Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) placed blame at the feet of the Democratic Party for supporting former President Joe Biden’s bid for reelection last year, arguing party leaders blinded by loyalty failed to listen to voters who wanted a “younger” candidate.
During a Sunday interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Murphy reflected on Biden’s reelection campaign, which quickly turned into a nightmare for his party. Questions about Biden’s decline surged following his disastrous presidential debate last June, leading him to exit the field the following month. The late decision left his replacement at the top of the ticket, former Vice President Kamala Harris, just months to craft her own abbreviated campaign, which some Democrats blamed for her loss to President Donald Trump last November.
Murphy said Sunday that Democratic chiefs should have listened to voters who wanted a younger candidate to run for the country’s highest office, as opposed to Biden, 82, who had shown visible signs of decline.
“I admit that by 2024 the American public had made up their mind, right, that they wanted the Democratic Party to nominate somebody new, and it was absolutely a mistake for the party to not listen to those voters,” Murphy told NBC host Kristen Welker.
“They wanted somebody younger,” he added. “It was a mistake for Democrats to not listen to the voters earlier and set up a process that would have gotten us in a position where we could have been more competitive that fall.”
Murphy pinned blame broadly on Democratic leadership, saying he thinks “we all bear responsibility.”
“I think, you know, we maybe didn’t listen as early as we should have, in part, because we have immense loyalty to this man who had led this country out of a pandemic, who had been maybe the most prodigious legislator as a president,” the Connecticut lawmaker continued. “But ultimately, in retrospect, you can’t defend what the Democratic Party did because we are stuck with a madman—with a corrupt president in the Oval Office—and we should have given ourselves a better chance to win.”
He was also pressed on recent accounts detailing the extent of Biden’s cognitive decline while in the White House, most prominently detailed in a book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson set to be released later this month. Audio of a 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur leaked last week has further revived interest in the former president’s mental decline during the final years of his presidency.
However, while Murphy told Politico last week that there was “no doubt” that Biden suffered from cognitive decline in office, the senator said Sunday that he never personally noticed changes in Biden.
“I saw a president who was in control,” Murphy told Welker. “That’s my experience.”
His comments come after he told Politico that “there’s no doubt about it,” when pressed on whether he believed in Biden’s cognitive decline. “The debate is whether it was enough that it compromised his ability to act as chief executive,” Murphy said.
A recent report by Tapper and Thompson suggested that Biden seemed to have a sprinkling of good days and bad days while in office. Allies said he operated up to standard at times, while seeming confused and dazed in other moments, both in private and in public.
A prolific Democratic fundraiser rumored to be a presidential contender in 2028, Murphy’s remarks this week come after he has frequently criticized the Democratic Party’s strategy last year.
“Our party has made mistakes, and if we don’t learn from those mistakes,” Murphy told the CT Mirror in late April. “We’re cooked.”
“There’s not going to be an election in 2028 if we don’t win this fight right now,” he added. “It seems kind of silly to think about anything other than the emergency that exists today.”
Murphy expressed particular alarm over his party’s tactics after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) opted to avert a government shutdown this spring.
“I still support Sen. Schumer as leader,” Murphy said on NBC News’s Meet the Press in March. “But I think the only way that we are going to be effective as a caucus is if we change our tactics, and we have to have a conversation inside our caucus to make sure that we are going to do that.”
CHRIS MURPHY BACKS SCHUMER BUT ADDS PARTY MUST ‘CHANGE OUR TACTICS’
In other comments this spring, he added, “We have become the status quo party, and so we have reverted to defending democracy instead of explaining how we are going to break it down and reform it.”
“We have not been a pugilistically populist party, where we name the people who have power and we build very easy-to-understand solutions about how to transfer power to people who don’t have it,” Murphy concluded.
