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 Pete Buttigieg, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, 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 President Donald Trump’s 2024 election that delivered him 77,302,580 votes. 

Harris, meanwhile, is in the midst of an 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 young 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 said in the prerecorded video. 

“And born out of our love for our country, keep fighting to build a country and a nation that works for everyone,” she said. “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 and Harris’ absences from 2025 races, “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.”

The Democratic 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 Trump in June 2024. Party members began suggesting, and then 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 party into a tailspin as it worked to build a presidential campaign with a new top-ticket candidate 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 Democratic 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 from its 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 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. 

Virginia Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones’ campaign continued to take in major donations from Democrats and Democratic-aligned PACs even after it was revealed he had envisioned the murder of a Republican leader and his family — while his reckless driving case remains under further investigation.

The Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), which painstakingly publishes donor names, amounts, lawmakers’ biographies, bills, district maps and more, printed data from Jones’ latest campaign finance disclosures this week.

Since the murder text scandal broke on October 3, Jones received more than $1 million in donations. Fox News Digital pored through some of the higher-dollar amounts, focusing on donors who contributed $5,000 or more since then.

DAGA PAC, the political action committee supporting Democratic attorneys general, dumped nearly 75% of that million-dollar-figure in three tranches in the last two weeks: two gifts of $250,000 and another expenditure of $230,000.

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The next highest donor was the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus.

The group, chaired by Del. Luke Torian, D-Montclair, and Del. Joshua Cole, D-Fredericksburg, contributed $50,000 on October 20, and had given another $50,000 one day before Jones’ murder texts scandal broke.

The Virginia Eighth District Democratic Committee – a party organization comprised of people from Rep. Don Beyer’s heavily blue Alexandria-Fairfax congressional district, but not connected to the congressman himself – gave $30,000 to Jones’ campaign on October 21, according to VPAP.

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The largest individual donor in the timeframe was Norfolk attorney and executive Adam Casagrande, the vice president of a Virginia Beach diving supply company that sells equipment and provides logistics to the Pentagon. Casagrande gave Jones $25,000, according to VPAP, and has given substantive sums to Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., ex-Gov. Terry McAuliffe and several Norfolk Democrats.

Another $25,000 came from an individual named Scott Shenker, who appears in VPAP records as a top donor from Berkeley, California, with similar contributions to McAuliffe, Spanberger and former House Democratic Leader Eileen Filler-Corn.

The next highest donor was Karen Waldron, identified by VPAP as a Botetourt County real estate developer, who gave $15,000 to Jones on October 17, and also gave to Lily Franklin – a Democrat battling Del. Chris Obenshain, R-Roanoke, in what is likely to be one of the closest races in the state House sweeps.

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Shahir Kassam-Adams of Lovingston made the next-largest contribution since Jones’ scandals surfaced, donating $10,000.

One notable donor who gave $5,000 a few days prior to the scandals rocking the news cycle was Jonathan Soros, the younger son of left-wing Hungarian American billionaire George Soros.

Attorneys for a Virginia teacher shot by her 6-year-old student told jurors that the school’s former assistant principal ignored repeated warnings the boy had a gun, as a $40 million civil trial opened in Newport News.

The $40 million civil trial filed by first-grade teacher Abigail Zwerner, who was shot by a 6-year-old student in 2023 with a 9 mm handgun, entered its opening phase Tuesday as attorneys delivered their opening remarks and the first witnesses took the stand.

The lawsuit accuses former school administrator Ebony Parker of failing to act after the first-grade teacher, the guidance counselor, the music teacher and the reading specialist informed her that the boy might have a gun. Zwerner is suing Parker, who resigned after the shooting.

“No one could have imagined that a 6-year-old first-grade student would bring a firearm into a school,” Parker’s attorney, Daniel Hogan, told jurors. “You will be able to judge for yourself whether or not this was foreseeable. That’s the heart of this case.”

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On Jan. 6, 2023, the boy pulled the gun from his hoodie and shot the 25-year-old teacher, with the bullet tearing through her left hand and lodging in her chest.

“1:58 p.m., BANG!” Zwerner’s attorney, Diane Toscano, said in opening statements. “A bullet went through Abby’s hand, then through her chest.” The bullet is still in Zwerner’s body because it’s too dangerous to remove, she added.

Zwerner’s lawyer accused Parker of being grossly negligent because she had several opportunities to confiscate the gun based on the information provided by others.

“She made bad decisions that day,” Toscano said.

Hogan said that decision-making in a public school setting is “cooperative” and “collaborative.” He also warned of hindsight bias and “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

“The law knows that it is fundamentally unfair to judge another person’s decisions based on stuff that came up after the fact,” Hogan said. “The law requires you to examine people’s decisions at the time they make them.”

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Dr. Nina Farrish, the director of human resources for Newport News Public Schools, testified that Parker admitted to her two or three days after the shooting that it was reported around 12:20 p.m. the student had a gun in his backpack. That was more than 90 minutes before the shooting.

Amy Kovac, the reading specialist, was in Parker’s office when Zwerner told Parker the boy had threatened a kindergartner and had been aggressive with a security officer during lunch. Parker never looked up at Zwerner, who had to leave to return to class, Kovac testified.

“She told me I could tell [Zwerner] that she could call his mom at any time to come pick him up,” Kovac testified Tuesday.

When she confronted the 6-year-old, she recalled telling him, “Can I have the bag?” and the boy replied, “No, no one is getting that bag.”

Kovac said she immediately warned Parker, only to be brushed off: “She did say, well, he has little pockets.”

Kovac testified that she pressed Parker again, saying the child might have slipped the weapon into his jacket pocket. Minutes later, after hearing the gunshot, Kovac ran to Zwerner’s classroom.

“I felt like I had a bubble of God around me, and I walked straight to him,” she told jurors.

The boy, she said, stood “with his legs kind of spread open, arms crossed and cocked.”

Kovac testified she grabbed his wrist and restrained him, using Zwerner’s phone to call for help.

“I said, this is Richneck. A teacher’s been shot. I have the shooter. Send help.”

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Another first-grade teacher at the school, Jennifer West, testified Tuesday that a “visibly nervous” student told her after recess that the 6-year-old had a gun on him, and he saw the firearm and bullet.

She said she called the front office to report this to an administrator, per protocol, and also spoke to a school counselor about it.

The counselor, Rolonzo Rawles, testified Tuesday that he asked Parker if he could search the child’s person for a gun and that she responded that the student’s mother would be arriving to get him soon and to wait to check him then.

“I didn’t want to step over any boundaries, so I wasn’t going to check him without permission,” Rawles said.

Toscano argued that Parker had the authority as the assistant principal to act.

“Who would think a 6-year-old is going to bring a gun to school and shoot their teacher?” she said. “Dr. Parker’s job is to believe that is possible.”

Parker faces a separate criminal trial next month on eight counts of felony child neglect, one for “each of the eight bullets that endangered all the students” in Zwerner’s classroom, prosecutors said.

The mother of the boy who shot Zwerner, Deja Taylor, was sentenced to two years in prison for felony neglect and federal weapons charges. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.