CNN senior political commentator and former Obama adviser David Axelrod said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that if then-President Joe Biden had stayed in the 2024 presidential race, he would have lost more states, and Democrats would have lost more Senate seats.
Host Jake Tapper said, “In what seemed to be an attempt to get ahead of the book, President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden went on ‘The View,’ and he still says that if he had stayed in the race, he would have won. What do you think?”
Axelrod said, “I think that’s preposterous. I think he’s being told that by Mike Donilon, his top political aide. I’ve known Mike for decades. Mike is a brilliant, brilliant guy. He was a pollster. He was a media consultant. He knows politics very, very well. I think he’s just so tied to Biden emotionally that he could not accept the truth. Which was it, just it wasn’t there. The analytics before the debate, Jake, that within the Democratic Party, within both the campaign and outside the campaign, showed him with less than a 5% chance of winning. And had he run, Democrats would have lost at least three more Senate seats, probably would have lost some more states. The damage would have been greater. You know, he may need to comfort himself by believing that, but it’s just not true.”
Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN