The Idealism of Joe Biden, and the Democratic Electorate

look I clearly did not see Super Tuesday coming but neither did you, probably, so let's try and make sense of it together okay

(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Here is what we know about Joe Biden.

He is gaffe-prone. He has a virtual treasure trove of C-SPAN clips from a decades-long career in America’s least popular institution, supporting some of its least popular policies, among them the wars on drugs, crime and terror. His son was recently at the center of the president’s impeachment inquiry. 

He is also now the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

I didn’t see it coming, and I’m willing to bet you didn’t either. So let’s try and make sense of it, shall we?

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It is hard to take an honest look at the Biden campaign and not see every plague that befell Hillary Clinton in 2016. For better or for worse, there will be attacks on Biden’s cognitive function, just as there were on Hillary’s. Senate Republicans have already promised to probe Hunter Biden, and we may very well see the former vice president and his erstwhile son as a fixture in sub-committee hearings in the coming month. “But her emails” could be “but his Ukranian gas company.” And a non-insignificant number of Bernie Sanders’s base, disaffected with a nominee unsympathetic to their concerns and bombarded with reels of Biden clamoring for segregationists and cuts to already-meager entitlements, will stay home.

The reality of that scenario is almost palpable. It’s a sentiment I heard from many Sanders supporters, both in and out of my personal bubble, as the results churned in on Tuesday night. If it seems so obvious, then why isn’t Sanders winning, they ask. And, to that, I would say to listen to the words of the now-frontrunner:

“Look, our campaign reflects the diversity of this party in this nation, and that’s how it should be, because we need to bring everybody along, everybody. We want a nominee who will beat Donald Trump, but also also keep Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, win back the United States Senate. If that’s what you want, join us. You want a nominee who’s a Democrat, a life long Democrat, a proud Democrat, an Obama Biden Democrat.”

Biden’s pitch has never been on policy. That’s because his policies are profoundly unpopular. In every Super Tuesday state, Democratic primary voters preferred public over private health care. Even in Tennessee, long a bastion of Blue Dog conservatism, primary voters said they preferred socialism over capitalism.

Thus, the Biden’s campaign boils down to a single, self-fulfilling prophecy: he’s electable. Why is he electable? Well, it’s not because of policies, or his individual strengths as an orator. And this is not to say that he’s a bad candidate, or that Sanders is a better candidate than Biden. A large part of the story last night — and, earlier on, New Hampshire — was how much of Sanders’s rural support in 2016 was a reaction to Clintonism, rather than the groundswell of a genuine socialist movement. Just look at the difference between Sanders’s vote share in 2016 and 2020 in Oklahoma, for example.

Voters like Sanders, consistently more so than Biden. They just don’t think he can win, and thus — despite it all — put all their eggs in the Biden basket. Most people don’t have the time to analyze the minutiae of electoral politics. They just go with the adults in the room tell them. It is irresponsible of the press to not use whatever limited share of a voters’ attention span to push Biden on his policies, far more out of step with the average Democratic voter than Sanders, or even Elizabeth Warren. It helps when Biden is the only candidate that the media can talk about.

If the exit polls say anything, it is that there are little to no socially or economically conservative voters within the Democratic Party anymore. Instead, the ideological fault lines are split among those who want to tear down the system, and those who are content with working within it. There are currently more of the latter group than the former — as we saw Tuesday night —  but the former group is younger. They don’t vote as much, sure. But is it because they don’t care, or is it because so many of them are working two jobs to keep the lights on, see the massive lines to vote, and ascertain that they simply don’t have the time to participate? Would it be a fair assumption, on their end, that this is a broken system? 

If Biden voters really just want a return to the Obama years, then the media should call them conservatives. Conservatism is, after all, an ideology centered around a return to tradition. They might not necessarily think themselves that Medicare for All is too far left. They just think it’s too far left for other people, and thus stop them from what they really want more than anything, more than structural change: to get rid of Donald Trump. It’s a valid viewpoint, but also a conservative one.

If you had come up to your run-of-the-mill liberal in December 2016 — a good person, mind you, just not a particularly politically engaged one — and asked them who’d they think would be the best fit to take on Trump in four years, it’d be Biden, followed by Sanders and Warren. It seems instinctively true, and it also happens to be the results of the only poll we had from that time period. The takeaway that voters got from the 2016 election was that Donald Trump was an aberration, not a product, of the system. That may be true. But a Biden presidency will do nothing to change that system. And, until then, with every downballot Republican trying to replicate Trump’s strongman demeanor, there’s every chance we’ll get a new Trump. And the narrative writes itself again.