So Joe Biden is (maybe) going to run for president. In a moving and uncharacteristically newsbreaking column, Maureen Dowd (with apparently inside sourcing, as Bill Kristol notes) writes that Biden was urged to run by his dying 46-year-old son Beau Biden. As my Washington Examiner colleague Jim Antle notes, “this could certainly shake up the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.”
By all the old standard rules, Biden shouldn’t be a candidate. He was born in December 1942: if elected president, he will be 74 years old when he takes the oath of office. In a year when voters are angry at Washington insiders, Biden has been a federal officeholder for almost all his adult life: he was elected to the Senate in 1972, re-elected in 1978, 1984, 1990, 1996, 2002 and 2008, and was elected vice president in 2008 and 2012. He has had serious health problems (two cranial aneurysms in 1988) and some brushes with plagiarism (one of which prompted him to leave the presidential race in 1987). Speaking of which, he has been around the track more than once, running for president in the 1988 and 2008 cycles, without getting many votes.
What does Biden have going for him as a candidate? As vice president, he is knowledgeable about government, and foreign and defense policies at the highest level. Even if you believe, as his former colleague in the Obama administration Robert Gates does, that he has been wrong on every important issue over the last 40 years, that is an asset few candidates possess. He has demonstrated that he’s capable of negotiating agreements across the partisan aisle, something Barack Obama seems almost entirely incapable of and uninterested in doing and which Hillary Clinton has done only occasionally and on relatively minor issues. He has naturally good political instincts. I interviewed him on the phone in May 1972, when we were both in our 20s, and he set out (even before he hired pollster Pat Caddell) how he could beat the incumbent Republican Sen. Caleb Boggs, who had held statewide office for 26 years — and then proceeded to do just that.
Perhaps most important. He’s a nice guy — an authentically nice man on a personal level. During his 36 years in the Senate he maintained his home in Delaware and commuted there almost every night on Amtrak. He shopped at local stores and malls, took his kids to games and events and in the process continually schmoozed with local voters. In the run up to his 1988 campaign, I spent a day with him in Delaware and it seemed that just about everyone he encountered knew him — and he knew them and their families. He’s endured tragedy: the death of his wife and young daughter in an auto accident in December 1972, the death of his son Beau this year. Biden can be a mean customer in political combat, as you can see in his handling of Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991 or his vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan in 2012. But the nice guy comes through. He has an authenticity that Clinton cannot begin to match, to put it mildly.
How would Biden do in the Democratic primaries and caucuses if he runs? Terribly, if you make a straight-line extrapolation from the polls. The RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows him with 12 percent of the vote, far behind Clinton (58 percent) and even behind Bernie Sanders (18 percent). But last month’s Quinnipiac poll, released last week, showed something interesting, that Biden is running just about as strongly against the Republicans tested (Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Donald Trump) as Clinton. This was not the case in the few 2013-14 polls in which Biden was tested. Clinton’s numbers have come down, as doubts about her honesty and trustworthiness increased. Biden’s have not necessarily risen, but they look to be roughly level with hers. Democrats who worried about Clinton’s electability earlier in the cycle had reason to doubt that any other candidate could run better. Democrats worried about Clinton’s electability now have an alternative who looks about as strong or perhaps stronger, and his name is not Bernie Sanders.
What would a Clinton-Biden-Sanders contest look like? Sanders, it seems, is getting and perhaps has nailed down the Birkenstock Belt, making him competitive with Clinton in New Hampshire and Iowa — voters who are almost entirely white, who like the sound of Sanders’s economic populism but are more concerned about peace and environmental issues. So let’s put them aside, and consider how the major Democratic blocs that were apparent in the 2008 Clinton-Obama contest are likely to go this time.
Clinton’s strength then came from what some analysts have called the Beer Democrats, as opposed to the Wine Democrats who tended to vote for Obama. Beer Democrats helped Clinton win New Hampshire and Massachusetts as well (where she tended to carry cities and towns that trended toward Scott Brown in the January 2010 special election). They were an essential part of her coalition in winning Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. Clinton’s strongest region was the Jacksonian belt, the states along the Appalachian chain from West Virginia to Oklahoma, where Obama has run very weakly in both primaries and general elections. She surely benefited from residual affection in Arkansas, her best single state where she got 70 percent of the vote, but she also won 67 percent in West Virginia and 65 percent in Kentucky. Jacksonians qualify as Beer (if not Moonshine) Democrats.
But would Clinton carry Beer Democrats over Joe Biden? He’s much more an authentic beer type (though he doesn’t drink alcohol) than she is. I think there’s a very real danger that this bedrock of Clinton’s 2008 support could move away from her this time.
In 2008 Barack Obama carried black voters by very wide margins over Clinton, and blacks characteristically tend to vote nearly unanimously for one candidate over another, even if the latter has authentic credentials on civil rights issues (Robert Kennedy over Hubert Humphrey 1968, Obama over Clinton 2008). It’s been generally assumed that Clinton will win overwhelming majorities from blacks this time, and she surely would if her only extant competition came from Sanders. That would give her large margins and delegate hauls in the belt of Southern states where blacks make up 25 to 50 percent of the Democratic primary electorate and would help her immensely in large Midwestern states where they comprise more than 20 percent. But would black voters go for Clinton over Obama’s vice president? Not clear. Polls in 2007 had black voters split between Clinton and Obama, but once Obama demonstrated the ability to win the almost all-white caucuses in Iowa, black voters overwhelmingly supported him.
Another segment of Clinton’s 2008 coalition was Hispanic voters, whom she carried by wide margins over Obama (so much for the idea that there is a united “people of color” voting bloc). They helped her win Texas narrowly, even though Obama’s black and Birkenstock support enabled him to carry Harris (Houston), Dallas, Tarrant (Fort Worth) and Travis (Austin) counties, where 38 percent of the primary votes were cast. Hispanic voters were also critical to her win in California, where she carried all of southern California and the Central Valley, while the San Francisco Bay area was split. In Florida she won her highest county percentage in Osceola County, with its Puerto Rican and other Hispanic voters.
So what does the contest look like? A Biden candidacy would seriously threaten Clinton’s hold on the Beer Democrats and the Jacksonian Belt, her largest constituency in 2008. It could conceivably threaten her claim to inherit black Democrats, who overall make up nearly one-quarter of Democratic primary voters. It probably does not threaten her hold on Hispanics, and they are an important constituency in some big states (New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, California) but not others (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan). Wine Democrats in the Birkenstock Belt seem, initially at least, to veer off to Sanders in some numbers, and Wine Democrats generally have shown little enthusiasm for the Clinton candidacy so far. The upshot: if Biden runs, the Democratic race could be a lot more interesting that most of us have been expecting.
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