How will history remember Biden's presidency?
Welcome to 538's politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior editor and elections analyst): 'Tis the season for your favorite media outlets to publish "year in review" articles — the year's best movies, recipes, reality TV moments, etc. But we at 538 are thinking bigger. Instead of "year in review," how about "presidency in review"?
On Jan. 20, 2025 — 28 days from today — President Joe Biden will leave office after just one term. That got us thinking ... What have been the biggest news stories of the last four years? What will Biden's presidency be remembered for, and will those memories be good or bad ones? So for the final 538 Slack chat of 2024, I've assembled an all-star panel of reporters and political scientists to discuss what Biden's legacy will be.
Now, I want to acknowledge up front that this is a premature exercise: Ideally, you need distance — and a knowledge of how things played out after they left office — to properly assess a presidency, and historians are constantly reevaluating their perceptions of even long-dead presidents based on evolving sensibilities.
But it's often said that journalism is the first draft of history, and someone needs to write that first draft! So, based on what we know today, if you guys had to pick one moment/episode/trend/accomplishment/failure from Biden's presidency that will go down in history, what would it be? Let's start with you, Geoffrey.
geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst): "We finally beat Medicare." Thus began the end of Biden's reelection campaign in his infamously bad debate against President-elect Donald Trump on June 27, 2024. And because Trump went on to win this election, Biden's choice to seek reelection will undoubtedly be a chief focus of his presidency, even though we'll have to wait to see how other aspects of his presidency will be remembered.
Biden decided to run again despite concerns about his age, and then his debate showing substantially reinforced the doubts many voters already had. Biden stepped aside for Vice President Kamala Harris in late July, becoming the first presumptive presidential nominee in the modern primary era to drop a reelection bid. This left his vice president about three months to campaign for the office, a race she narrowly lost.
We don't know how Trump's second term will go, but considering how impactful it could be, it's hard not to focus on how Biden's choice to run again may have played into Trump's victory. It's difficult to say how things might've played out differently, of course — counterfactuals always are. But had Biden decided to bow out way back in late 2022, perhaps a different candidate who won a contested Democratic presidential primary would have defeated Trump.
Monica Potts (Monica Potts, senior politics reporter): I agree, Geoffrey, and I thought you'd choose the debate. I do think it will be remembered as a turning point, and for causing an extremely rare event in the modern era: a nominee leaving the presidential race so late in the cycle and essentially anointing his vice president without a primary.
nrakich: Yeah, we're elections people, so we might be biased. But I think the unprecedented and dramatic nature of Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 election pretty much guarantees it will at least be mentioned in the history books.
julia_azari (Julia Azari, professor of political science at Marquette University and 538 contributor): Sorry, got distracted by the end-of-year recipes.
This definitely makes sense to me, but I also think that as we get further from the 2024 election, this may fade from memory. People don't exactly remember former President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to drop out of the 1968 election as his main legacy, for example, but they do remember the broader circumstances: domestic unrest and the Vietnam War. It's hard to think of an example of an election that became a president's main legacy.
nrakich: That's an interesting point, Julia. I feel like Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 campaign is something that history will never forget ... but, to your point, I'm not sure it's really legacy-defining.
What would be the equivalent of those broader circumstances for Biden? His age? I could see a big part of his legacy being a cautionary tale for Americans to elect anyone older than, say, 75.
geoffrey.skelley: Unless he's running against someone about the same age, of course.
julia_azari: Right — Trump is only a few years younger than Biden.
nrakich: Well, but it could give primary voters pause about supporting someone that old in the future.
Monica Potts: I do think it really solidified for voters and people active in the parties to shift to younger politicians.
In addition to the debate, I was also going to choose Biden's decision to run again. I don't know if there was an exact moment when that happened. He'd been hinting at a reelection campaign for months before officially announcing his bid in April 2023. At the time, he pitched his candidacy as an attempt to hold democracy together and argued that Trump was an existential threat to the country. But many voters had buried the chaos of Trump's first term, the COVID-19 pandemic and the events of Jan. 6 deep in their memory vaults. They were much more concerned with what had happened during Biden's term: record-breaking inflation and the fact that he was rapidly aging in front of them.
It really makes one wonder about all of the Democratic leaders who had epiphanies about Biden's age after the debate and put pressure on him to leave the race. Why didn't they have those earlier in the cycle? He'd been running for reelection for more than a year at that point. There had been plenty of grumbling about his aging, although in fairness much of it came from anonymous sources griping to the press, and some complaints had an ableist ring to them. But as you've written, Nathaniel, some Democrats reportedly had doubts about whether he should run again at an earlier stage, and those people could have intervened in time for a primary. Almost everything else Biden accomplished will be overshadowed by that, because of course his executive and legislative legacies can be undone by Trump.
geoffrey.skelley: To me, the question is, how much was Biden's legacy tied up in defeating Trump in 2020, and how much of that is undone by what happened in 2024 to bring Trump back to power?
Monica has nicely linked how the campaign situation could help erode any chance for Biden to have a positive legacy. His opponent is reentering office and will attempt to undo many of Biden's accomplishments, potentially reducing the chances that anyone says in a few years, "Wow, that thing Biden did had a long-lasting impact."
julia_azari: I definitely think that Biden's inability to hold off Trumpism in the long term will be a big part of his legacy, but I wonder how much the particulars of the 2024 election will become a lasting part of that story.
geoffrey.skelley: I guess, to me, the debate and its aftermath are a microcosm of that, Julia. An easy thing to point to.
nrakich: Yeah, but also, this is something we'll be able to assess a lot better in 2029, when we know how Trump's second term went. Will he do lasting damage to our democracy, as Biden and other Democrats believe he will? Or will he actually make America great again?
geoffrey.skelley: Or which of those two extremes do we end up closer to …
nrakich: I guess neither outcome would reflect super well on Biden.
Monica Potts: Right. I think the events of the 2024 campaign will be an easy thing to point to, but I also think that Julia's correct in that, down the road, there might be a broader view of what was going on this year, and it might be wrapped into a larger story about "The COVID-19 Era," or something we haven't quite named yet.
nrakich: Speaking of which ...
Monica, I was going to go to you next, but you already said that you agree that Biden's decision to drop out was the headline of his presidency. But do you have a runner-up?
Monica Potts: I think that some of Biden's accomplishments, like the Inflation Reduction Act or his efforts to forgive a record number of student loans, may very well leave a lasting impact. It's hard to tell exactly: Trump has already promised to reverse some of the components of the Inflation Reduction Act and pull back unspent money, and we may see that first with some of the tax credits that would have gone out to homeowners and car buyers for making environmentally conscious choices.
But the Inflation Reduction Act also made efforts to boost manufacturing and infrastructure in the U.S., and some things, like lithium mining in Arkansas, can probably be traced to that policy. Likewise, individuals who had their loans forgiven will have a different memory of Biden's presidency, surely, and it may impact how they're able to retire or invest as they age. So we will see.
julia_azari: I think this is a good point. Something I've thought about a lot since Biden's popularity dipped in 2021 is that, with the benefit of hindsight, he might start to look like Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower — presidents who weren't considered terribly flashy in their own time (Eisenhower was popular but considered a lightweight by Serious Government Types) but came to be regarded as much stronger on policy and decision-making decades after they left office.
(Presidential legacy-making is fascinating and someone should write a book about it.)
nrakich: I agree that the Inflation Reduction Act — a truly robust anti-climate-change bill — was probably Biden's biggest legislative achievement. But without tipping my hand too much, I'm skeptical that specific legislation, rather than general vibes/conditions, will be what Biden is most remembered for.
I take your point about past presidents, Julia, and I think it's possible that, like Truman, people will be more impressed by Biden's policy achievements (which he accomplished with very narrow majorities in both the Senate and House) once they forget that he spent most of his presidency with pretty low approval ratings.
And call me pessimistic, but I also am not sure that the Inflation Reduction Act will do enough to counter climate change to be remembered as truly transformative. We're already seeing the effects of a warming planet, and without decisive action from countries outside the U.S., the planet seems likely to get more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial baseline — a red line set by many scientists.
Monica Potts: Something that keeps me up at night, Nathaniel.
nrakich: What about you, Julia? What do you think has been the defining event of the Biden presidency?
julia_azari: I am still trying to think of the event that really illustrates this, but in addition to what everyone has already said, I think Biden's presidency will be seen as a turning point in the Democratic Party (though in what direction I'm not exactly sure).
Something we don't talk about a lot is that Biden's 2020 nomination was unusual in a way: If you buy coalition theories of nominations, Biden wasn't so much the "acceptable to all factions" nominee as the one considered most "electable," and then, once he clinched the nomination, he had to spend time and effort reaching out to the progressive wing of the party.
I see this fault line less as one on policy and more as a split between a faction that wanted to go back to "normal" after Trump, that favors institutions and the status quo, and one that wants to see serious change in the structure of American government and politics. Biden did try, I think, as a party man through and through, to bring these two factions together. But the 2024 election loss puts a lot of strain on that alliance. What's the Democrats' path forward? Will the status quo people win? The progressives? Or will this be a long period of push and pull, with visible intraparty strife? I don't know at this point.
I can think of two events that illustrate this: (1) Biden saying "fund the police" in his 2022 State of the Union address and (2) — this is going to sound weird — the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Not because it was clearly an action associated with either faction, but because it showed how much Biden's presidency was defined by contending with the decisions of his predecessors and how difficult it is to change directions, even as the American public soured on the Afghanistan war in particular and interventions like it in general.
geoffrey.skelley: At a time when there's a major lack of faith in institutions, the perceived failures of an institutionalist like Biden could substantially influence Democrats moving forward. It connects to what I think is one of their larger challenges, which is being perceived as the party of government and status quo while the GOP is viewed as the anti-establishment force.
Granted, let's be careful not to vastly overstate the meaning of a close election.
nrakich: Interesting! Yeah, the future direction of the Democratic Party is definitely a big question going forward, but I think because of that, we won't know if this was a big part of Biden's legacy for a few more years.
julia_azari: The corollary is that I wonder what Biden's legacy and Harris's loss (combined with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016) means for former President Barack Obama's legacy.
nrakich: Now we're getting meta!
I think the difference there is that Clinton's loss can't really be pinned on Obama. He was popular at the time; she wasn't. This year, Harris was more popular than Biden, so I think he is more responsible for Trump's win.
julia_azari: You knew I would be annoying when you invited me. (I should get a T-shirt that says that.)
Monica Potts: I think that's true, Julia, and something I hadn't thought of. What's interesting to me is that some of what Biden did as president was more progressive than the progressive wing of the party was expecting. Like Biden's National Labor Relations Board appointments, and appointing Lina Khan, a big opponent of tech monopolies, as chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
nrakich: Yeah, I would actually argue that Biden was probably the most progressive president in U.S. history? But I'm not sure if he will be seen that way, and thus I'm not sure how that will affect the establishment vs. insurgent fight that's going to play out in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.
Monica Potts: Yes, agreed.
julia_azari: Yes, I see that too.
And Biden's reputation with the left flank of the party might be different without the Gaza issue, which we haven't talked about. But it is part of the fault line I mentioned.
geoffrey.skelley: Internationally, the situation in Gaza will probably be a major part of Biden's legacy. I'm not sure it'll have as much traction in domestic remembrances, but it's worth noting.
Of course, that gets at another aspect of Biden's legacy: the U.S.'s place in the world and its involvement in events elsewhere. Besides Gaza, Biden's defeat might have serious consequences for Ukraine, NATO and America's alliances generally.
Monica Potts: Agreed, Geoffrey, I was thinking of that too. It's hard to know how history will assess it because Trump may change or shift U.S. policy toward Israel in ways that overshadow what Biden did or didn't do, and other countries around the world have played a role as well.
And yes, Trump's win will likely have consequences for how the U.S. interacts with the rest of the world going forward too.
geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, will we be making Smoot-Hawley comparisons here in a few years regarding protective trade measures?
(OK, I might be the only one doing that.)
Monica Potts: You might not be the only one: an entire generation learned about it from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."
nrakich: Yeah, foreign policy was on my short list as well — namely, Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But I think the most remembered aspect of Biden's presidency will be something that I'm surprised hasn't come up yet: the rampant inflation of 2021 and 2022.
After inflation basically went decades as a non-issue, it shot up to historic levels as the economy overheated post-pandemic and crested at 9.1 percent in June 2022. It became Republicans' go-to cudgel against Biden in the 2022 and 2024 campaigns, and the cost of living consistently ranked as Americans' number-one issue in polls. The first burst of inflation was probably at least partially responsible for Biden's approval rating going from net positive to net negative in September 2021, and of course it stayed net negative for the rest of his presidency. And according to most post-election analysis, the economy was probably the biggest factor behind Trump's victory in this year's election, keeping with the theme of that being a big part of Biden's legacy.
geoffrey.skelley: I was sort of rolling inflation into the larger defeat story. But yes, undoubtedly Biden's presidency will be remembered for economic dissatisfaction. That might group him with other one-term presidents like Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush: Carter's tenure saw clear economic turmoil — "stagflation" and a significant shrinking of the economy — while Bush's also featured a recession. However, no one really thinks back positively about Carter's presidency, whereas the elder Bush arguably has fared better in hindsight.
julia_azari: As someone who sort of remembers the H.W. Bush years, it's almost amusing how much his legacy has changed over time.
Monica Potts: I guess part of me wonders whether, in hindsight, inflation will be wrapped up in the pandemic story (since it was partly caused by supply-chain issues related to the pandemic) and not thought of as part of Biden's legacy. I guess I don't know whether history will lay that at Biden's feet, and it's a pet peeve of mine that voters tend to blame presidents for every single thing that happens in this free market economy of ours.
nrakich: Sure, presidents actually have little control over the economy. But I think history has shown that presidents do get assigned a lot of the credit or blame for how the economy fares under their watch. Plus, many economists believe that the American Rescue Plan — Biden's first major piece of legislation — actually did contribute somewhat to inflation.
julia_azari: The economic story seems complicated to me. While inflation makes the comparisons between Carter and Biden inevitable, several other economic indicators were actually pretty strong under Biden, which wasn't the case for Carter. So I think that makes 2024 different from other incumbent-party-rejecting elections like 1980 or 2008.
nrakich: You guys are already getting into it, but my next and final question was going to be, where do you think historians will place Biden in the pantheon of presidents? Will he largely be remembered positively or negatively?
julia_azari: I think it sort of depends on (1) who is crafting the legacy, and whether Democrats (or people in Biden's inner circle) decide they want to work on rehabilitating Biden's legacy, and (2) what the impact and legacy of Trump's second term is.
Monica Potts: I think it's hard to say, but I will go back to where we started. I think Biden's most important decision from a legacy perspective will turn out to be his decision to run again, and I think not knowing when to step aside will overshadow everything else. Everything he did while in office now has to survive a Trump presidency or risks being overshadowed by it, and it would be a completely different conversation if a Democrat were taking office next year. Although, to be clear, the anti-incumbency feeling might have extended to any Democrat, and I don't know that any of them would have won.
nrakich: Yeah, one-term presidents are usually not rated very highly in historical rankings, and I suspect there's a reason for that.
For instance, in C-SPAN's 2021 survey of presidential historians, eight of the top 10 presidents served two terms (or quite close to two terms, like Truman and Teddy Roosevelt). The only exceptions were Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy — two presidents who didn't have the chance to serve two terms because they were assassinated.
geoffrey.skelley: I mean, if we're getting really cynical, in 50 years most people may only remember Trump from this era in history, making Biden something of a footnote analogous to, say, Benjamin Harrison or one of the other one-term presidents of the late 19th century (another period of intense partisanship and polarization).
If I'm still around, I'll spend my dotage talking about it, though.
