Dems Confront The First Real Litmus Test Of 2028: Biden's Mental Acuity

Joe Biden may have cost Democrats the White House in 2024. Their inability to admit it, some Democrats fear, could hobble them in 2028.

As a fresh reckoning in the party unfolds around the former president’s mental acuity, potential presidential contenders have mostly dodged questions about his condition while in office. They’ve also sidestepped whether the party should have more forcefully called on him to abandon his reelection bid earlier.

“How are some of these national frontrunners or people who are already barnstorming states like South Carolina or Iowa expected to look voters in the eyes with a straight face and say, ‘Trust me, even though I got the 2024 election so terribly wrong?’” asked the former Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.), who said he expects the issue to come up on the trail in what is now the first-in-the-nation primary state. “There’s no courage on display by any of the folks whose names are being circulated right now.”

He said the party’s Biden question needs to be “nipped in the bud” if Democrats want to reestablish trust with voters.

Some potential presidential contenders have been willing to criticize Biden, to varying degrees, risking pushback from critics accusing them of hypocrisy after they defended Biden last year. Just this week, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said there was “no doubt” about Biden’s cognitive decline, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg conceded the party “maybe” would have done better without him and Rep. Ro Khanna of California said “Democrats must be honest … Joe Biden should not have run for reelection.”

But they were the exception. For the most part, leading Democrats — many of whom attested to Biden’s fitness when he was still on the ticket — are ducking what is fast becoming the first real litmus test of the 2028 campaign. The problem for Democrats is Biden's blast radius keeps expanding. It isn’t just the embarrassing accounts dribbling out from a forthcoming book. It’s that so many Democrats with 2028 ambitions were defending him at the time — and are now being forced to answer for what they knew and when.

When Murphy, in an interview, fessed up to Biden’s diminishing capabilities, GOP operatives threw months-old comments in face. “This you??” said an aide to Speaker Mike Johnson on the social media platform X, pointing to when the Democratic senator had vouched for Biden in the wake of a damning Wall Street Journal report on the subject.

Khanna got similar treatment. After Biden’s disastrous debate, one social media user pointed out, Khanna compared Biden to the fictional boxer Rocky, saying the latter was a “fighter” even if he “wasn't the most eloquent.”

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro appeared to try to differentiate himself from other ambitious Democrats — and put some distance between himself and Biden — by maintaining he privately raised concerns with the former president in the moment.

Shapiro said he hadn’t read the buzzy book “Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” But he all but confirmed one of its passages, which reported Shapiro told Biden he was worried after his debate and believed that he had not shown the public it was an aberration.

“I can tell you that I was very frank with the president during his campaign about what I saw were some of the shortcomings,” he told POLITICO. “I was very honest with him in a private setting about that.”

While Shapiro said publicly at the time that Biden had “a responsibility to reassure” Pennsylvanians he could win, the governor and most other elected Democrats defended Biden’s fitness up through the final months of his presidency. Asked by POLITICO in August 2024 if he had any concerns that Biden had slipped, Shapiro said, “Not at all, and I’ve been in regular contact with the president.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who attended a White House meeting with other Democratic governors last July following Biden’s debate, did some “rah-rahing for Biden” there as other attendees questioned Biden seriously, according to a copy of “Original Sin” viewed by POLITICO.

At a fundraiser the next day in Holland, Michigan, which POLITICO attended, Newsom told Democrats that he had friends accusing him of “gaslighting.”

“I spent a lot of time with Biden over the years,” Newsom said to nervous Michigan Democrats.

“Remember: All the impacts of climate change, all the forest fires, all those floods, the drought, all these impacts — Marine One, Air Force One. I've spent time. Hours and hours in the aggregate on the phone with him, was just with [him at] a major fundraiser we did down in L.A. two weeks ago. I've never seen him like that debate night.”

But the book reports that Newsom attended a June 2023 fundraiser with Biden in Kentfield, California that “went awry,” with attendees “shaken by Biden’s meandering remarks.”

“I remember leaving that fundraiser thinking, Fuck,” one attendee told the book’s authors, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

With Biden now out of office and getting dragged nearly daily in the press, there would seem to be little political imperative to stick beside him. But there is also an obvious downside to addressing him at all — inviting comparisons to the party’s boosting of the former president in the past. With those tricky political dynamics in mind, perhaps, few Democrats have openly said this week that Biden experienced cognitive decline in office or that he should’ve stepped down earlier.

Far more are trying to sidestep the question and pivot to the future.

“I think he had good days and bad days. That’s all I’ll say,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told POLITICO.

Or as Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona put it in an interview, “I think we need to be focused on the future. I didn’t spend a ton of time with him when he was in office. I’d see him occasionally.”

Khanna, in a statement, said “I have always admired Biden's resilience and the grit he has shown after the loss of his son — and often compared that strength to Rocky. I was a surrogate for the president of my own party whose policies I backed. But obviously we did not have the full picture, and in hindsight it is painfully obvious that President Biden should have made the patriotic decision not to run.”

It was a pleading of ignorance that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer likewise employed, telling CNN on Thursday, “I didn't see the president frequently. And I can tell you I can't speak to that directly.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told the network on Tuesday that the discussion over Biden’s health is “very backward-looking,” but that if the former president wasn’t going to run he should have dropped out before the Democratic primary. Similarly, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear told the Washington Post that “if the president was going to drop out, dropping out earlier would have given any candidate a little more time.”

Some Democrats argue that their leaders aren’t owning up to the truth about Biden — and risk keeping the issue alive indefinitely as a result. They fear that Democrats’ record-lowapproval ratings are tied, in part, to their unwillingness to come clean.

How long the damage may last is unclear. And Biden is far from Democrats’ only problem, with an electorate that shifted away from the party across the country last year.

David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist who warned about Biden’s age as far back as 2022, described the current discussion surrounding Biden as “the fascination of the moment” and “the first litmus test.”

“I don’t know that it is going to be the first question on the minds of voters” in 2028, he said.

However, he added, “It is a fair question.”

A Biden spokesperson declined to comment.

Of potential Democratic candidates, Axelrod said that those closest to Biden — including Cabinet members — have more of a burden to account for statements ahead of 2028.

“I think there was a massive sort of surrender to what was a strong-armed tactic by the Biden team,” Axelrod said.

On the other hand, the Biden recriminations could provide an opportunity for Democrats countering party orthodoxy on the issue. In the same way Barack Obama gained credibility with some Democratic primary voters in 2008 by having opposed the Iraq War long before his party consensus shifted, some Democrats think a willingness to break from the field on Biden could open the door to an outsider candidate.

“Anybody who is tangential to Biden's sphere of influence bears some form of responsibility for this catastrophic failure,” said Cunningham. “Somebody from the outside would have more credibility on this issue and would have a head start on gaining or regaining the trust of Democratic voters.”