Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) laid into Democrats’ strategy that resulted in the loss of the Senate and White House in 2024 — airing his frustrations about how President Biden set the party up for failure by running again.
“Joe Biden should not have run for re-election,” Huffman, 60, vented in an interview published Friday by Politico’s “Playbook Deep Dive” podcast.
“I think we should be able to just say that,” he added. “It’s not unkind or uncharitable to acknowledge that he just shouldn’t have done it. And even by starting down that path, he set us back tremendously.”
Huffman was one of the first congressional Democrats to call on Biden, 82, to step down after the president’s scattered debate performance against former President Donald Trump on June 27 — fueling widespread concerns about the commander-in-chief’s mental acuity and ability to serve another four years.
Biden would have been 86 years old by the end of a second term — and Huffman griped that Democrats should have come out sooner against his candidacy.
Party bosses had helped to quash the candidacy of Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who launched a primary challenge to Biden last year.
Phillips told The Post in December 2023 that the president’s age was disqualifying, especially given the worsening conflicts abroad in Ukraine and Israel.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump — in which she ceded all seven battleground states — left Democrats in disarray about what happened.
Like Huffman, House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said Biden should either have not run or should have dropped out sooner.
“I think there was a lack of self-awareness, and I’m sure there were good intentions bound up in that as well, because he’s a good and decent man, and he’s done a lot of good things. But I will also say that many of us were frustrated,” Huffman dished in his Politico interview.
“I was frustrated that for the first year of our inflation problem, the Biden administration’s answer was to call it ‘transitory’ and be dismissive about it,” he went on.
“That was a huge mistake, deeply tone-deaf. And it took us a while to correct. And by the time we did, I think we’d lost a lot of credibility on what might have been the No. 1 issue in this election cycle: costs and inflation.”
The California Democrat also directly tore into Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has blamed Democrats’ treatment of the working class for Harris’ loss.
“Joe Biden and Democrats did more for the working class in the last four years than we’ve seen in a long, long time. And Bernie Sanders — Mr. Working Class — underperformed Kamala Harris in his own state,” Huffman swiped.
The Harris-Walz campaign was doing some soul-searching after its defeat, sending out emails asking supporters to take a survey on how the Democratic strategy should change going into 2026 and 2028, and whether the party should re-evaluate its priorities.
Huffman argued: “I don’t think you throw out your values.”
“I don’t think you fundamentally do away with everything you care about and fight for,” he said. “I think you’ve got to be careful about overreaction in a moment like this, too, because politics swing back and forth and, you know, had we won a few more seats, we’d be in the majority in Congress — just, like, literally two more seats.”
