Obama pollster: Lay off Biden and stop giving Trump too much credit

An Obama pollster called out critics for blaming President Joe Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss this week.
Cornell Belcher, a pollster and MSNBC analyst, suggested on social media platform X that Democrats should be thanking Biden and not criticizing him over President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. Many Democrats have taken aim at Biden for not dropping out of the race sooner, suggesting that his late departure contributed to Harris’s loss.
“The so-called ‘rage’ at Biden is predictably misdirected &part of the problem. They r raging at the guy who actually beat Trump in 2020 & garnered more votes than anyone ever (thnk u maybe) Biden’s didn’t stop Dems frm having historic 2022. This is missing the forest for the trees,” Belcher wrote Thursday on X.
He also pushed back on some critics’ arguments that Harris did not appeal to working class voters, noting that Harris had a plan for them while Republicans did not.
“So is this predictable trite argument by Dems every time there’s bad elec tht if they only had better econ message 4workingclass,” he wrote. “ok tell me wht workers policy they didn’t champion vs GOP who is literally against everything tht empowers workers. Again missing forest 4the trees.”
This comes after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tore into Democrats on Wednesday for ignoring working voters and for not addressing their needs during a “disastrous” campaign. Belcher argued that people need to look at how many votes Trump earned in 2024 compared to 2020 instead of focusing on criticizing Biden and the Democrats’ message during the campaign.
“Trump garnered less votes in 2024 on his way to winning than he did in 2020 on his way to losing… maybe just maybe let’s start the analysis here constructively instead of pushing unhelpful narratives tht only benefits our own myopic political agendas,” he added.
Belcher is the founder of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, a polling firm that helped former President Barack Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012.
Democrats are trying to play the blame game after Harris decisively lost the 2024 election. Andrew Yang, a 2020 candidate in the Democratic primary, suggested that it would have been a different race in Biden stepped aside in January instead of July.
“Joe Biden should have stepped aside in January, not July, and then given whoever emerged as the nominee permission to talk about him however they wanted,” Yang wrote on X.
Biden, 81, ended his reelection campaign in July, weeks after an abysmal debate performance sent his party into a spiral and raised questions about whether he still had the mental acuity and stamina to serve as a credible nominee.
But polling long beforehand showed that many Americans worried about his age. Some 77% of Americans said in August 2023 that Biden was too old to be effective for four more years, according to a poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs.
The president bowed out on July 21 after getting not-so-subtle nudges from Democratic Party powers, including former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. Biden endorsed Harris and handed over his campaign operation to her.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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