The Democratic Party confronts a harsh "What might have been" question: If President Biden had stepped down, would President Kamala Harris have won?

There comes a point when “protecting the President” stops being about respect and starts being about fear. Sometime in the final stretch of Joe Biden’s term, the Democratic Party crossed that point. The country saw signs of slowing — the pauses, the whispered stage directions, the way public appearances narrowed into shorter, more carefully rehearsed frames. None of this was mysterious. It was visible.

But the message from the White House and many in the media was that any concern was inappropriate, even cruel. Asking whether the President of the United States could fully do the job was treated as a form of personal insult. So the public was instructed to disbelieve what it could plainly see.

What we now know from reporting in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and confirmed in memoirs and staff accounts is that the presidency itself had been reshaped around Biden’s limitations. Meetings were shortened. Access was filtered. Cabinet secretaries — including Defense and Treasury — often could not reliably get direct conversations. Senior lawmakers described having to route policy discussions through layers of intermediaries. This was not improvisation. It was the operating structure of the administration.

Then came June 2024 — the first debate of the campaign. And the last. Biden didn’t suddenly decline that night. The management strategy simply broke. The country saw what had been happening behind the curtain. Within weeks, Biden withdrew from the race. Kamala Harris became the nominee. And Democrats publicly swore the transition was purposeful, orderly, strategic.

Everyone knew it wasn’t.

And this is the hard part — the part the party still does not want to say out loud: If Kamala Harris had assumed the presidency earlier — even by several months — she would have entered the 2024 race as an incumbent. She would have had the advantage of authority, of narrative control, of articulation. Instead, she inherited the aftermath of a cover-up.

No candidate can win when their very presence on the ballot is framed as an emergency substitution.

Harris did not lose because she lacked skill or ideas. She lost because she was asked to run while carrying the full political weight of a presidency the country had stopped believing in — and a quiet acknowledgment that the party had known far more, far earlier, than it ever admitted.

Meanwhile, the press is now entering its public mea culpa phase. Some journalists have acknowledged they avoided pressing the age and capacity question because they feared being accused of disrespect, or of doing the opposition’s work. But this is exactly how institutional trust erodes: not through a lie, but through a decision not to say the truth because the truth is inconvenient.

So the question remains, and it is a constitutional one:

Should Biden have left office earlier — through resignation, the 25th Amendment, or voluntary transfer of authority?

If the answer is yes, then the Democratic Party knowingly allowed a president who could not fully execute the duties of the office to remain in place for political reasons.

If the answer is no, then the debate, the withdrawal, the reporting, and the retrospective confessions all amount to nothing.

There is no middle ground between those two realities.

A democracy cannot function on managed truth.
 A party cannot rebuild trust while denying responsibility.
 And a country cannot be asked to participate in a story it knows is false.

The tragedy is not simply that Democrats lost. It’s that they lost because they would not tell the truth when it mattered — not to the public, but to themselves.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)