Joe Biden Is Stronger Than You Think
Here’s why he is still winning.
NY TIMES
It was yet another epic failure of political punditry. Go back to the early months of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and read what the consultants and commentators were saying about him: His support is just name recognition; he’ll fade! He’s too old! He’s running a zombie campaign! The party has moved left and he’s out of touch! He voted for the crime bill!
Almost everybody was bearish on Joe. But now look where we are, weeks from actual voting. If the polls are to be believed, Biden will win Iowa, he’ll come in second in New Hampshire, he will easily win Nevada, he will dominate in South Carolina. He’s now tied for the lead in California and he’s way ahead in Texas.
I don’t know if he’ll win the nomination (both he and Bernie Sanders look strong), but this is not where a lot of people six months ago thought we’d be.
It’s the 947th consecutive sign that we in the coastal chattering classes have not cured our insularity problem. It’s the 947th case in which we see that every second you spend on Twitter detracts from your knowledge of American politics, and that the only cure to this insularity disease is constant travel and interviewing, close attention to state and local data and raw abject humility about the fact that the attitudes and academic degrees that you think make you clever are actually the attitudes and academic degrees that separate you from the real texture of American life.
Biden didn’t just luck into this. He and his team grasped six truths:
Understand the year you are running in. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are running the same basic campaign they would have run in 2012 or 2016. Biden’s campaign is completely focused on the central problem of 2020: that Donald Trump is a steaming hot mess in the middle of national life.
Biden has fixated his campaign on the Trump problem and fighting for the soul of America. Nearly twice as many Democrats say it’s more important to beat Trump than to have a candidate with whom they agree on all issues.
Understand your party’s core challenge. All around the world parties on the left are losing because they have lost touch with the working class. These parties think they can reconnect with that class by swinging even further left. But Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders here are a doctoral student’s idea of a working-class candidate, not an actual working person’s idea of one.
Biden has criticized his own party for losing touch with this class. He emerged from it, is focusing his attention on it and is winning support from it.
Moderates are still powerful. The Democratic Party is moving left, but about half of Democrats still say they are moderate or conservative. No candidate has ever won a nomination without strong support from these voters, while college-town candidates — Howard Dean, Gary Hart — tend to falter. In every presidential general election that Democrats have won since 1988, they carried moderates by more than 12 percentage points. In every race they have lost, they failed to do that. Biden kept his moderate credentials when many other candidates saw A.O.C. on Twitter and decided to move left.
Many Democrats resent their own elites. There is a quiet tension between Democrats who wield cultural power and those who don’t. The former are active on social media, and clobber the latter — people who say or write the “wrong” thing.
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