Kildee says Biden clearing primary field after withdrawing from the race harmed Democrats

U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Flint Twp.) speaks at a press conference hosted by the re-election campaign of President Joe Biden in Flint on Feb. 19, 2024. Biden faces an increasing challenge in Michigan's Democratic presidential primary from progressive groups urging voters to vote "uncommitted" to express their dissatisfaction with Biden's handling of the war in Gaza. (Andrew Roth/Michigan Advance)

Retiring U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Flint) said that President Joe Biden's decision to initially seek reelection, clearing the field of most primary challengers, harmed Democrats' chances of defeating President-elect Donald Trump in the general election.

Following a widely panned debate performance by Biden against Trump in June that sparked weeks of pressure from Democratic officials and pundits, Biden exited the race on July 21, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to be his replacement at the top of the ticket.

While Kildee told the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy during an online forum on Tuesday that "any one of a dozen" factors could have changed the outcome of the race, he said that having a "more conventional" nominating process would have been the biggest change Democrats could have made.

"President Biden made a decision long after the process was underway. I think he made the correct decision. But there's not much doubt that having a presidential campaign of 107 days on one side, and of four years on the other side, put us at a pretty significant disadvantage," said Kildee, who opted not to run for reelection this year.

"I think the fact that we went through the change that we did midstream was, in retrospect, much more damaging than many of us thought it would be at the time," Kildee said. "We were better off with the change, but not as well off had we been going through a normal nominating process."

That echoes a sentiment shared by former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who The New York Times that "had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race," adding that "the anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary."

"And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don't know that. That didn't happen," Pelosi continued. "We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different."

Former U.S. Rep. Barbara Comstock said during the Levin Center's webinar that Harris faced increased difficulty running against Trump as a Black woman.

"The yeast that makes Trumpism rise is racism and sexism," Comstock said.

While Comstock said that she wrote in candidates in the last two elections rather than voting for Trump or the Democratic nominees, she supported Harris this year "because I'm so sick of this racism and sexism in my own party and Republicans going along with it."

But Comstock said that "the misogyny is bipartisan," arguing that "the Bernie [Sanders] bros and those guys do the same thing to women as the Donald Trump bros do," adding that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faced similar attacks from both parties when she was the Democratic nominee facing Trump in 2016.

While some pundits have suggested in their postmortems of the Harris campaign that she should have accepted an invitation to be interviewed by podcaster Joe Rogan, a stance Sanders also shared on Sunday, Comstock said she is glad that Harris did not make an appearance.

"Please, no. Stop this acquiescing to this sexism and racism in this bro sphere," Comstock said.

Kildee said that eight years of having Trump at the forefront of American politics, with four more years on the way in the form of a second presidency, has reshaped the nation's character to embolden people to publicly share racist or sexist views.

"What the eras of Trump has done has legitimized what had been, I think, latent sexism and racism that the norms of our society had been addressing and taken much of that behavior and characterized it as unacceptable," Kildee said. "With the era of Trump, with his brash language and his use of invectives, it's clear that he has allowed some people who otherwise were keeping it to themselves to suddenly celebrate using his language, celebrate their biases, celebrate their prejudice."

Once Democrats switched nominees, Kildee said the party allowed Harris to be defined in the public eye by attacks from Trump and "didn't do a very good job of circling back to the core economic issues that we work on."

Kildee said that it is "frustrating" that some working-class people felt as though Democrats were not doing enough for them, arguing that Democrats deserve credit for "reshoring manufacturing."

"This generalized anxiety that exists in society creates an underpinning where negative messaging is pretty easily accepted," Kildee said. "And I think the final conclusion that I've come to in all of this is that truth takes longer for people to absorb than an incendiary, outrageous lie."

But Kildee acknowledged that it takes time to feel the effects of major legislation, arguing that creates an opening for Republicans to take advantage of.

"We limit ourselves in our argumentation, largely, to truth. Donald Trump and the people around him have no such restriction," Kildee said.

"And with a constant barrage of information, if you tell somebody that whatever circumstance in their life makes them unhappy, whatever level of anxiety they're experiencing about their own future, that they can blame somebody else for that and not accept the fact that there actually is change coming and it takes time," Kildee said. "If we had been able to produce some of the legislation that is reshoring manufacturing, say, two years earlier, and it was actually being experienced, rather than simply announced, that may have made a difference."