Assessing Joe Biden

Over on Facebook I’ve been in some heated discussions over the Democratic Presidential primary race this year. As former VP Biden consolidates his delegate count on the way to the Democratic nomination, I’ve raised the issue that I don’t think he’s going to beat Trump. Lots of my liberal friends have pushed back – some harshly – that I’m wrong, and that I’ll need to eat a lot of public crow when he wins. Since I don’t have the energy or time to rewrite my reasons across a great many platforms, I’m consolidating them here, in the hopes that folks will come and read, and at least understand.  I don’t need or want agreement.

Polling

Polling is a fickle thing – a great many people refuse to trust it since so many polls had Sec. Clinton winning right up until she lost. Yet absent polling data its hard to tell what’s going on in the electorate since the primaries are not head to head; we’ve had no debates yet, and the ad cycle is not geared to a national election. So as a data guy I turn to the state by state polling as summarized by 538. Its by no means perfect (most of the polls are pre-Super Tuesday), and I’m sure Nate Silver would trash my analysis, but I think its good enough for discussion.

Looking at 538’s polling data the picture is not at all clear for Biden.  There are three sets of states in that data – polling in states with 10 or more Electoral College Votes; Polling in states with less then 10 Electoral College votes; and a surprising group of states with varying EC votes but no real polling (Illinois I’m looking at you).  If you add the most recent state polling averages for Mr. Biden and the President, and chart them against the available electors in each state you get my first table.  The “Electors with no polling” are an assumption that states Trump won in 2016 are states he’d still win, and that states Clinton won in 2016 are states Biden wins now. 

Electoral College Totals if Polling holds

	Trump	Biden
Polling total electors 10+	116	270
Polling total electors -10	75	54
Electors no Polling	37	18
Electoral Totals	228	342

Its worth noting that a lot of the states Biden wins in current polling at +5 Biden or lower, and I think its reasonable to say those states are in play for the President if he chooses to contest them.

As we know however, the state and national polling missed a lot of the actual trend information last time, and when it was all done, Trump have flipped 5 states that have 10 or more EC votes from Obama to himself (Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin).  While Biden is currently leading polls in Florida, Michigan and Ohio, he’s only managed to pull even Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  Which means the With Current Polling totals put PA and WI in the President’s column since he took them last time (tie goes to the runner and all).

If, however, you move all the flipped states to the President, and hold the rest constant, you get my second table, which is telling.  By holding those flipped states along with all his other prior wins and current polling leads, the President remains in office. This seems to be the strategy the President’s campaign is banking on, based on rallies since he took office. It also means the VP’s campaign has to work harder in states he might otherwise want to avoid to prevent their loss again. Since he still doesn’t have the nomination, I don’t know if he will pivot successfully, but its not a given and not reassuring.

Electoral College Totals if 2016 Flipped states stay flipped
	Trump	Biden
Flipped total electors 10+	199	187
Polling total electors -10	75	54
Electors no Polling	37	18
Electoral Totals	311	259

Policy

The biggest policy challenge on the campaign trail will be economic.  The President has benefited enormously so far from the upward economic trends Mr. Obama left him, and has not managed to tank those trends. Despite his rhetoric however, his actual economic policies are not keeping manufacturing, returning coal jobs or making sure wages are climbing. And while he hasn’t succeeded in taking out the Affordable Care Act entirely, it’s not for a lack of trying. This means he can still be shot at for economics, but as long as unemployment remains low, wages don’t back slide, GDP remains steady, and stocks don’t majorly correct his economics won’t get a deeper look.

Mr. Biden on the other hand is all in on the Neoliberal economic approach that Sec. Clinton and Mr. Obama favored.  That means he prefers to act for the good of the corporation when government acts economically, and he’s not likely to support Single Payer or any other health care reform that pushes us to a more equitable model.  He can certainly point to the successes of the Obama Administration in arresting the Great Recession, but much of that was not in labor or infrastructure development, and main street’s recovery is still lagging Wall Street.

Lots of people took their anger about not getting bailed out when the banks and auto makers did out on Sec. Clinton, and Mr. Biden’s policies are no different. While folks may be doing better paycheck to paycheck now, they aren’t likely to associate that with him. This all means his economic approach isn't aligned with either real needs or perceptions of success.

History

In my lifetime there hasn’t been a centrist Democrat who has defeated a sitting Republican up for a second term, and the only open Centerist to win office was Bill Clinton. Mr. Obama, if you will recall, ran initially as a progressive and then governed from the center.  But Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton all ran as centerists and lost. Biden was part of most of those elections either as a Senator or as a candidate, and its telling that he’s the only one left still trying to win the WH.  Now past is not always prologue – the current President is an excellent example of that – but again, Mr. Biden is campaigning from a place that historically hasn’t worked for Democrats.

Perception

Like it or not, modern politics is as much about perception as policy (perhaps more so), and here Mr. Biden faces an almost vertical climb.  There remains a sizable portion of the population – across party lines but more so Republicans and Independents – who do not believe Washington (by which they often mean Congress) is or was fighting for them. I hear it a lot from southern moderates who voted Obama twice then went Trump.  And like it or not the President has a VERY blustery “Fighter's” demeanor.  Sure, he deploys it to attack and “other” all sorts of people, but until Chuck Schumer’s ill-advised rant on the Supreme Court steps this week most folks would be hard pressed to identify a Democrat on the national stage who has done anything similar.  Mr. Biden isn’t really capable of running up the rage tweets or the mocking of people, and even if he were it would not play well with large swaths of the electorate.  But the President promised to “blow up Washington” and he is definitely doing so in ways that feed the fighter perception – damning as they are to the rule of law and the Constitution.

Mr. Biden will also be dogged all the way to November by the "investigations" of his son's "corruption" in Ukraine, and his alleged role in that.  The optics are in no way good - Hunter Biden did spend years receiving $50,000 a month for sitting on a corporate board  - and to a great many people it will look unethical even though its not illegal.  The Senate is poised to issue Hunter Biden subpoenas on the matter - which I am sure he will ignore on the advice of counsel.  That will also be used against the elder Mr. Biden as further evidence that he's corrupt in an almost caricatured way.  And yes, the same accusations could be made against Mr. Trump and his kids, but so no one has.

Summing it all up

Ok, ok some of you may say – his polling is ambivalent at best (but its sure to come up closer to the convention when he has the nomination locked); his economic policies are not going to win back the Obama-turned-Trump voters (but he’ll get better help with what he does try because the Senate will flip to join the House); he’s not perceived as a fighter (but people are getting tired of the fighting); no Centerist Democrat has unseated a Republican up for reelection (but Obama!).  Fine, you say.  Joe is still our guy because he’s going to bring us back to something we think we recognize as normal. And that’s enough.  That’s a start.

It is a start.  It’s not enough however.  Sec. Clinton won by 3 million votes, and still lost the White House. The Senate stayed Republican – and the consequences of that will still need unraveling by my kids when the judges that have been confirmed all finally die.  The House stayed Republican through 2018 – and now we have to hold it against a Republican onslaught at significant cost of finite campaign resources.  And the Democratic Party is now 20+ years in to being captured by big money – the same big money that has driven the Republican Party hard right and that created economic conditions that Republicans could leverage against racial animus to put the current President in power.

Much of that is directly attributable to the votes not cast.  The 45% who stayed home. And the loss of key battleground states that are showing dead even right now in the polling.  Joe Biden is not the clear national alternative to the President. He is nowhere nearly as inspiring as Sec. Clinton.  He still has a significant uphill battle to get there, and then he has to sustain momentum in more places and more ways the Hillary Clinton did. Both his track record and his experience of this campaign do not lend confidence that he will.

I hope I am very wrong.  But this isn’t about hope.  It’s about fighting for what’s right.  It’s about a last stand for democracy in a crashing republic.  It’s about pushing back authoritarianism once and for all.  For that Democrats have to move much further left and much more quickly.  Incrementalism is part of what got us here. Incrementalism will not save us.

And for reasons best left to another blog post – Bernie Sanders is all that we have left of the left.

Thanks to his bluster and the Bernie Bros he’s at least got the fighter thing down pat.