Last week, Matthew Yglesias wrote a Substack post titled “Throw Biden under the Bus.” If you couldn’t tell from its title, the main thrust of the post was that Democrats, in order to reclaim the electoral ground they lost in 2024, shouldn’t be afraid to loudly and cleanly break with former President Joe Biden by criticizing his decision to run for reelection long after it became clear he wasn’t physically up to the challenge and that the public did not want him to run again. Ygelsias suggests that such a break could do for the Democrats what Donald Trump’s criticisms of George W. Bush did for the Republicans – remove the stink of an unpopular president and persuade swing voters that the party has abandoned some of its more unpopular positions. 

It’s certainly hard to argue with the idea that Biden was a drag on the party in 2024. Even as one of his most vocal defenders, it’s clear to me – and I would assume anyone with two eyes and a brain – that in addition to receiving the bulk of the blame for inflation, immigration, and the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the murkiness surrounding Biden’s fitness for office cast a long shadow of scandal over a president who promised to restore a sense of normalcy after the chaos of the first Trump administration. The end result was an election where traditionally Democratic constituencies like young and non-white voters swung right, cracking a coalition that the party hoped would always give them a popular vote advantage over Republicans. And if those electoral consequences weren’t enough, the Trump administration that it helped elect is currently engaged in one of the most aggressive (and questionably illegal) reshapings of the federal government in American history, threatening the well-being of almost anybody who relies on a form of government assistance and any federal employee unwilling to swear ultimate fealty to the president. 

So, yes, Democrats do not have a lot to gain from touting the presidency of Joe Biden, much in the same ways that, as Ygelias points out, Republicans did not have a lot to gain from touting that of George W. Bush. But I do think that Yglesias fails to recognize the key ways in which Biden and Bush’s unpopularity differ from each other. In the view of the American public, Bush’s failings and scandals had little to do with Bush the person. There were no debates about whether he was mentally or physically up to the job. Instead, it was the very discrete policy decision to launch two deadly wars, and the misfortune of presiding over the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, that did him in and sparked the largest Democratic victory of my lifetime. 

When Trump criticized Bush during the 2016 primary, he wasn’t attacking the man so much as what he represented. Rather than referring to a flesh and blood person, “Bush” became a metonym for a failed foreign policy and a wave of unemployment and foreclosures, while “the establishment” came to refer to both the Democrats and Republicans who failed to end these wars and restore confidence in the economy. By promising to break with these policies, Trump effectively neutralized them as campaign issues – whether or not it was actually reflective of his record, it was now possible to vote for Republicans and believe that they would end the war in Afghanistan and protect Social Security (or even protect Planned Parenthood).

Biden’s liabilities, on the other hand, were more personal. Voters were upset about the way he handled inflation and immigration, yes, but the vast majority of the backlash he endured seemed focused on the idea that he hung around too long. Unlike the War on Terror and the recovery from the Recession, this is an issue that seems unlikely to reach debate stages in 2026 and beyond – with Biden now out of the picture, will voters really care about a given candidate’s stance on a very specific and bizarre situation from 2024? And even if they do, is there anything that the Democrats could propose or articulate that would assure them that they, too, do not like the idea that Biden ran for reelection? 

I don’t disagree that Biden can best help the Democratic Party by enjoying a nice, long retirement in Rehoboth Beach. But I don’t think that the Democrats gain much from indulging what I, taking a page out of the right’s playbook, have decided to call Biden Derangement Syndrome – or, the hyperfixation on making a very public, very explicit break from the 46th president. They already did this in 2024 – the list of Democrats who encouraged Biden to drop out after the debate is so long that it has its own Wikipedia page, and once Kamala Harris became the nominee, the party began to take a harder stance on immigration and embrace patriotic imagery that felt like a far cry from the much more progressive rhetoric of Biden’s 2020 campaign. Even though most Democrats did not explicitly state that “Biden was a bad president who made a fatal mistake,” they already threw him as far under the bus as was humanly possible and left themselves without much more room to pivot to the center on one of his biggest liabilities. Any Democrat going into the next four years with “Biden is bad” as their primary message will still have to answer policy questions. It’s unlikely that “I pledge not to run for reelection when I’m 82” will be a solid enough foundation on which to build a platform. 

It’s also unlikely that the pallor of the Biden Administration will overshadow the already ensuing controversies of Trump’s current efforts as president. In fact, Trump stole so much of the spotlight from Biden during the latter’s actual presidency that it may have cost the Republicans a Senate majority and a number of governor’s offices. Trump’s ongoing mission to gut the federal government and unilaterally withhold funding allocated by Congress, combined with an aggressive immigration policy that threatens to sweep up American citizens and the adoption of tariffs that could send markets into a tailspin and grocery prices through the roof, should provide Democrats with an ample amount of material to run against in 2026 and, eventually, 2028. 

It’s worth remembering that, after the American public thoroughly repudiated the Bush Administration in 2008, they made an abrupt about face two years later, swinging 63 House seats in the direction of Republicans in 2010. It’s too early yet to determine whether or not Republicans will even lose control of the House in 2026, but the message is clear: the president that voters care about the most is the one still in office. Any Democrat running for office in the future should think carefully about how to respond to any questions they’re asked about Biden’s time in office. The only way for the party to truly move forward is to respond to the crises of today, not the failures of the past.