Democrats are directing their anger over losing the presidential race at Joe Biden, whom they blame for setting Kamala Harris up for failure by not giving up sooner.

They say his advanced age, questions about his mental acuity and deep unpopularity put Democrats at a serious disadvantage. They’re furious that they were forced to embrace a candidate voters had made clear they didn’t want — and then stayed in the race long after it became clear he couldn’t earn.

“He shouldn’t have run,” said Jim Manley, a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “Now is not the time to pull punches or worry about anyone’s feelings. He and his team have caused enormous damage to this country.

According to interviews with nearly a dozen party officials and members, Biden wasted precious months only to end in disaster on the debate stage. And by the time he decided to pass the torch, he had imposed too many challenges on Harris and far too little time to build a winning case for herself.

The new anger at Biden came as Democrats embarked on a series of recriminations following Tuesday’s decisive defeat to Donald Trump, with officials struggling to explain why a majority of the electorate voted Republican for the first time times in 20 years.

Democratic leaders hoped Harris could distance herself from Biden’s shortcomings after taking the nomination just 107 days before the election. The change in candidate in July generated new enthusiasm among voters and seemed to instantly reset the race, reinforcing the theory that she could eke out a victory against an opponent as controversial as Trump.

But any progress Harris made during her abbreviated campaign was overwhelmed Tuesday by the continued backlash against the Biden administration over inflation and cost-of-living concerns — and a president who revealed himself unable to sell the electorate on his achievements and whose apparent overconfidence held him back. in the campaign despite growing signs that he was not ready for the job.

“She ran an extraordinary campaign with a very tough hand dealt to her,” Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said of Harris. “The truth is, Biden should have stepped aside sooner and let the party develop a longer-term game plan.”

This loss, supporters and critics say, will put a lasting dent in a legacy that Biden built steadily over more than half a century in politics, culminating in what he envisioned as a resounding defeat for Trump and his policies. which divides. Instead, Biden’s presidency will now be inextricably linked to Trump’s return to the Oval Office and his legislative achievements risk being undermined by his successor. That’s partly a consequence, some Democrats concluded, of Biden letting pride and ego cloud the keen political judgment that had contributed to his long rise to the White House.

“There was a fatigue with Biden,” James Zogby, a three-decade veteran of the Democratic National Committee, said of the shift in the electorate in recent years. “And he lasted too long.”

Biden called Trump on Wednesday afternoon to congratulate him on his victory and praised Harris in a statement, saying that “under extraordinary circumstances, she stepped up and ran a historic campaign.” He plans to make his first public remarks about the election during a national address on Thursday.

In a somber White House, aides, still processing the results, bristled at the idea of ​​questioning Biden’s decision to run for re-election, pointing to the legislative record he had accumulated over the of his first two years and the better-than-expected midterm results that suggested Democrats had political momentum. Likewise, there were few immediate regrets over Biden’s decision to abandon and support Harris, short-circuiting the potential for a messy fight to replace him.

Instead, his aides and allies argued, Tuesday’s defeat was so complete that it’s unclear whether a Democrat could have won under such circumstances. The anti-incumbency anger sparked by the inflation that has swept Europe in recent years has finally come to the United States. And while working-class voters turned decidedly toward Trump, they expressed doubts about Harris’ ability to cobble together a viable coalition, even if she had. more time to campaign.

“People, for some reason, feel like things were better four years ago — and I don’t think we can fight that,” said a longtime Democratic activist, pointing to the growing percentage of voters Latinos and blacks who turned to Trump. “We just have a bad brand right now.”

Marty Walsh, Biden’s former labor secretary, acknowledged in an interview that the administration’s messages “just weren’t resonating with people.” But he cautioned that these shortcomings were not related to Biden or any other candidate; rather, the party as a whole has not figured out how to effectively reach and educate voters.

“It’s not a day of finger-pointing. It’s a day of reflection,” he said.

Just as she did during the campaign, perhaps to her detriment, Harris also refused to criticize Biden publicly or privately, telling her confidants that she had done her best, but that it was nothing. ultimately not enough, according to a person close to the matter who was granted anonymity to describe the conversations.

Yet Biden has become a central target in the intensifying debate among Democrats over what went wrong.

Several Democrats pointed out that the administration’s handling of rising inflation was a major misstep. The White House initially dismissed it as a temporary phenomenon, and it took Biden months to understand the impact it had on the electorate. This episode cost them credibility with voters and overshadowed economic progress made elsewhere.

“They didn’t jump fast enough,” said Mike Lux, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Democracy Partners, who defended Biden’s record but lamented that he never managed to win. among working class voters. “It really hurt people, and we just didn’t respond in the way that we could have and should have in terms of policy, to some extent, but certainly in terms of communication.”

But beyond the political turning points, critics have criticized the president and his close advisers for wildly misinterpreting the Democrats’ 2020 victory as being driven by a groundswell of support for Biden himself — rather than an expression temporary dissatisfaction with the pandemic and an unpopular incumbent president in Trump.

Biden, who had pledged at one point during the 2020 campaign to be a “bridge” candidate to a new generation, then based his re-election bid on the belief that only he could defeat Trump — even s he showed clear signs that at 81 years old. , he wasn’t even the dynamic candidate he was four years ago. In a poll dating back to 2023, more than three-quarters of Americans thought Biden was too old to hold office.

“They didn’t see his inability to step up his game,” Zogby said of Biden’s top aides. “There was this feeling that no one could do it.”

The decision froze several potential successors, tying the party to a candidate that its advisers believed would gain popularity as the race progressed. And despite Democrats’ growing concerns about Biden’s effectiveness, it took until June’s disastrous debate for those concerns to become public. Even then, Biden spent nearly a month trying to salvage his candidacy before giving up — leaving Democrats little time to audition new candidates.

“It would have been better if we had had a primary, even if Harris was the eventual winner,” the representative said. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), one of the first congressional Democrats to publicly call on Biden to step down after the debate. “And it was necessary for the Democratic candidate to separate himself from an unpopular incumbent president, as much as we love Joe Biden. None of these things happened.

Instead, Harris inherited the race with just over three months remaining, forced to rely on Biden’s campaign infrastructure while developing her own presidential platform on the fly.

Biden, to his credit, took an immediate backseat as Harris tried to establish her identity as the candidate and catch up with Trump, the president’s critics said. But by that point, it was too late – both for his reputation and for the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

“He is a good man who can be proud of his achievements. But his legacy is in tatters,” Manley said. “The country is heading in a very dangerous direction and part of that is due to its arrogance.”

Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.