The friends Biden lost this year

The year started on a good note for the president, with what many Democrats viewed as a strong State of the Union performance. Over the year, however, many observers began to question his mental acuity for another four years on the job.

Biden’s political future nosedived in the summer after the June presidential debate, in which his often rambling answers and confused looks gave Democrats grave cause for concern about the future of his candidacy. The first Democratic lawmaker to call for him to drop out was Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), and the first senator was Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT).

“There is a marked difference in the president from the spring to the summer,” one senior Democrat told CNN in July. “He’s just not the same.”

After calls to exit the race began piling on from Democrats and a few weeks of defiance, Biden dropped out in July and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic nominee. She lost the race to President-elect Donald Trump by a little over 2 million votes nationally.

Following the election, some Democrats are still blaming Biden for the Democrats’ loss this year. The president’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, has also sparked backlash from a large number of Democrats.

Here are the friends the president lost along the way:

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Earlier this year, Biden honored Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) by awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying she would be remembered as the “greatest speaker of the House of Representatives in history.”

“She used her superpower to pass some of the most significant laws in our nation’s history,” Biden said in May. “On Jan. 6, Nancy stood in the breach defending democracy. … Nancy is a brilliant, practical, principled, and determined leader.”

But at the end of the year, Pelosi is perhaps the most significant friend Biden has lost this year. After Biden exited the race in July, Pelosi confirmed in August she had not spoken with the president since his exit.

Some speculated that Pelosi, oftentimes seen as “the Godmother” of the Democratic Party, was pulling the strings to get lower-ranked members of the party and her close allies, including then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), to call upon Biden to drop out. She rejected these claims.

Before the election and shortly after Biden dropped out, Pelosi told the New Yorker that she had concerns about the election and Biden’s chance of winning. She emphasized that she remained focused on keeping Trump out of office, noting any actions she took were to make sure “that Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”

“But my concern was: This ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen,” she said. “The president has to make the decision for that to happen. People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines, I was talking to [Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all.”

After the election, Pelosi blamed Biden for the Democrats’ loss, telling the New York Times, “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.”

She also said she anticipated an open primary process to choose the next candidate but that Biden’s near-immediate endorsement of Harris made those plans difficult.

“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said, adding that Harris would have done well in such a primary process, which would have made her “stronger going forward.”

“But we don’t know that,” she said. “That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

Rank-and-file and high-ranking Democrats

Other Democratic incumbents running for reelection, including Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), started not to campaign with Biden between the debate and his exit from the race.

By the time of Biden’s exit from the race, 40 House Democrats and five Senate Democrats, as well as outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), had called for him to drop out.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), a Pelosi ally, told the president she presented him with data “indicating that you in all likelihood will lose the race for President.”

“Simply put, your candidacy is on a trajectory to lose the White House and potentially impact crucial House and Senate races downballot,” she said.

When he left the race, Democrats, by and large, applauded his decision, but after Harris lost, some began blaming Biden for the loss. Besides Pelosi’s comments, other Democrats sourced Biden as part of the party’s problem.

“He shouldn’t have run,” Jim Manley, a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told Politico. “This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings. He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”

“She ran an extraordinary campaign with a very tough hand that was handed to her,” said Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). “The truth of the matter is Biden should have stepped aside earlier and let the party put together a longer game plan.”

One Democratic donor told Reuters, “Why did Joe Biden hold on for as long as he did? He should have not concealed his [health] and dropped out a lot sooner.”

Harris staffers

Some staffers who worked on the vice president’s presidential campaign also dissed Biden after she lost the race.

“We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president,” one anonymous aide told Politico. “Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”

One Democrat familiar with the White House’s dynamics blamed Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, Biden’s top political aides, for the loss, telling Axios, “Mike and Steve will have a lot to answer for — having him run” for reelection after turning 80.

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Another person involved with Harris’s team said, “The 107-day Harris campaign was nearly flawless. The Biden campaign that preceded it was the opposite.”

On the matter, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said, “Anyone criticizing the vice president’s campaign is at odds with President Biden.”