Vice President Kamala Harris’s 100-day campaign for president amounted to a last-ditch effort to salvage what Democrats thought was a sure defeat if Biden stayed in the presidential race. He had fumbled spectacularly at his debate, reinforcing his age to voters with repeated verbal stumbles.

Under pressure, Biden eventually dropped out of the race, endorsing Harris to replace him on the Democratic ticket. But, party insiders are fuming at what they see as lost time to mount a proper campaign against Trump.

More commonly, Democrats complained that Biden, 81, should never have run for a second term in the first place.

“He had no business running again,” said Charlie Comfort, an Iowa Democrat and Oskaloosa City councilman. “I blame him for giving us another four years of Trump because he chose to be selfish and egotistical. His legacy is severely tarnished in my book.”

Some of the conversations in the hours after Trump won the race, improving on his 2020 margins and cutting short what was expected to be a dayslong vote-counting process, was a shift in campaign strategy.

Democrats had struggled to connect with the blue-collar workers who historically made up their voting base. She also faced growing skepticism from minority voters who traditionally vote Democratic.

“They don’t want us,” Democratic strategist Stefan Hankin said of voters, lamenting that the party had become “very preachy” and increasingly viewed as “elitist jacka**ses.”

“We are not an alternative to this, the f***ing chaos monkey,” he added.

Criticism was also reserved for Harris. Democrats continue to be haunted by her gaffe on The View, in which she told the hosts, “Not a thing that comes to mind” when asked if there is anything she would have done differently than Biden as president.

But Biden is coming under the greatest scrutiny, more than anyone else, as Democrats brace for the prospect of unified Republican control of Washington next year.

One operative told Politico that Biden was the “singular reason” Democrats lost. A senior Harris campaign official told CNN that he should “hold a lot of the blame.”

Christopher Hahn, host of the Aggressive Progressive podcast, said that anger at Biden would not “fix what went wrong” on Tuesday night.

“It was a combination of a global backlash against incumbents, messaging that didn’t resonate, and underestimating the movement that Trump created,” Hahn, a former Democratic consultant, told the Washington Examiner. “Trump did a better job of hanging voters anxieties on Harris than she did at painting him as an extremist.”

However, other political observers saw a logical connection between Biden’s actions and the outcome of the race.

“It’s conceivable that an earlier departure from the race, or a decision not to run for reelection in the first place, would have enabled a real primary process to unfold and a longer period to campaign,” said Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University.

“In the end, concerns about the economy, inflation, and immigration would have made it difficult for any Democrat in 2024, but the race could have been closer than it ultimately was,” he said.

Biden insists he could have won the presidential race had he remained at the top of the ticket. He withdrew, he repeatedly said, because he did not want to risk control of the House and Senate with a monthslong debate about his continued viability.

“You always think you could’ve won. If you go back and look at the numbers, we weren’t that far behind,” he told reporters at the August convention for Harris. “But it would’ve been close.”

Democrats’ numbers improved across the board in polling taken after Harris entered the presidential race, but she suffered a resounding loss anyway, with Trump on track to sweep all seven battleground states and win the popular vote.

The challenge for Harris was separating herself from Biden, who was underwater in polling on immigration and the economy. At the same time, she campaigned on many of his accomplishments as president.

“Harris was always walking a tightrope between stepping out of Biden’s shadow and distancing herself from his administration’s policies while not appearing to be disloyal,” said Panagopoulos. “It was a difficult balancing act.”

Democrats felt vindicated that they had pressured Biden to step aside when he made a series of high-profile gaffes in the final weeks of the race. As he stumped for Harris, he said that Trump should be locked up “politically.” Days later, he called Trump voters “garbage” in a remark that overshadowed Harris’s speech at the Elipse.

But Hankin said that any evaluation of Harris’s loss must also include the message, not just the messenger.

“We’re still doing the same things, using the same people, taking the same approaches, just expecting the ability to go back in time and recreate the Obama coalition, and like — that ship has sailed,” he said.