Biden Is Back From St Croix-- Ready For The Status Quo Ante

Very rare photo of what Joe Biden looks like in the 21st Century

Mike Allen reported yesterday that Biden's lifelong lust for the presidency-- an end-goal rather than a wish to accomplish something for the country-- is about to manifest itself with a final "decision", imminently. (Anyone notice that the media always uses photos of Biden that were taken in the 1980s and 1990s rather than more recent ones. I wonder what they're trying to hide. Supposedly the trip to St Croix this past weekend resulted in the whole family being "on board," hilarious bullshit from 2020's most inauthentic, phony-baloney candidate. "If Biden decides to go for it," wrote Allen, "he'll start pressing political allies and potential staff members for firm commitments to join him. That will be the true 'tell,' advisers say, and will quickly become widely known. Biden himself has been telling friends about a possible early April launch, and has been saying he has a 95% chance of running. 'With some people, he's going a little bit higher than that,' the insider said."

You may have detected a hint that Biden's in DWT's least favorite Democraptic candidate-- along with the other arch-opportunist, Kirsten Gillibrand-- this cycle. Monday morning Bloomberg published a piece by Jonathan Bernstein, Joe Biden’s Ahead in the Polls. Does It Matter?, urging readers to not read too much into early surveys." My theory has always been that once voters start seeing Biden's record-- beyond the fact that Obama used him as a ticket balancer-- they will abandon him en masse (just like they did when he tried running in the past). Bernstein wrote that "The Democratic nomination field continues to narrow, and continues to be unusually large. I had originally counted 32 people who were doing the things that presidential candidates do a year or more before the Iowa caucuses. With the exits last week of Michael Bloomberg, Sherrod Brown, Eric Holder and Jeff Merkley, we’re down to 18 by my count-- a dozen who have formally announced in some way, and six who haven’t. As of now, Joe Biden leads in nationwide polls; Bernie Sanders leads in at least one betting market; Kamala Harris seems to be first or second in most pundit rankings; and Harris and Cory Booker are the early leaders in endorsements, with Amy Klobuchar not too far behind."

With polls showing Biden and Sanders on top-- not just nationwide, but in the early-voting states as well-- I’ve seen a few pundits wondering whether the contest is less open than it once seemed. I think that’s a mistake. Yes, it’s better to have good poll numbers than bad. But we’ve already seen one candidate, Beto O'Rourke, have a polling surge. We’re almost certain to see others. If history tells us anything, it’s that almost any candidate can have at least a temporary surge, usually accompanied by a round of media attention. Many of those surges eventually collapse, but sometimes-- think Barack Obama in 2008, or Sanders in 2016-- they persist.

John Sides and Lynn Vavreck wrote about this phenomenon in their book on the 2012 election. Although we still don’t have a systematic explanation for why candidates surge, I suspect that party support is important. Candidates with strong backing from party actors will be more likely to spark the media’s interest in the first place, and more likely to get positive coverage for longer. That’s not always true, as the massive counterexample of Donald Trump demonstrated in 2016. But overall, it’s probably the case.

At any rate, all that’s in the future. Right now, only a tiny number of party actors and political junkies are paying close attention to the race. Most Democrats will tell you they like the candidates they’ve heard of so far, because Democratic voters tend to start off with positive feelings toward little-known Democratic politicians (just as Republican voters do for candidates of their party).

When it comes to congressional elections, political scientists have found that name recognition and even incumbency may turn out to be proxies for whether a voter knows anything he or she likes about a politician. If the same is true of presidential elections, then learning a few positive things about a candidate could make a difference very quickly for voters who are lost in the large field. Much of politics-- debates, advertising, electioneering-- amounts to candidates trying to teach voters a few good things about themselves, with most voters paying little attention until the election is just around the corner.

In other words: Yes, it’s very possible that Biden, Sanders or both will still be in the lead on caucus night in Iowa-- but don’t count on it, and certainly don’t assume that polling leads at this point are stable. 

From Norman Solomon's CounterPunch post yesterday, Biden on the Relaunch Pad: He’s Worse Than You Thought: "On the verge of relaunching, Joe Biden is poised to come to the rescue of the corporate political establishment-- at a time when, in the words of the Times, 'the sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats.' After 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president, Biden is by far the most seasoned servant of corporate power with a prayer of becoming the next president... The direct prey of Biden’s five-decade 'association with bankers'” include millions of current and former college students now struggling under avalanches of debt; they can thank Biden for his prodigious services to the lending industry... In typical Biden style, the former vice president is eager to stake out the middle of the road, between ultra-predatory capitalism and solidarity with working-class people. At an October 2017 gathering in Alabama, he said: 'Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.' Later, Biden elaborated on the theme when he told an audience at the Brookings Institution, 'I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.'"

Of course they're not; they're his donors. But as Solomon concluded, "Whether Biden can win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination will largely depend on how many voters don’t know much about his actual record."