Harris or Trump will inherit a mixed legacy in 2024 US election

Americans head to the polls on Tuesday in a mood of discontent and division, with opinion polls showing nearly 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-19 shutdowns with strong job growth and wage increases, many Americans complain the 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 an increase in illegal border crossings.

The supreme court upended the legal landscape around abortion rights by overturning Roe vs Wade, inflaming one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

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 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 He halted construction of Trump’s border wall, rescinded bans targeting people from certain majority-Muslim countries and other nations and wound down the “remain in Mexico” programme, which forced non-Mexican asylum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 while they pursued their US cases.

However, months into his presidency, illegal crossings spiked, 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 and Venezuela and countries outside the hemisphere.

In response, Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, in 2022, began busing 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 US 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,  but because of a decision by the Supreme Court.

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

The decision ushered in a period in which individual states set their own 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.

However, the court dismissed on procedural grounds the administration's case arguing 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' strict abortion ban.

While devoutly Catholic Biden was openly uncomfortable about abortion from early in his political career, mitigating the impacts of the dissolution of Roe vs 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 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 nearly 16.5-million new jobs. The unemployment rate has averaged only 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 US household net worth has climbed to a record $163.8-trillion (R2.8-quadrillion), thanks to a booming stock market and rising home values.

However, 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 roughly $5-trillion (R87-trillion) of government stimulus from Biden's and Trump's administrations, sent prices climbing, and fast.

By the summer of 2022, the consumer price index was rising by 9.1% year-over-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 continue to 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 impacting black people and other communities of colour.

However, 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 and deaths in custody. It also restricted federal agencies from using chokeholds and “no knock” entries.

While Biden's 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 R26.1bn) in loans to black-owned businesses. It has also invested more than $16bn (R279bn) in historically black colleges and universities and distributed $2.2bn (R38bn) to more than 43,000 black and other farmers who experienced discrimination. Last year, the Biden administration allocated $470m (R8.1bn) 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 in the world and determined to push back on an increasingly aggressive China.

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

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

In its third year, the war of attrition in Ukraine continues despite billions in US military aid and massive losses on both sides. The conflict is increasingly international, with 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 ability of the US to criticise others for human rights abuses and violations of international law.

A conflict in Sudan has triggered ethnic violence and famine conditions in Sudan'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 US manufacturing. Among his goals was to put an end to federal oil and gas leasing, expand deployments of solar and wind energy to decarbonise the power grid, electrify the nation’s vehicle fleet, and put 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 a massive investment in the clean energy economy, namely 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 in 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 lawmakers did not support the legislation.

The administration has awarded $90bn (R1.5-trillion) 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 new 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 massive surge in US oil and gas output — mostly on privately owned lands in Texas and New Mexico — that has made the US the world’s top petroleum producer.

In perhaps the best litmus test of Biden’s climate actions, projections from the Rhodium Group show US greenhouse gas admissions set to decline by 32% to 43% by 2030 under current policies, short of Biden's 50% to 52% goal.

Reuters