Former President Joe Biden is not surprised that his former Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t win the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.
On Thursday, during an appearance on “The View” the former president didn’t hold back in expressing his thoughts on why America elected Donald Trump for a second term instead of Harris. He said frankly he wasn’t surprised.
“I wasn’t surprised, not because I didn’t think the Vice President was qualified to be president. She is. She is qualified to be president of the United States of America,” he explained. “I wasn’t surprised because it went the sexist route.”
The 82-year-old former president rattled off examples of how discussions around the 2024 U.S. presidential election between Harris and Trump quickly became about Harris’ gender and racial identity.
“Really, I’ve never seen quite as successful and consistent campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t lead the country and a woman of mixed race,” he said.
He then said, looking at the fact that liberal democracies didn’t just fall in Washington but across the country and around the world, politicians may have underestimated the “negative impact” of the pandemic on current widespread attitudes.
While elaborating further on how the country arrived at the current times, firstly, he noted, “a lot of people didn’t show up” in regards to the 3 million voter decrease from the last election. He then highlighted how he had 7 million more votes than Trump during the 2020 election, implying, in other words, that he could have secured a second term even though there were widespread concerns about his cognitive abilities and health before he stepped down from the democratic ticket.
He also pointed out that when you look at the polling numbers, even within battleground states, “it wasn’t a slam dunk” for Trump as the two political opponents came nearly neck and neck in some regions.
When Biden decided to step down during the 2024 election and Harris took over, just six months were left before election day. Despite reports that he had instructed her not to break from policy, he told the hosts of “The View” that he never said that, but that he wanted Harris to be her own person. However, he was pleasantly surprised by how much she was able to accomplish in that span of time and by the way they left America when they left the White House.
During the first five months of Trump’s presidency, Biden said, “He’s had the worst 100 days of any president ever.”
Whether Harris plans to run again still remains to be seen as more Democratic hopefuls start to rise in the ranks. Biden shared that he and Harris keep in touch regularly and that when they last spoke, she asked him for advice; he teased that he couldn’t go into detail about it.
“All kidding aside, she’s got a difficult decision to make about what she’s going to do. I hope she stays fully engaged. I think she’s first rate,” he said. “But we have a lot of really good candidates as well. So I’m optimistic. I’m not pessimistic about the future.”
