Biden left office as the first one-term Democratic president since Jimmy Carter, with approval ratings under 40%. He angered some allies on the way out, pardoning his son Hunter after promising not to and suggesting that he, unlike Harris, could have won the 2024 election. (Few Democrats believe that, outside of Biden’s inner circle.)

Former President Barack Obama hit the trail for Democrats in last year’s competitive elections, but Biden stayed away. He spoke up after the off-year races were over, addressing Nebraska Democrats at a party dinner as Gaza protesters were kept behind a police line outside.

“We handed Donald Trump, literally not figuratively, the strongest economy in the world,” Biden said in Omaha. That set the tone for his next political speech, a commemoration of his 2020 South Carolina primary win, in which he derided Trump for a net job loss in his first term.

Few Democrats were as committed as Biden to defending his record, but the former president’s allies believe he’s being vindicated by Trump. In national Harvard-Harris polling this year, 53% of voters said that the economy was worse than it had been under Biden, and 62% blamed Trump for the decline.

“The Democratic candidates and party leaders who saw through the endless yelling about his age — and stayed focused on what he actually delivered for the American people — are the ones earning his endorsement,” said Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Fleming Kleeb. “And they will win their elections, because voters see the good Joe Biden did for our party’s infrastructure and for our country’s infrastructure.”

That sentiment may be giving Democrats with Biden ties a real boost with Democratic voters, even when their work for his administration wasn’t particularly well-reviewed. Becerra, whose Cabinet role came about largely thanks to a push from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, now highlights that work as executive experience no other Democrat can match.

“Who has had to declare a crisis, a state of emergency, of the candidates that are running — at the scale of California?” Becerra asked at a town hall meeting in the Central Valley last month. “Only one candidate: Me.”

Republicans and one Democrat, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, view Becerra’s Biden record as a weakness. At their last debate, on April 28, the only mention of the Biden administration came from Mahan, who used it to attack Becerra’s record.

“The secretary has never met a crisis that he couldn’t ignore, whether it was migrant children, the 85,000 who were lost; monkeypox, where we were slow to respond and then blamed the gay community for the crisis; or COVID, where the Biden administration had to sideline him,” Mahan said.

“You’re not wearing a mask, are you, Matt?” Becerra shot back. “You are not worried about catching monkeypox, right? We were able to deal with these crises.”

The grumbling over Biden’s record has been quieter in Georgia, where Republicans nervous about their own messy primary see Lance Bottoms as a weak potential nominee. Republicans quickly blended her Biden endorsement into their messaging, which focused more on the former Atlanta mayor’s single term as well as her perceived mishandling of the pandemic and national unrest that defined the summer of 2020.

“Keisha Lance Bottoms burned Atlanta to the ground,” Trump-endorsed GOP contender Burt Jones said on X. “Now she and Joe Biden want to do it again.”

Unlike Becerra, who endorsed Biden well after he won the 2020 nomination, Lance Bottoms was an early supporter who defended him to the hilt and made an early running-mate list. In her memoir, published last month, Lance Bottoms writes that she turned down an unspecified Cabinet job to finish her mayoral term.

She spent just eight months leading Biden’s Office of Public Liaison, saying on the way out that the president’s “poll numbers have gone up tremendously,” then served on the low-profile presidential export council. As a 2024 campaign surrogate, she did not join the stampede of Democrats urging him to quit after his final debate with Trump.

“I was surprised by the president’s performance,” she wrote of Biden at the time. “I had never experienced a moment with him that made me question his physical or cognitive abilities.”

Like Koh, she asked the former president for an endorsement, and got it. Her Democratic primary rivals saw her record in Atlanta and DC as easy fodder for Republicans. But the ex-president’s popularity with their own voters made it hard for them to attack it first.