I maintain that the Democrats would have been in a better position going into 2024 had Joe Biden not foolishly run for reelection in 2024. He was not in a position where it was within possibility, at any point, to win. He repeatedly said in 2020 that he would be a one term president, only to (attempt to) break that promise by running. By the time Biden announced his run for reelection, his approval ratings had already dropped to some of the lowest out of any President in living memory. The party had up until that point assumed that they were going to run a younger, better, more electable candidate.
In July of 2024, Biden agreed to a debate with Trump, which he absolutely bombed. He could not demonstrate coherent thought, took every piece of bait offered by Trump, and in one incident embarrassingly asserted that “we finally beat Medicare”.
In mid 2024, after his disastrous debate but before he dropped out, Biden’s internal polling showed him losing by 400+ electoral votes. Biden stubbornly going on with his doomed campaign until the mid summer forced the Democrats to run Kamala Harris instead of having a primary and being able to test her viability as a candidate.
Biden’s biggest challenge in 2020 was his age, and he barely won that election. Four years later, not only was he four years older, but his public speaking skills had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer reliably form coherent sentences. Biden, a very successful legislator and good president, is an incredibly poor communicator, and having him steer the ship for the first half of the campaign gave the public a deeply false impression of the Democratic platform, if they even got the impression that they had one. The impressive accomplishments of the Biden administration could not be stated clearly by Biden himself. The American public ended up with ideas of the Democratic platform that were wrong in fundamental ways. The median voter believed that Democrats were weak on border security, obsessed with transgender rights, directly funneling money to Ukraine, and increasing the crime rate. A better communicator would’ve been able to dispel these myths. The best Biden could do was stutter and stumble his way through empty platitudes about “moving past Trump” and “restoring the soul of America”.
Biden created more jobs than any other President in history, and he did it in one term. Did he advertise that fact at all? No, instead he brought up over and over and over that we had strengthened our ties to AUKUS, as if even a single swing voter cares about AUKUS or even really knows what it is. Biden did not clarify even once that we were sending weapons to Ukraine, not money. Biden did not clarify even once that we were sending aid to Gaza, or that he as the president was constitutionally obliged to send weapons to Israel that congress approved. Had Biden not run for reelection, another candidate could’ve actually advertised these goals and accomplishments.