At least nine Democrats who served in the Biden administration are running for Congress or governor this cycle — and almost none of them want voters to know it.
Across campaign websites, launch videos, and promotional materials, Biden alumni are performing a coordinated vanishing act on the man who gave them their most prominent jobs. No photos. No name drops. No trace of the 46th president, except where absolutely unavoidable — and even then, wrapped in enough euphemism to make a press secretary blush.
The pattern is unmistakable. These aren't obscure staffers hoping nobody Googles them. These are ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, and senior White House officials who now treat their own résumés like classified documents, as Axios reported.
Start with Bridget Brink, Biden's ambassador to Ukraine, now running for a Republican-held House seat in Michigan. In her announcement video, she told voters she proudly served "under five presidents, both Democrat and Republican" — while photos of Obama and George W. Bush flashed on screen. The president who actually appointed her as ambassador? Nowhere to be found.
Michael Roth, Biden's interim leader of the Small Business Administration, is challenging Rep. Tom Kean Jr. in New Jersey. His website describes him as a leader "trusted by senators, governors, mayors, and a president." Which president? He'd rather not say.
Then there's Deb Haaland, Biden's Interior secretary, now running for governor of New Mexico. Her website refers to her cabinet tenure only as holding the position "for the past four years" — no mention of who put her there. In a revealing twist, her site does mention Trump, boasting about her work with him in getting seven House bills she introduced signed into law. Biden gets erased; Trump gets a highlight reel.
Xavier Becerra, Biden's Health and Human Services secretary, is running for governor of California. Biden appeared in neither his campaign launch video nor his website. Doug Jones, the former senator who served as Biden's "sherpa" guiding Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court nomination, left Biden off his website and kickoff video for his Alabama governor's race.
A national Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity, explained the calculus plainly:
"Joe Biden's lingering unpopularity is proving to be a serious drag on Biden alums running in swing districts across the country."
The strategist went further:
"They're unable to talk about their most recent and often most high-profile job experience without alienating general election voters."
Read that again. These candidates cannot mention the most significant line on their résumé without hurting their chances. That is the Biden legacy, distilled to a single strategic verdict.
The reversal from recent history makes the silence louder. In the 2018 midterms, Democratic candidates tripped over each other to associate themselves with Barack Obama. Biden himself was a sought-after surrogate on the campaign trail. Haaland said at the time that she wouldn't have had the courage to run if she hadn't worked for Obama's campaigns.
Obama was an asset. Biden is an anchor.
Ryan Vetticad, a former presidential management fellow at the Department of Justice, now running for a House seat in Illinois, was asked about leaving Biden out of his campaign materials. His response was diplomatic but unmistakable:
"It's not the priority for me."
He elaborated:
"There's a lot of things that Democrats did wrong in the 2024 cycle, so I want to chart a new way forward."
"Chart a new way forward" is the kind of language you use when the old way led somewhere catastrophic. Vetticad isn't wrong about 2024. He's just not willing to say the quiet part any louder than he has to.
Only one candidate among the group leaned into his Biden service. Christian Urrutia, running for a House seat in New Hampshire, highlighted his work at the Pentagon under Biden on his website, arguing that "people are hungry for folks that are authentic." The key detail: his seat is viewed as solidly or likely Democratic. He can afford the association because he doesn't need swing voters.
In competitive districts, Biden's name is poison. In safe blue seats, it's merely irrelevant. Neither scenario reflects well on the former president's political standing.
The implications stretch beyond the midterms. Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg — both Biden administration alumni — are cited as potential 2028 presidential candidates. If midlevel appointees running for House seats can't afford the Biden association, the problem compounds exponentially for anyone seeking the presidency on the strength of that same administration's record.
A former Biden White House official dismissed the whole pattern as "a manufactured, press-driven narrative." A Biden spokesperson declined to comment at all. These are not the responses of people who believe the narrative is wrong. They're the responses of people who have no good answer for it.
Meanwhile, Republicans are doing exactly what you'd expect. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York wasted no time tying his Democratic challenger, Cait Conley, to Biden on social media, calling her "the director of counterterrorism on the Biden National Security Council during the fall of Kabul and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan." Conley did not respond to a request for comment.
The candidates can scrub their websites. They can film slick launch videos that mention every president except the one who hired them. But opponents have Google, and voters have memories. The Biden record doesn't disappear because a web designer omitted it.
Doug Jones, at least, tried to split the difference. He told Axios he was "proud of the work I did for my friend President Biden," then added that "as the campaign evolves, so too will our website and future materials." Translation: the website will eventually mention Biden — once the campaign calculates the least damaging way to do it.
This is what a historically unpopular presidency looks like in its aftermath. Not a single one of these candidates is running on Biden's record. Not one is making the case that his administration improved the lives of the voters they're courting. The silence is the review.
Democrats salivate at the prospect of major gains in November. They may even get them. But they'll do it by pretending the last Democratic president doesn't exist — which tells you everything about what that presidency actually delivered.
