the process we have would have brought about a more meaningful ending even in a normal year. Whatever the policy and stylistic differences between the two candidates, the key fault line in the party seems to be one between preserving and restoring the status quo, a faction that prizes institutions and civility and “normal” politics, and one that sees the American system as in need of fundamental, structural change. Contra coalition theories of the presidency, Biden was not the compromise candidate across these factions – crucially, it’s not clear to me that anyone could be. He did make some serious effort to reach out to these factions in the general election campaign. The negotiations over what eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act included talks with progressive leaders as well as Manchin and Sinema.
But while Biden could be pulled to the left on policy, his political project was always one of institutions and restoration. We saw this, as the Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last points out, in the cautious approach to making structural change and “aggressively” pursuing accountability for Trump. These questions largely lurked on the margins of Biden’s presidency as others in the party took up the abortion question after Dobbs, as the party mainstream slowly drifted toward a stronger position on court reform, and as the various Trump cases made their way through the courts.
The obvious place where these two party factions clashed was in the Israel-Gaza war and the administration’s support for Israel. There are a lot of different ways to understand both the conflict and the US domestic politics of it, but one way is to see it in terms of long-standing commitments, policies and rationales, and a growing faction on the left that wants to see US policy take a different direction. We can also debate about the logic behind these positions –changing positions based on new realities, or insufficient understanding of the history of the region. But basic fault line in the Democratic coalition maps onto other issues – economics, culture, and orientation toward norms and institutions.
It's hard to know exactly how much of this drove the 2024 election result, especially as the party showed remarkable willingness to coalesce around Harris. Harris’s description of her role as California Attorney General attempted to repurpose her institutional credentials on behalf of vulnerable people - in service of restoring a just balance of power, rather than simply wielding the power of the state. But whatever it was, it wasn’t enough, and Biden’s legacy will be a party whose divisions along this dimension probably can’t be ignored much longer.
Post-election takes have both suggested that the Democrats moved too far from the American mainstream on cultural issues and that Harris committed a strategic error by campaigning with Republicans like Liz Cheney – with a corollary that running to the center, in general, didn’t work. It’s not clear that any of this really mattered.
But it seems likely that Biden’s presidency will represent a turning point for this conflict within the party. It could go one of three ways: Biden in 2020 could represent just the first of several “electable” nominees, with a sharp turn away from anti-establishment or “identity” politics. Or we could see a turn away from Biden-style politics, seeing the 2024 election as a repudiation of it as an electoral loser – and toward a more populist and anti-institutional approach coming from the left. Finally, it’s possible that this will usher in a long period of intra-party struggle, much like the 1948 election and the Dixiecrat movement marked a period of increasing tension between Democratic factions, ultimately resulting in a re-shuffling of coalitions.
This fissure seems also largely driven by internal factors and dynamics within the Democratic Party. With Trumpism ascendant in a Republican Party that will control the federal government for at least two more years, however, we can expect inter-party competition to shape it as well. The two factions have a somewhat counterintuitive relationship with Trumpism. The preservation types are more apt to compromise with Republicans, but the progressive faction has more in common stylistically with Trumpism. We’ve also seen – both in Trump’s first term and now – some acknowledgement of shared frustration with the status quo, and progressives floating the possibility of cooperating on things like cutting defense spending. It’s unclear that much ever has or ever will materialize as far as policy overlap – but certainly there are some common objections. One possibility is that how much to accommodate or oppose Trumpism will add another dimension to the conflict. A more disturbing prospect is that deciding the other side has a point will become a source of agreement for the two Democrat factions, even if they disagree about exactly what it is.
But turning back to the fights among Democrats, intra-party dynamics still matter. Thus far, the establishment faction has clung to institutional power, as we saw in the struggle over the Oversight Committee. I’ve long assumed that the more change-oriented faction was going to gain in numbers over time, as successive generations of Americans are convinced that nothing works for them and lose faith in institutions. But it’s entirely possible that this assumption was wrong, and Gen Z won’t form a new coalition of left-wing Democrats. And in a political environment where people are both distrustful of the status quo and unsure of replacements for it, things could go a lot of different ways.
In 2021, Biden took office at a time when the public mood was very low, amid promises to restore the nation’s pre-Trump identity. Those moments – the depths of the pandemic and the guiding ideas of the 2020 nomination process – have passed. As president, Biden maneuvered around these challenges, but as a party leader, he never really confronted them. The party, and the country, will spend the next four years – at least – living with the implications.