Beware the Biden Nostalgia

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

 

The warning signs for Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections are mounting.

 

Over the weekend, a Democratic candidate’s special-election victory in a Texas State Senate seat that Donald Trump won in 2024 by 17 points sent a shock wave through Republican politics. More alarmingly, the Democratic candidate’s overperformance fits within a trend that saw double-digit swings toward Democrats in special and off-year elections throughout 2025. As of today, the Democratic Party’s lead in the generic congressional ballot test is the largest it has ever been in the second Trump era.

 

Maybe the most nauseating indication of the Democratic Party’s potentially imminent comeback are the early signs of something like nostalgia for Joe Biden’s presidency.

 

For the first time since it has asked the question, the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll recently found that a majority of voters (51 percent) now believe that Donald Trump is doing a “worse job” than his predecessor. The margin is a tight one; 49 percent of respondents still say Trump outperforms Biden in the role of president. But in December, the same survey showed that 53 percent preferred Trump’s record over Biden’s. Last February, an overwhelming 58 percent said Trump outshone Biden in the presidency, with only 42 percent dissenting.

 

What’s more, the registered voters that Harvard-Harris’s pollsters surveyed seem to be retrospectively evaluating Biden’s policies through rose-tinted glasses, too. When respondents were asked whether the economy has fared worse under Trump or Biden, 53 percent said the economy is “worse than it was under Biden.” Only 47 percent believe Trump’s economy outperforms Biden’s, a decline of three points from December.

 

We can anticipate that the president’s critics will not soberly reflect on this tentative expression of buyer’s remorse among voters, feeling encouraged by the results but resolving not to overread them. The caricature that Joe Biden’s hapless image-makers engineered for the former president is about to make a comeback. We’re about to be subjected to an off-putting campaign aimed at convincing voters that they never had it as good as they did under the last Democratic president.

 

You can see it now, can’t you? Biden will be exhumed from his political grave, sporting a pair of aviators and a bomber jacket, armed with an ice cream cone, and strapped into a Mustang convertible. “Dark Brandon” will return, casting his ocular lasers on the many targets of his retribution.

 

This public relations campaign will not be for Biden’s benefit. Indeed, who is to say whether the former president will even be cognizant of it? Rather, its beneficiaries will be its executors: the dozens of Democratic staffers and hangers-on whose professional reputations remain tarnished by their association with that administration and its humiliating end. A Democratic Party that is too conscious of its own failings to release the findings of its own autopsy on the 2024 election cycle is not going to suddenly discover the virtue of prudence. If Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel dangle a political lifeline to Democratic establishmentarians, they’ll take it.

 

Those who will overinvest in our collective amnesia will not limit themselves to gauzy reflections on the campy elements of the 45th president’s tenure. They will probably try to convince you that his economy was fairer, his immigration policies more equitable, and his prosecution of the culture wars more benign than the wrecker currently occupying the Oval Office. If they do that, Biden’s backers will have succumbed to hubris.

 

The voting public may not remember feeling “financially squeezed” during the Biden years, as two-thirds said of their own experience at the time, but they do remember what rampant inflation felt like. They can certainly read a chart — at least enough to deduce that an annual inflation rate of 9.1 percent is an undesirable level of price instability.

 

The voters who don’t remember just how difficult Joe Biden found managing America’s illegal immigrant population are bound to be reminded of the former president’s failings. They’ll be asked to recall the former president’s allergy to border enforcement, how confounded he was by Congress’s failure to relieve him of his responsibility for border security, and Biden’s sudden discovery that he didn’t need the legislature’s imprimatur to take the migrant crisis seriously — but only if voters were angry enough about it. Border security is one of the few areas in which Trump’s approach is still viewed positively, and the GOP will relish the opportunity to remind the public of Biden’s record on immigration.

 

Democrats would love to pretend as though Trump’s grandfatherly predecessor was a noncombatant when it comes to cultural conflict — or, perhaps, at least less petty and vindictive than Trump. Nonsense.

 

The former president waged a whole-of-government crusade to operationalize the dubious shibboleths that captured the hearts of progressive activists at a time when that reliably unreasonable cohort was at its least rational. “Equity” was, by the administration’s own admission, baked into its every initiative. The Biden White House attempted to subvert the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by disbursing debt relief and grants explicitly on the basis of race. It tried to triage access to Covid vaccines based on race and employment (for preferred professions, like union-connected teachers), all while advertising that being unvaccinated would or, at least, should (and, in the case of the U.S. military, did) result in lost opportunities and social ostracization. By the end, the infirm president seemed to have convinced himself that he could amend the Constitution via social media.

 

The Biden White House handed out constitutionally obscene beneficences to favored constituencies like student-loan borrowers. The president himself admitted that he would ignore the courts to satisfy the activists who insisted that property owners should have no say over who occupied the premises they held or even whether they should be compensated for the inconvenience. Do Democrats really want a critical retrospective on the strong-arm campaign behind “gender-affirming care,” the administration’s contempt for Title IX proscriptions against gender discrimination, or his efforts to use the power of the state to intimidate (and possibly ruin) dissenters to this new catechism?

 

The Harvard-Harris poll’s results should be viewed within the context of the voters’ general dissatisfaction with the status quo. In every way they can, the voting public is communicating its desire to see the Trump administration reboot its tactical approach to governance. They are not clamoring for a Joe Biden restoration. But Democratic partisans will not be able to resist the temptation to embark on an “I told you so” tour, and the GOP is not going to stop them.