Pod Save America host Jon Favreau slammed President Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second presidential term on a Friday episode analysing Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Republican President-elect Donald Trump.
“Joe Biden’s decision to run for president again was a catastrophic mistake,” the podcaster and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama said. “It just was.”
Favreau accused Biden and “his inner circle” of refusing to believe polls indicating that the president was unpopular, and of failing to take the public’s concerns about the economy seriously.
“They just kept telling us that his presidency was historic and it was the greatest economy ever,” he said.
He added, “Clearly, 70, 80 percent of voters don’t believe that. They don’t believe that about their own personal financial situation, but they just keep telling us that.”
The host also excoriated Biden’s campaign for claiming “the polls were fine” after the president’s disastrous June debate against Trump — even though, Favreau said, the campaign’s internal polling at the time “showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes.” (A source described as “close to Biden” disputed those numbers in a comment to Mediaite.)
In August, the head of Democratic super PAC Future Forward revealed that its own forecast models, while not as dire as the internal polling Favreau described, had only put the probability of Biden winning in the single digits prior to his stepping down.
Elsewhere in the episode, the hosts of the hit political podcast commented on the difficulty that Harris faced as the eventual Democratic nominee after Biden stepped down in July —timing that left her with around 100 days to mount a campaign.
Representative Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, California) also laid blame on Biden in an interview with The New York Times published on Saturday. She criticised the president not only for not dropping out earlier, but for immediately endorsing Harris and thus making it “almost impossible” to hold an open primary for his replacement.
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” said Pelosi. Harris would’ve still won that primary, the former House Speaker maintained, but “may have been stronger, having taken her case to the public sooner.”