Joe Biden leaves a mixed legacy as Americans vote

Washington — Americans head to the polls on Tuesday in a mood of discontent and division, with opinion polls showing almost two-thirds of voters believe the country has been heading in the wrong direction under President Joe Biden.

While the US economy is the envy of the industrialised world, emerging from Covid shutdowns with strong job growth and wage increases, many Americans complain those gains were gobbled up by high grocery and housing prices.

Biden’s promise of a return to a more humane immigration regime than under Republican former President Donald Trump soon collided with the reality of a sharp increase in illegal border crossings.

The Supreme Court upended the legal landscape around abortion rights by overturning Roe v Wade, inflaming one of the most divisive issues in US politics.

And despite Biden’s pledge that America would serve as a stabilising force in the world, overseas conflicts have overshadowed his presidency.

Whoever triumphs in the election — Trump or vice-president Kamala Harris — will inherit the legacy of a Biden administration that made good on some promises, saw others swept off-course by events, and others still only partially fulfilled. Here’s how Biden fared on the defining issues of his presidency.

Immigration

Biden, a Democrat, started his presidency by reversing many of Trump’s restrictive immigration policies. He halted construction of a border wall; rescinded bans targeting people from certain majority-Muslim countries and other nations; and wound down the “remain in Mexico” programme, which forced non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as they pursued their US cases.

But months into his presidency, illegal crossings shot up, particularly among unaccompanied children from Central America, overwhelming US border processing centres and fuelling Republican criticism.

Illegal crossings reached record levels in 2022 and 2023 as more migrants arrived from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and countries outside the hemisphere.

In response, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, in 2022 started transporting arriving migrants north to Democratic cities including New York City and Chicago, which struggled to house them.

In January, Biden backed a bipartisan bill that aimed to tighten border security. After the bill was defeated in the Senate amid Trump’s opposition, Biden in June banned asylum for most migrants crossing the border illegally.

The number of migrants caught crossing illegally dropped dramatically, undercutting Trump’s false claims that Harris and Democrats support an open border.

Despite the political pressures surrounding migration, Biden created new legal pathways for hundreds of thousands of migrants and oversaw the restoration of the US refugee programme, which admitted more than 100,000 refugees in fiscal year 2024, the most in 30 years.

Abortion

The biggest upheaval on abortion access in decades occurred during Biden’s presidency — though as a result  of a decision by the Supreme Court.

In June 2022, the conservative majority formed by Trump’s judicial appointments to the court eliminated the almost 50-year-old federal right to abortion under Roe v Wade.

The decision ushered in a period in which individual states set laws on abortion access. More than a dozen states banned abortion in all or most cases.

Biden condemned the Supreme Court ruling, and his administration, through the department of health and human services and the justice department, laid out guidelines to ensure access to emergency abortion care under federal law and defended the use of the abortion pill before the Supreme Court.

The administration also pushed for expanded access to reproductive health services such as contraception through the Affordable Care Act.

The administration won its biggest victory in June when the Supreme Court rejected a case brought by anti-abortion advocates seeking to roll back the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, one of two medications used in the abortion pill regimen.

But the court dismissed on procedural grounds the administration’s case arguing that Idaho’s severe abortion ban conflicted with a federal law requiring medical providers to offer stabilising emergency care, including abortions. In October, the court declined to hear a similar administration case about Texas’s strict abortion ban.

While Biden, a devout Catholic, was openly uncomfortable about abortion from early in his political career, mitigating the affects of the dissolution of Roe v Wade has become a pillar of his presidency.

Democrats more broadly made abortion rights central to their platform in the 2022 midterm elections. In March, Harris became the first sitting vice-president or president to visit an abortion clinic.

Economy

Biden may go down in history as overseeing the best economy that everyone hated.

Since 2021, as the country emerged from a global pandemic that briefly created historic job losses and brought the economy to a near-standstill, employers have added almost 16.5-million new jobs. The unemployment rate has averaged just 4.2%, including the longest run at 4% or below since the 1960s.

GDP growth has averaged 3.2% per quarter, well above what most economists view as the US economy’s long-term potential. Incomes and wages have grown above trend. Collective household net worth has climbed to a record $163.8-trillion, thanks to a booming stock market and rising home values.

But survey after survey over most of Biden’s term has shown little of that registering with average Americans. Why? Because all of that occurred against the backdrop of the worst inflation breakout in a generation.

As the economy reopened, a mix of tangled supply chains, worker shortages and hot consumer demand, supported by about $5-trillion of government stimulus from Biden’s and Trump’s administrations, sent prices climbing — fast.

By the summer of 2022, the consumer price index was rising by 9.1% year on year and the widely followed gauge of household satisfaction with the economy — the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index — tumbled to a record low.

While inflation has receded and sentiment has begun to recover, surveys show Americans still feel the sting of lingering high prices, and they blame Biden and Democrats for it.

Racial justice

On his first day in the White House, Biden signed an executive order aimed at addressing racism, police brutality, poverty and inequities affecting  Black people and other communities of colour.

But reform has been slow. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, introduced in 2021 to stop aggressive law enforcement tactics and racial bias, stalled in Congress.

In 2022, Biden issued an executive order directing the department of justice to create a national database of misconduct by federal law enforcement officers and requiring federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the use of deadly force or deaths in custody. It also restricted federal agencies from using chokeholds and “no knock” entries.

While the justice department revived investigations into civil rights abuses, which had largely stopped under Trump, it has failed to secure a single binding settlement in the 12 investigations opened into possible police civil rights abuses since Biden took office.

On the economic front, Black unemployment fell to a historic low last year. This year alone, the administration directed $1.5bn in loans to Black-owned businesses. It has also invested more than $16bn in historically Black colleges and universities and distributed $2.2bn to more than 43,000 Black and other farmers who experienced discrimination. Last year, the Biden administration allocated $470m to improve maternal health.

Foreign policy

From wars in Ukraine and Gaza to civil bloodshed in Sudan, overseas conflicts have dominated Biden’s foreign policy agenda.

Biden came to office promising to restore US global leadership and determined to push back on an increasingly aggressive China.

In some ways, his administration has done just that. After the chaotic 2021 withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, Biden rallied allies the following year to oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has also revitalised alliances across Asia to pressure China’s leadership.

Still, US has struggled to bring the grinding conflicts to an end, and hasn’t been able to prevent the deepening ties between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Now in its third year, the war of attrition in Ukraine continues despite billions of dollars in US military aid and huge losses on both sides. The conflict is increasingly international amid Western accusations that Moscow is receiving weapons and soldiers from North Korea, missiles and drones from Iran and technical and other support from China.

The war between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, which started when Hamas fighters staged a deadly attack into Israel, has metastasised into conflict between Israel and Lebanese militants Hezbollah and sparked reprisal attacks between Israel and Iran.

Biden’s staunch support for Israel has divided his party and undercut the US’s ability to criticise other countries on human rights and violations of international law.

A conflict in Sudan has triggered ethnic violence and famine conditions in that country’s Darfur region, where violence about 20 years ago led to the International Criminal Court charging former Sudanese leaders with genocide and crimes against humanity. The US has been trying to help broker an end to the 18-month-long conflict.

Energy transition

Biden entered the White House with huge ambitions to fight climate change by transitioning the US economy away from fossil fuels to cleaner, renewable sources — all while creating new green, unionised jobs and reshoring manufacturing.

Among his goals was ending federal oil and gas leasing, expanding deployments of solar and wind energy to decarbonise the power grid, electrifying the nation’s vehicle fleet, and ultimately putting the economy on a path to become carbon-neutral by 2050.

On the win side of the ledger, Biden signed into law three pieces of legislation that have driven huge investment in the clean energy economy: the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the bipartisan infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act, which aims to establish a domestic semiconductor supply chain that could insulate the domestic energy sector from supply shocks.

Under the IRA, companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in new solar, wind, electric vehicles and infrastructure, battery storage and other climate-friendly projects that have sped up the energy transition and created jobs — largely in Republican states whose legislators did not support the law.

The administration has awarded $90bn in grants to climate, clean energy, and other projects under the IRA, or about 70% of the law’s climate-focused grant money, according to administration officials.

The Biden administration also expanded federal leasing for renewable energy projects, and passed regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants and oil and gas operations.

On the loss side, his administration’s attempts to end federal oil and gas leasing failed in the courts, and his policies failed to prevent a huge surge in US oil and gas output — mostly on privately owned land in Texas and New Mexico — that has made the US the world’s top petroleum producer.

And in perhaps the best litmus test of Biden’s climate actions, projections from the Rhodium Group — an independent research provider — show US greenhouse gas admissions are set to decline by 32%-43% by 2030 under current policies, short of Biden’s 50%-52% goal.

Reuters