Is Biden Really the Most ‘Electable’ Democrat?
With a field this large, let’s not jump to conclusions.
Biden, like Clinton, is extremely vulnerable to Trumpian forms of faux-populist attack. He is a 36-year veteran of Washington who backed the Iraq War, cultivated close ties with banks and credit card companies and played a leading role in shaping the punitive policies that helped produced mass incarceration. As he did with Clinton, Trump can slam him on these issues and sow division among Democratic voters. It’s how he won in 2016 — targeting black voters with Clinton’s past positions to discourage and demobilize them. It worked. For all the focus on blue-collar whites, Clinton also missed Obama’s benchmarkswith black voters. Had she reached them — or had she come close — she would be president.
It’s possible none of this will touch Biden, for the simple reason that he is a man. And the gender politics that constrained Clinton’s career — that harmed her standing whenever she reached for national office — don’t apply to Biden. Unlike her, he may retain enough of an appeal to blue-collar whites and remain the most formidable challenger to Trump.
There’s another possibility — that those blue-collar voters are gone. That their shift away from the Democratic Party, which began long before 2016, is permanent. And that Biden’s personal appeal isn’t enough to reverse it. Remember, if he wins the nomination, Biden will represent a coalition defined by its racial diversity and gender egalitarianism. If the backlash to those forces is driving the Trump movement, then the candidate who stands for them will face the same reactionary fury, regardless of how well he plays blue-collar identity politics.
Joe Biden will have to juggle this and the larger burden of standing for the past and its failures. Perhaps, despite running two failed campaigns for the presidency, he’s a deft enough politician to handle all of this and make a compelling case against Trump. Perhaps his electability isn’t a mirage. The point is that we don’t know. And with nearly two dozen candidates in the Democratic field, it seems premature to treat Biden as the one with the least risk.