Former First Lady Jill Biden recently said that she thought that her husband, former President Joe Biden, was having a stroke on stage during his disastrous debate debacle in the summer of 2024. She followed that comment up by saying that she had never seen him like that, before the debate or since. The problem for former President Biden wasn’t the debate performance itself. Plenty of would-be elected officials have turned in poor performances in a debate and lived to fight another day. It’s that in the months leading up to the debate, people had serious questions about the president’s health and the Democratic Party told us not to believe our own eyes and ears. Without that context, the debate performance doesn’t disqualify Biden from the race, but within that context, the performance became career-ending.
The Democratic Party has a choice here. They can be honest about the reasons that President Trump won in 2024, confront those issues and improve, or they can avoid responsibility and accountability without learning any lessons. DNC Chairman Ken Martin just recently released the party’s postmortem report, created after the 2024 loss, but he did so after delaying its release for a long time. That delay speaks to a reluctance within party leadership to actually confront the reasons and realities surrounding Trump’s 2024 victory. As the message from the Democratic Party about President Biden’s health continued to conflict with what voters were seeing, faith and trust continued to erode in the both the party and the president. Long before the disastrous performance at the debate, there were videos of Biden freezing, wandering aimlessly as if he were lost, slurring his speech, speaking unintelligibly, all of which seemed to confirm fears about his abilities and his age. But the Democratic Party kept brushing off questions about the president’s age and his acuity. The party clearly suffered from tunnel vision in their attempt to defeat Trump. As a part of that tunnel vision, they brushed off serious concerns that voters had about Biden. It is not good politics for the party to tell the voters that their concerns aren’t real. Successful parties address the concerns of their constituents. Their unwillingness to address legitimate concerns about Biden’s age and their dismissive attitude towards voters created the conditions that allowed Trump to return to the White House.
Much of our media was also complicit in the cover up for Biden. The New York Times ran an article with the headline “How Much Do Voters Really Care About Biden’s Age?” That framing makes it seem like not many voters had concerns and that those who did were unfounded. A headline on CNBC’s website was titled, “Biden is a ‘healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male,’ his doctor says after physical.” Clearly these articles were meant to reinforce Democratic talking points about Biden despite the fact that we all saw moments where Biden looked anything but healthy or robust. Both within the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, concerns about Biden’s age were treated as unfounded or partisan.
Then the debate happened. Biden had framed his administration as a return to honesty after the first Trump term. The debate laid bare that we were not being told the truth about Biden’s health, undermining the administration’s messaging about values, honesty, and character.
The postmortem report, which should be focused on learning from the mistakes of 2024 and rectifying them for the future, is woefully short on accountability and demonstrates that Democrats have seemingly learned very little. Even the debate on whether to make the report public demonstrates that the party is not yet ready to face the realities of their loss, much less learn from it. The lack of transparency makes it seem to the average voter that the party has something to hide. The Democratic Party has an opportunity to acknowledge that they violated the trust of the voters in 2024, own their mistakes, learn their lesson, and move forward. Unfortunately, it currently appears as if they’re content to point fingers, avoid accountability, and repeat the mistakes of the past. If that’s the case, they should expect to continue to lose elections.