Could Joe Biden Win With an Anti-Trump Message When Hillary Clinton Could Not?
Three reasons Joe Biden may have better luck than Hillary Clinton turning voters’ anti-Trump anger into an electoral victory.
After weeks of headlines centered on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s rise in the Democratic primary polls and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ return to the campaign trail with several high-profile endorsements in tow, former Vice President Joe Biden finally had good news of his own to share when a CNN poll published in late October found that his lead in the Democratic primary had hit its widest margin in six months. Similarly, a New York Times poll published last week showed Biden consistently outperforming his Democratic rivals in head-to-head polls versus Trump in key battleground states.
With fewer cable news headlines and seemingly less enthusiastic support online, Biden’s steady lead in the primary polls seems puzzling to pundits and fans of other campaigns, as FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver pointed out on Twitter:
Silver’s case for Biden rests primarily on Democratic voters’ preference for ideologically moderate candidates — which in this race are the candidates positioned to the right of the party’s more progressive demands for single payer healthcare, tuition-free college, and a $15 national minimum wage. Apart from policy, however, certain candidates are perceived as moderate based on their messaging — namely, the degree to which they emphasize the need for big, structural change in society.
While Biden may be the safest bet for Democrats who would rather fix Obamacare than go all in on Medicare For All, or who think the words “public option” are an easier sell to swing voters voters than “free healthcare for all”, I think the appeal of his moderateness is much more nuanced than simple ideological agreement. That is to say, what makes Biden a moderate is based more on how his time in the executive contrasts with Trump’s scandal-plagued White House than what policies he actually supports. This opens up the possibility of a successful anti-Trump message in 2020 where one had previously failed.
Before going into detail on why Biden may have more success running on anti-Trump fervor in 2020 than Hillary Clinton did back in 2016, I’ll briefly explain what I mean by the term “anti-Trump”.
All Democratic candidates for president are against Trump in the sense that they oppose his policies and presence in the White House. And for the most part, they all think he is guilty of abusing the power of the executive and that he should be impeached for his many offenses, including soliciting opposition research from Ukraine in exchange for aid. But in this post, I define being “anti-Trump” as being foremost opposed to Trump’s corrosion of the executive and of the Republican Party — that is, institutional political structures — and less animated by progressive demands for a clear, contrasting policy agenda.
Biden’s campaign for president fits closest to this definition of anti-Trump, and it may prove to be compelling for the following reasons:
1. Trump was never really expected to win the presidency in 2016. Hillary Clinton lead in national and state polls for the vast majority of the 2016 race. The sense of inevitability around her victory probably intensified the scrutiny she faced from progressives who felt the Democratic establishment had circled the wagons too soon around one of their own and from Republicans who had two decades of partisan attacks on the Clintons to rehash, even if they were not thrilled about their own nominee in Donald Trump. Days before the 2016 election, then-Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz admitted that Republicans were planning to keep soon-to-be President Clinton tangled up in legal battles throughout her first term.
The presumption of Clinton’s eventual win probably had the unintended consequence of demobilizing Democratic voters who were now primed to focus on Clinton’s faults rather than those of the candidate (Trump) who would never actually become president. So far, Biden does not appear to be as impacted by negative news cycles as Clinton was. His favorability rating is mixed but not in the deep negatives like Trump’s, and he is the only candidate shown consistently beating Trump in head-to-head battleground state polls.
Also, unlike in 2016, voters will now have four years of Trump to examine retrospectively. There will be no doubt this time in Trump’s chances of getting elected, so voters are likely to be persuaded from staying home as many did in 2016. Biden may not have their enthusiastic support, but Trump will have their vehement disapproval, and they’ll want to make sure he is soundly defeated at the ballot box.
2. As a political figure, Joe Biden is not as polarizing to the right or left as Hillary Clinton.
The latest skirmish involving Clinton and Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Tulsi Gabbard demonstrates that the former Democratic nominee remains the biggest foil to anti-establishment Democrats. After Clinton suggested in an interview that Gabbard was being “groomed” by Russians attempting to interfere in the 2020 election, she was roundly criticized by conservatives and progressives, including her former primary opponent Bernie Sanders.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has mostly survived attacks from progressives. In the first two Democratic debates, he was criticized for his past opposition to state-mandated busing by California Sen. Kamala Harris. Harris saw a brief bump in the polls after her exchange with Biden, but not too long after her numbers dipped, suggesting that voters were put off by her attacks on Biden. Several black Democratic elected officials also rallied around Biden after the debate. While Harris’ own record on criminal justice issues may have made her a poor choice for a critic of Biden’s race politics, ultimately attacks on Biden in this regard just don’t seem to carry weight with black voters given his eight years of service under President Obama.
Moreover, having served as Vice President, Joe Biden would not be as closely linked in voters’ minds to some of the unpopular policy positions taken by the Obama administration as Clinton would be after serving as Secretary of State. Not only is Clinton the face of Democrats’ complicity in the Bush-era invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, she reflects the party’s adoption of Bush’s interventionist impulse with the U.S. involvement in the civil wars in Libya and Syria.
In short, Biden doesn’t have to worry about decades of personal attacks poisoning the well with potential voters the way Clinton did when she ran against Trump. This is not to say that Biden’s support can’t or won’t be affected by a major scandal. Rather, there’s not a “tradition” of attacking Biden that would predispose voters to unfavorable opinions of him.
3. “Moderate” has a different meaning for Biden than it does for other candidates.
Biden’s biggest asset in the Democratic primary is that voters associate him with a popular president who had a scandal-free 8 years in the White House. In that sense, Biden’s issue positions relative to the field aren’t the only things that make him a moderate in voters’ minds. He’s also a moderating force for a deeply divided country. And a divided Democratic Party.
Ultimately, Biden’s absence from the party’s liberal versus left battle lines could help him connect with voters who view Trump’s corruption of the executive as the biggest threat to American democracy. As a former VP, Biden is best situated to make appeals to voters’ desire for decency and stability at the highest levels of government.
Of course, Biden is still going to need to offer voters more than resistance to Trump in order to win the presidency. But I think analysts underestimate voters’ anger and exhaustion with the Trump presidency and have too quickly dismissed this kind of negative partisanship as a real electoral force in 2020. Perhaps some of the bias goes to analysts assuming that whichever campaigns dominate social media discourse are also resonating with average voters. And there’s no doubt that political news media is in search of a bigger story to the primaries than Biden.
But right now, Biden’s promise to right the ship after four years of floating adrift seems promising. It is the least Democrats could do. But in 2020, less could mean more.
