Can Democrats blame all their problems all on Biden?

Party leaders who long tiptoed around Joe Biden’s health and questions around his senility now seem to be settling on a new tack in explaining the 2024 loss to Donald Trump: It’s all Biden’s fault. 

At least that was the chief reason put forward by Kamala Harris’ campaign manager David Plouffe in explaining what led to the November loss. 

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According to the forthcoming book “Original Sin,” which obtained by NBC News on Tuesday, Plouffe called the efforts to defeat Trump on a truncated timeline a “f—ing nightmare”  

“And it’s all Biden. He totally f—ed us,” Plouffe told the book’s authors, according to the excerpt. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party.” 

Plouffe did not respond to a request for comment. A Biden spokesperson said they had not reviewed every part of the book and would not comment on specific revelations.

“We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president,” the spokesperson said.

Plouffe’s comments in the book followed those from a series of Democrats — from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on down — who have pointed to Biden, his decision to run for a second term and his subsequent late exit from the race, as much of the blame for 2024 loss to Trump.   

But that thinking is opening a new tension in the party, where some on the left say that to just blame Biden is papering over a more substantive issue of failures by the campaign and the party, and that leaders should share blame and reflect. Not doing so, they warn, may lead to further losses in the next presidential election and even possibly the midterms.

In response to Plouffe’s remarks in the book, longtime Democratic National Committee Finance Chair Chris Korge delivered his own stern words in an interview with NBC News. 

“To blame Biden now is to shift the accountability from the people who lost the race: the consultants, the so-called ‘gurus,’” Korge said. 

Korge said Democrats are better served if they looked forward but noted that they still needed to review what went wrong. He said the party had a “perfect convention, including a huge contingency of influencers and podcasts.” Harris also, he added, had a tremendous debate, and they raised a record amount of money — more than $1.4 billion.

“We had all the money we needed and we found a way to not use our money wisely,” Korge said of the campaign. “I find it rich that consultants who lost that election are now trying to blame Joe Biden.”  

Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, went further in saying that Harris was a flawed candidate and Plouffe’s remarks attempted to “whitewash” a bad campaign. 

“All the things being said about Biden — he should have dropped out earlier, and there’s likely a cover up — is probably true,” Green said. “But that’s too easy an excuse to distract Democrats from solving a very real problem, which is that the party is seen as clubby political insiders who are defending a broken economic system when we need anti-establishment candidates who stand for political and economic change.” 

The discussion around Biden is accelerating as a series of deeply reported books examining the Democrats’ 2024 loss have been released. “Original Sin,” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, to be publicly released later this month, purports to lay out aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment. “Fight,” a book by Jonathan Allen of NBC News and Amy Parnes of The Hill, gives anecdotes of Biden not recognizing high-profile party leaders and of the former first lady and others in his inner circle cocooning the then-president to obscure infirmities from the public. 

The new revelations seemed to prompt an offensive by Biden, who went on ABC’s “The View” last week to declare he was not in cognitive decline in office. Biden also hired Chris Meagher, a former White House aide, to handle his communications.

Meagher did not respond to a request for comment, but last week on X, he criticized one of the books saying, writing on X: “Yes, Biden was old, but that’s a lot different than an allegation of mental decline that kept him from being able to do the job, which there is no evidence of.”

Biden had long rebuffed attempts to stop him from seeking a second term, though he had implied his presidency would serve as a bridge for Democrats to a new generation. He then announced a second term, and he picked up support from party leaders and some White House officials who then moved to his campaign.

Once Biden had a cataclysmic debate performance against Trump in late June of last year, the tide turned for him to leave the race. Biden stepped aside and backed Harris, but by then there was just 107 days for her to mount a campaign against Trump.

“In a 107-day race, it is very difficult to do all the things you would normally do in a year and a half, two years,” Jen O’Malley Dillon said on “Pod Save America” last November.

Left unasked, however, was what role O’Malley Dillon — and others who were on Biden’s White House team before moving to campaign efforts — played in helping create the very predicament they were complaining about.

That included not putting Harris out in front early enough in the administration so she would be prepared to lead if necessary, as well as how much those running Biden’s White House then campaign efforts pushed for answers on his mental health. 

Many Democrats today express some regret over how the process turned out.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who made a bid for the White House in 2020, also recently said that the party could be in a different place today if it had held a real primary.

“You know, everything we look at in a rearview mirror after you lose an election. Yes, we would have been served better by a primary. But we are where we are,” Klobuchar told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic strategist, said the party would be well served to evaluate its mistakes but also quickly adjust to the new political landscape before them.

“There are a lot of lessons to be learned from 2024 beyond just whether Biden should have run, and it’s important that we continue to have a spirited conversation inside the family about what went wrong and what we can learn from it,” Rosenberg said. “But the real next chapter for us is going to be the 20 or 30 political leaders in our party charting a new course, having a big debate, and we’re having a big debate and charting a new course for our party over the next few years.”

Rosenberg added that the playing field is quickly changing with Trump in the White House. 

“That’s where the real action is going to be, because Trump has already created a whole new dynamic, and the politics that generated 2024 are no longer with us,” Rosenberg said. “We now have a new set of realities that we have to respond to and build from and so what’s going to be more important.”