Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton Generate Very Different Emotional Responses from Republicans

Biden not only doesn’t generate the emotional response Hillary did, his nomination would constitute the Democrats broadcasting to the world that they have not (yet) embraced socialism, and they have not (yet) fully-embraced the woke culture of the Online Left. So how would the Republicans generate the kind of Flight 93 urgency that helped Trump (very narrowly) beat Hillary? I’m not sure. In fact, if Joe Biden can win his way through the primaries, he’s almost lab-engineered to beat Trump. He doesn’t cause Republican panic, he has the potential to connect with white working-class voters in a way that Hillary couldn’t in 2016, and he has a potential to connect better with black voters than Hillary did.

But all of this for now remains in the realm of the potential and hypothetical. Hovering over Biden’s huge polling lead (in both primary and general election polls) is the knowledge that we’ve seen Biden run for president before, and it wasn’t good. Perhaps he’s better now. Perhaps he can be more disciplined, and he’ll be tough enough to endure the slings and arrows of more than 20 competitors, all aimed at the front-runner. And perhaps he can win without tacking so far left that Republicans can plausibly paint him with the Bernie brush. All of that remains to be seen, but if Biden emerges from that crucible, Trump will face a very different challenge than he faced in 2016.