WASHINGTON. When President Joe Biden gave what appeared to be a farewell speech on Thursday, he promised that the transfer of power to successor Donald Trump would be "peaceful and orderly." He also said that the election's loser Kamala Harris should be proud of a "wholehearted" election campaign.
Joe Biden smiled but it wasn't hard to sense his disappointment. In what was probably his last major speech as US president, he was remarkably ungenerous towards his vice president. Obviously, Biden had not gotten over a double bitterness: First, he was dumped as a presidential candidate by his own party, and then the election became a historic setback for the Democrats.
Biden did say that Kamala Harris "gave everything" in the election campaign, but otherwise he had no warm words for her.
The election result itself is hardly something to be proud of. With all the election numbers coming in soon, the size of the Democrats' defeat is emerging.
Trump defeated Harris in every swing state. The Senate received a Republican majority, which facilitates Trump's appointments of ministers and judges. And perhaps worst of all for the Democrats: Trump won "the popular vote" with nearly 5 million more votes than Harris.
If you compare it to the 2020 election, it looks even worse for the Democrats. Then Biden got 81 million votes, while Harris in 2024 had to make do with 67 million. That's a loss of nearly 14 million votes. The overall voter turnout was lower than four years ago, so Trump also backed off, but only by 2 million votes.
So what really happened to the Democrats? How could an election that looked fairly even for a long time become a walking victory for Trump and the Republicans? Whose fault was it?
Those questions received no answers from Biden, although no one had expected a post-election analysis. It was no easy task for Biden to find the right wording when he had to say something about the electoral disaster for the party's presidential candidate. In all the sorrow, however, Biden tried to strike an optimistic note: "We lost this battle, but we will be okay and the American experiment continues."
Those words could not hide that the defeat must have been exceptionally painful for Biden. Not only in light of the fact that his own party so brutally forced him out of the election campaign this summer. The 82-year-old Biden would like to be remembered for being the one who actually managed to defeat Trump in an election. He never got a second chance to do that.
Remaining in the memory of many will instead be that Biden, through his refusal to step down in good time before the presidential election in favor of a less unpopular and fresher candidate, became the one who paved the way for Trump's comeback.
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