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Though Democrats officially lost the 2024 election last month, Astead Herndon<\/strong> suggests they effectively lost it early last year, \u201cwhen they rallied around the reelection of Joe Biden,<\/strong> back when there was a lot of evidence the country didn\u2019t want that.\u201d<\/p>\n Herndon, a New York Times<\/em> national politics reporter and host<\/a> of The Run-Up<\/em> podcast, recalls on the latest episode of Inside the Hive<\/em> how Biden\u2019s unpopularity had been apparent for years if you looked outside the DC bubble, and how the 2020 coalition that brought him to power was \u201calways fairly tenuous.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that I think blew my mind was I remembered the discussion of Biden\u2019s age, even back at the time,\u201d Herndon says. \u201cI remember talking to voters who were concerned he was too old to serve for second terms, and I remember the efforts that the Biden campaign did to kind of imply that maybe that\u2019s something that they could deal with down the road. And that, for a lot of people, was a message that worked. They simply said, \u2018Hey, we\u2019ll deal with that come four years from now, but right now it\u2019s about stopping Donald Trump.<\/strong>\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Although Biden could count major legislative accomplishments in his first two years in office, events perceived as \u201cwins\u201d among Democrats and framed as such in the political media, many Americans weren\u2019t feeling the effects. And yet Biden, now in his 80s, was running for reelection<\/a> with the party behind him. \u201cDemocrats, I think, got trapped in kind of believing their own hype more so than I think working from the premise where a lot of Americans started from, which is that Joe Biden was there to get rid of Donald Trump. And so what came next?\u201d<\/p>\n While Biden never explicitly ruled out running for a second term, his 2020 vow<\/a> to be a \u201cbridge\u201d to \u201can entire generation\u201d of Democratic leaders was perceived by many that way. \u201cIn some ways, Kamala Harris<\/strong> running in 2024 was exactly what a lot of people expected to happen in 2020,\u201d Herndon notes. \u201cWhat changed was that Joe Biden and Democrats retrenched on that implication and robbed themselves of a primary.\u201d Herndon says that if Biden had considered Harris his successor early on for the 2024 race, he \u201ccould have acknowledged that from the start and set her up for success\u201d or\u00a0\u201cif that wasn\u2019t the person he wanted, he could have chosen a different person who he did want to set up for success.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot of other different options that could have taken place,\u201d he adds. \u201cI just think that they kind of chose the worst one. They sidelined the person then, and kind of argued it could only be him, then had to shift to the person in a crisis with three months left.\u201d<\/p>\n Herndon, a National Magazine Awards finalist for his 2023 profile<\/a> of Harris, says he \u201cthought Joe Biden\u2019s age was an undeniable ticking political crisis. No matter what.\u201d To Herndon \u201cit was just a matter of when and how they would deal with Kamala Harris because she was going to be the obvious person.\u201d So \u201ceven if he won,\u201d he adds, \u201cthere would have been a democratic crisis in 2025.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n