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Former President Joe Biden, who holds the record for most popular votes in a presidential election in U.S. history, and former Vice President Kamala Harris were both at the top of the Democratic Party in 2024, but they overwhelmingly have been absent from the 2025 off-season election cycle as other big-name Democrats have been hitting various campaign trails to rally support.
According to political pundits and lawmakers who spoke to Fox News Digital, their presence on the campaign trail likely would not generate warm welcomes following the fallout of the 2024 race.
“The one thing you could probably get progressives and moderates inside the Democratic Party to agree on is that the Biden/Harris administration did not score very high marks,” former chief counsel to House Judiciary Committee Democrats Julian Epstein told Fox Digital Monday. “I’m not sure why any candidate would want to go to either of them who voters rejected in one way or another and to who are widely seen that leading the party into the wilderness.”
The nation is facing only a handful of big-ticket races in 2025, with four most notably garnering national attention: the Virginia gubernatorial race, the New Jersey gubernatorial race, the New York City mayoral race, and California’s special election to vote on a ballot measure that would redistrict the state’s congressional lines.
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The trio of elections in New Jersey, New York City and Virginia have especially attracted a handful of high-profile Democrats offering official endorsements of the candidates or traveling to those jurisdictions to help rally support among locals.
Former President Barack Obama, for example, offered official video endorsements of New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rep. Mikie Sherrill and Virginia Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger earlier in October, and is scheduled to attend two separate rallies for the individual candidates Saturday. Former Secretary of Transportation under the Biden administration, Pete Buttigieg, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others also have joined the gubernatorial candidates at various campaign fundraisers and events.
Biden and Harris have meanwhile been largely absent from the 2025 campaign fray.
“Of course Democrats are running away from the disasters they created with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” Republican Rep. Andy Barr, who is running for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, told Fox News Digital. “It will take years to undo the damage they inflicted on our economy, our border, and our national security. Every Democrat on the ballot owns that record. Kentuckians will reject it and stand with us to fully advance President Trump’s America First agenda.”
Biden has not joined campaign events, with Fox News Digital also unable to find any public endorsements of 2025 political candidates as of Tuesday.
Biden, notably, revealed in May that he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bones. Biden has taken a step back from the public spotlight since his administration ended, but he did attend an event Sunday, when he received a lifetime achievement award for inspired leadership from the Edward M. Kennedy Institute.
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“Friends, I can’t sugarcoat any of this. These are dark days,” Biden said during the event, adding that “our very democracy is at stake in my view.”
Biden received the most votes in U.S. history during the 2020 race, at 81,283,501 votes, beating Obama’s 2008 record of about 69,498,516 votes, and Trump’s 2024 election that delivered him 77,302,580 votes.
Harris, meanwhile, is in the midst of an ongoing book tour to promote her new memoir, “107 Days,” which recounts her experiences on the 2024 campaign trail, including when Biden decided to drop out of the race July 21, 2024, and the party’s mad dash to rally around Harris as his replacement with just more than 100 days until Election Day.
In New York City, Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is building endorsements and support from Democrats and left-wing members of the party, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Harris did offer support for Mamdani’s nomination to lead New York City while on her book tour, but has not offered endorsement campaign videos, joined rallies or taken part in other official campaign events like her party colleagues, Fox Digital found.
“Look, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the Democratic nominee, and he should be supported,” Harris told MSNBC of Mamdani’s candidacy in a September interview, before offering stronger support days later while recounting a phone conversation she shared with the candidate.
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When asked about Harris not having officially endorsed candidates in the three major 2025 elections, a spokesperson contended, “This isn’t true at all. I would do more research and come back to me when you’ve got the facts sorted out.”
When it was noted that Harris has made some favorable comments about Mamdani but has yet to offer him a more formal endorsement or appear with him, Spanberger or Sherrill, Harris’ team was similarly dismissive, pointing to fundraising emails and “events for senate candidates,” although there are no candidates for U.S. Senate in the 2025 race.
Harris did take part in a roughly two-minute prerecorded video message to youth voters in July, as reported by the New York Post, rallying young voters to get involved in politics and stay committed to the “fight,” but did not cite specific campaigns.
“Keep building your political power, keep building community, keep building coalitions, keep challenging the status quo,” Harris told the summit in the prerecorded video.
“And born out of our love for our country, keep fighting to build a country and a nation,” she said. “That works for everyone. And I look forward to continuing in the fight alongside you. You take care.”
Gen Z conservative podcast host and political commentator Brilyn Hollyhand told Fox News Digital, when asked about Biden’s and Harris’ absences from 2025 races, that “the Democrat party is a sinking ship of a party and they’ll be the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean come the midterms.”
“They have no leader and no bench and their loudest voices are Jasmine Crocket and Zohran Mamdani,” he said. “They spent millions studying why Gen Z men fled their party? I’ll give them the answer for free: look in the mirror. They went so far to the Left they fell off a cliff. Anybody running wants to stay as far away from claiming to be a Democrat as possible — it’s kryptonite,” he said.
The Democrat Party has been trying to find its footing since Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race amid mounting concerns over his mental acuity that had simmered for years before reaching a roiling boil following his disastrous debate against then-former President Donald Trump in June 2024. Party members began suggesting, before outright encouraging, Biden drop out of the race and pass the torch to a younger generation.
He ultimately dropped out and endorsed Harris.
The departure from the race threw the Democratic Party into a tailspin as it worked to build a presidential campaign with a new top-ticket candidate with just a few weeks before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Former Trump official and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, Morgan Murphy, told Fox News Digital that Biden and Harris “were never more than 2D media props, employed to disguise how radical Democrats have become.”
“This Halloween, soft socialists in places like New Jersey and Virginia are dressing up as moderates. Even they know that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are too toxic for voters in states they both won in 2020 and 2024,” he said. “At this point, Democrats are suffering from a bad hangover. Four failed years of high inflation, open borders, and foreign policy disasters is something democrats are trying to forget.”
Murphy argued that the Democrat Party has gone “full Marxist” and the “only endorsements that matter to their increasingly leftist base are from socialists like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran Mandani.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Biden’s office inquiring about the lack of official endorsements for candidates in 2025, considering he was president less than a year ago and garnered the most votes in U.S. history, but did not receive a reply.
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The trio of high-stakes gubernatorial and mayoral elections has set the various jurisdictions on edge in the final week of the election cycle.
New Jersey has been eyed as a potential deep blue state to flip red following Trump’s inroads with voters during the 2024 cycle, with Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli criss-crossing the Garden State’s liberal strongholds to conservative farmlands to rally a Republican outpouring at the ballot boxes.
The Virginia gubernatorial election pits a former Democratic lawmaker and CIA employee, Spanberger, against Marine veteran and current lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears in a state considered purple and currently led by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
The New York City mayoral race has gained widespread popularity as it pits a self-described socialist currently in the lead, according to polls, against the state’s former Democratic governor and a longtime Republican candidate and fixture of the city.
Mamdani, a self-described Democratic socialist, is accused by conservatives and moderates of actually holding communist ideologies, and is facing off against former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who remained in the race as an Independent after Mamdani defeated him in the Democratic primary — as well as Republican challenger and founder of the Guardian Angels, Curtis Sliwa.
The trio of Democratic campaigns in New Jersey, Virginia and New York City did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on Biden’s and Harris’ lack of involvement this cycle.
Election Day 2025 will be held Tuesday, and also includes the Boston mayoral election, Seattle’s general election, Pennsylvania Supreme Court elections and others. The 2025 election is seen as a bellwether ahead of the 2026 midterms, which historically results in the party holding the presidency losing seats in Congress.
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