Nine Democrats who served in the Biden administration are now running for office in 2025 — and virtually none of them want to talk about the man who gave them their jobs.
That's the state of Joe Biden's political legacy thirteen months after leaving the White House. Not exile exactly, but something worse for a politician: irrelevance dressed up as gratitude.
A new report from Axios found that nine candidates with direct ties to the Biden administration are distancing themselves from the former president as they chase gubernatorial and congressional seats this year. Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, now running for governor in blue-leaning New Mexico, doesn't mention Biden on her campaign website. Former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra skipped any Biden reference in his California gubernatorial launch video. These aren't Republicans trying to shed a difficult association. These are Biden's own people — cabinet secretaries, appointees, inner-circle figures — treating his name like a liability.
Because it is one.
A veteran Democratic strategist, speaking anonymously to Fox News Digital, put it plainly:
Biden remains a liability. Being associated with the Biden administration is doing some candidates no favors as they run this year.
Anonymous or not, the statement merely confirms what every Democratic campaign manager already knows. Biden left office with approval and favorability ratings well underwater. His party suffered major election setbacks in 2024. And his final year in power was defined not by policy achievements but by the spectacle of a sitting president forced to abandon his own re-election bid amid serious questions about his physical and mental fitness — questions that erupted into public view after his debate performance against Donald Trump.
The one notable exception among the nine candidates is Sanjyot Dunung, a Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois' 8th District, who mentioned in her launch video that she served on Biden's foreign policy working group. One out of nine. That's not a mixed picture — it's a verdict.
In a twist that reads more like political archaeology than celebration, South Carolina Democrats are planning an event later this month to mark the sixth anniversary of Biden's Palmetto State primary landslide — the 2020 comeback victory that rescued his campaign from early-state irrelevance and propelled him to the Democratic nomination and eventually the presidency.
Six years ago, South Carolina was the story of a political resurrection. Biden's campaign had stumbled badly before a dominant primary performance revived his candidacy and cleared the field, Fox News reported. It was, by any measure, a pivotal moment in modern Democratic politics.
But commemorating it now carries an unintentional honesty. The celebration looks backward because there's nothing ahead. Biden has made only a handful of high-profile public appearances since leaving office and sat for just a couple of major interviews. Fox News reached out to his post-presidency team and received no response. The man who once commanded the most powerful office on earth has settled into a quiet that his party seems perfectly content not to disturb.
This is worth measuring against recent history. After the 2018 midterms — held while Trump was in the White House — both Barack Obama and Biden himself were in high demand on the Democratic campaign trail. Former presidents with credibility and energy get recruited. They headline fundraisers. They cut ads. They lend their names to candidates who want the association.
Biden is getting none of that. His cabinet secretaries won't say his name. His party's rising figures — Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg are both seen as possible 2028 White House contenders — are building their own brands with no apparent interest in carrying his banner. The Democratic bench isn't running from Bidenism as an ideology so much as running from Biden as a brand. And in politics, the brand is often the only thing that outlasts a presidency.
What makes this particularly damaging for Democrats is what it reveals about the hollowness of their 2020 argument. Biden was sold to the American public as the steady hand, the return to normalcy, the experienced institutionalist who would restore competence after what they called chaos. Four years later, his own party treats that pitch like a fever dream no one wants to revisit.
They can't run on his record because voters rejected it. They can't run on his judgment because his own party questioned it publicly enough to push him off the ticket. And they can't run on his legacy because there's no constituency clamoring for more of what he offered. The infrastructure bill didn't save him. The spending didn't save him. The "adults in the room" framing didn't survive contact with reality.
So instead, nine of his former officials run for office and pretend the last four years were a gap on their résumé.
Democrats have a habit of rewriting their own history in real time. The same party that spent 2020 insisting Biden was sharp, energetic, and fully capable spent 2024 quietly acknowledging he wasn't. The same officials who served proudly in his administration now scrub his name from their websites. The same strategists who called his presidency transformative now call him a liability — as long as the quote is anonymous.
South Carolina Democrats will gather later this month to toast a victory that happened six years ago. It may be the last time anyone in the party celebrates Joe Biden's name out loud.
His own people have already moved on. They just don't have the decency to say so with their names attached.
