Democrat Chris Murphy says ‘no question’ Biden refusal to drop out hurt Harris

There’s “no question” that Joe Biden should have dropped out of the 2024 race sooner, a Democratic senator said on Sunday.

While far from a surprise, it’s a sign of how far Biden’s party is willing to go in questioning his judgment after the president’s team saw losses in the presidential, Senate and House races this cycle.

With the president waiting until July to drop out — long past the point where his party could have held a primary election to field a new candidate — more center-left Democrats, such as Senator Chris Murphy, are vocalizing the failures of the Biden/Harris White House and campaign strategy.

Murphy appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday and fielded a question about the president from moderator Kristen Welker.

“Well...in hindsight, knowing that he ultimately made the decision to stand down, yes, of course, it would have been better for President Biden to have made that decision earlier. I think there's no question about it,” the Connecticut senator said.

Murphy joined others in his party in questioning why, when Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket in mid-July, the vice president’s campaign largely ceased messaging around populist economic issues, such as the work being done by the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan to fight corporate monopolization during a time of high inflation.

“I think some of the most important things that Joe Biden did were taking on the big corporations, going after their monopoly power, helping consumers with some of the really egregious fees and gimmicks that those companies used to hurt us,” Murphy said. He added: “I wish the Biden campaign and the Biden White House and the Harris campaign talked more about what they did to break up corporate power.”

Many on the left have argued in the wake of Harris’s defeat that the Democratic Party remains highly resistant to any messaging embracing a challenge to corporate power because it fears alienating the party’s wealthiest donors.

The director of One Fair Wage, a group that supports raising the federal minimum wage, identified the problem on Sunday in an interview with The Guardian, claiming that pleas for the Harris campaign to focus on explaining how the White House would be — and already was — focused on helping average Americans and alleviate the pain of persistently high prices for groceries and other items fell “on deaf ears.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was they kept wanting to talk about the economy. And we kept saying, it’s not about the economy, it’s about our economy: it’s about my economy, my ability to pay for eggs and gas.”

Murphy concurred Sunday on NBC.

“I think Democrats need to be much more aggressive in making this case that power has been concentrated and it needs to be returned to regular Americans,” he said. “[W]e need to be able to invite a lot of different Americans into that conversation, regardless of whether they line up with Democrats on every single social and cultural issue.”

In the same interview, Murphy said that he would not support the nomination of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Patel, a Trump loyalist, has no formal background in law enforcement.