BIDEN HITS A HOME RUN AT THE DNC: NIGHT 3

VOX

 Joe Biden was facing a convention that he wishes were nominating him, and at which he remains quite popular. In that unenviable position, he stepped up in a big way. He gave exactly the speech that someone needed to give on Clinton’s behalf: a speech aimed squarely at working-class voters who might be attracted to Trump’s agenda.


The idea that support for Trump is driven by economic anxiety rather than racism is close to a punchline at this point. It just doesn’t jibe with all the quantitative evidence from surveys of Trump voters, and it doesn’t explain why this seemingly economic-driven revolt is coming at a time when the economy is doing better than it’s done in a decade.

But the theory’s failure as an explanatory approach doesn’t mean that voters who respond to Trump’s racism might also respond to economic appeals. These are voters who won’t be persuaded if you tell them that Trump is a xenophobe, that he’s bigoted against Muslims. Those are features, not bugs, to them.

So instead of highlighting the aspects of Trump that make him so uniquely horrifying to Democrats, to reach these voters surrogates need to make an orthogonal argument, to change the subject to a topic the voters also care about and where their values are closer to Democrats’ than to Trump’s.

This was Biden’s task, and he nailed it. He did not try to convince viewers to oppose Trump on anti-racist grounds. He tried to convince them on pocketbook grounds, to convince them Trump is a fraud who does not care at all about their material needs. "He is trying to tell us he cares about the middle class," Biden scoffed. "Give me a break. That is a bunch of malarkey."

He touted his own proletarian credentials: "I know I'm called middle-class Joe and in Washington, that is not meant as a compliment. It means you are not sophisticated. I know why we are strong, I know why we are held together."

Biden’s speech was meant to target the anti-elite, populist tone of the Trump campaign head on. It was one of the only speeches in this entire convention to date to do that. Who knows if the approach will work, but it shows promise, and Biden deserves credit for being the only one to really try.