Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.
The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden’s son Hunter.
With just more than three weeks of his single-term presidency remaining, Biden’s reported rueful reflections are revealed in a Washington Post profile that contains the clearest signs yet that he thinks he erred in withdrawing his candidacy in July after a woeful debate performance against his rival for the White House, Trump, the previous month.
It’s very much not a basic tenet of politics, simply the philosophy that centrists continually push because it’s the philosophy that promotes centrists. This election was the perfect test case. Harris couldn’t be more centrist, even putting a lot of effort into courting actual Republican voters, while Trump leaned into the far right. Your naive political philosophy was soundly disproven.
Elections aren’t a static population of voters on a line, they have diverse opinions and different priorities, and elections are often won or loss on turnout from voters in the party base. Trumps turned his out, Harris didn’t. It had nothing to do with who was best able to represent the center.