Biden's Campaign Is Confusing Name Recognition With Electability-- Don't Take The Bait

Remember what Chris Hayes said about looking at the 2020 candidates as the cycle kicked off? I saved the video to remind you. Let's use it as a quick lens to look at Status Quo Joe. Who will he fight for? What will he fight for? Well, who has he always fought for? His own career, his family, his family's lobbying clients, Big Banks, Wall Street, corporate America, the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about. Can he be trusted to do what he says? According to PolitiFact, 84% of Trump's checked statement have been lies. No one can compete with that... but Biden comes closer than any other politician. PolitiFact finds 60% of his checked statement to be lies. Trump is worse but, that bar is too low and it doesn't excuse the fact that most of what Biden says is a lie, some of it said to mislead and some of it said because his brain no longer functions adequately. So, no, Joe Biden's conflicting promises to various groups cannot be-- should not be-- trusted.

Grace Panetta, writing for Business Insider over the weekend, warned that it would be a mistake to buy into the hype that Biden is the most electable of the 2020 candidates. It's the narrative his creaky campaign is pushing, but he isn't the most electable at all. His big poll numbers come from name recognition among voters who are least likely to be following the primary carefully and from two important cohorts of Democratic primary voters that prioritize defeating Trump above all else: African American voters and voters in their 70s and 80s, much of the same coalition that decided Hillary was the most electable candidate.

When his wife tried to make a case for him last week, she didn't claim his pathetic healthcare plan was any good on the merits-- it isn't-- she just said issues don't matter and we should defeat Trump. In effect: just sign on the dotted line and we'll work out the details later. In general, that approach appeals to people whose educations didn't go beyond high school more than it does people who went to college. Like many rich people, Biden doesn't understand Medicare and doesn't understand Medicare-For-All. He opposes Medicare-For-All and has offered to compromise away Medicare benefits in order to lower budget deficits. If he is-- God forbid-- elected president, that is exactly what he will do.

Biden's wife, reported Panetta, "acknowledged that even if Biden's plan isn't the best one and voters don't like it, they should hold their noses and vote for him anyway." Addressing Elizabeth Warren and Bernie supporters, Mrs Biden said, "Your candidate might be better on healthcare than Joe is, but you have to look at who is going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say 'I personally like so-and-so better,' but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.'" That's all they got... but is it enough?

Nope. His policy stances across the board are basically nothing but tepid, conservative, ineffective and incrementalist approaches to healthcare, Climate Change, immigration, Wall Street, criminal justice, wealth inequality and everything else. And his putrid record will haunt the primary campaign and if he wins, will give Trump all the weapons he needs to defeat him.

The electability argument has always been bogus. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were seen as the least electable when they first ran. Jeb Bush, then Scott Walker and Marco Rubio-- and then Hillary Clinton-- were seen as the most electable in 2016. Panetta: "As political scientist Seth Masket pointed out, hypothetical Quinnipiac University general election polls from February 2016 showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton handily defeating Trump by five percentage points, tied with Sen. Ted Cruz, and losing to Sen. Marco Rubio by seven percentage points. But Republicans nominated Trump anyway, and won."

In her argument for why Democratic primary voters should pick Biden over other candidates, Jill Biden cited the head-to-polling showing Biden leading Trump as the main reason undecided primary voters should back him over other candidates.

"You've got to look at the polls... and if they're consistent and they're consistently saying the same thing, I think you can't dismiss that... if your goal is to beat Donald Trump, we have to have someone who can beat him," she said.

Most recent poll-- last week-- for the first primary (New Hampshire) shows Biden trailing Bernie by a wide margin

Not only has the conventional wisdom on electability been wrong many times before, but hypothetical general election polls, like the ones Biden's camp is relying on, haven't historically been a very good predictor of who actually wins elections, as FiveThirtyEight's Perry Bacon Jr. pointed out in June.

At this point in the 2016 election-- late August 2015-- head-to-head matchups showed, on average, Clinton beating Trump 50% to 39%, a margin of victory of 11 percentage points. In the end, Clinton defeated Trump 48% to 46% in the popular vote and lost the electoral college.

In 2016, FiveThirtyEight also conducted a broader analysis of general election matchup polls from every presidential election from 1944 to 2012. They found head-to-head matchup polls conducted a year before presidential elections were, on average, 11 percentage points off the final result.

For example, former President Bill Clinton hardly seemed electable in the later months of 1991 when he was 21 percentage points behind George H.W. Bush in the polls, but ended up beating Bush by 5.6% in the popular vote after the US went into a recession.

Brand new polling from Colorado shows Bernie ahead of Biden and this graph shows them doing equally well against Trump

As one Hillary mouthpiece admitted: "Aside from the logic, telling us to settle now is way too early. There is no need to settle." And remember, Biden inspires no one. "Much like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden’s Democratic primary campaign has thus far cloaked itself in an aura of inevitability," wrote Bhaskar Sunkara Friday. "You might not like Joe Biden. He might say racist or sexist stuff from time to time. His gaffes might be occurring at an alarming rate. He might have uninspiring policy ideas. But he’s going to win the primary anyway, so you better get used to him." That's how many interpret his wife's case for voting for him.

The states that matter most in 2020 are not red Biden bastions like South Carolina; they are in the industrial Midwest, where Bernie is shown to consistently beat Trump by around 10 points

Sunkara reminds his readers that "Biden’s fundraising picture also looks less rosy than it did back in May. He’s still the preferred choice of big party donors, but grassroots enthusiasm is receding. After raising an impressive $4.6m online on this first day of his campaign in April, things have slowed to a trickle. As Politico reports, Biden’s median online daily fundraising by the end of June was just $67,000 a day, considerably below Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is an especially important benchmark for Biden. They seem to be competing over much the same base-- working class, diverse, not college educated-- and either would benefit from the other’s downfall. Despite a narrative earlier this summer of campaign dysfunction and imminent collapse, recent polls have showed that the Vermont senator in a steady position within striking distance of Biden. Sanders has a rabid base of volunteers, superior online fundraising infrastructure, and his existing support may even be undercounted by most polls.

Yet the media narrative continues to paint Sanders as a fringe pariah and Biden as the inevitable 2020 candidate. It’s reminiscent of the 2016 Republican primaries, in which Donald Trump was considered an unserious candidate whose support was continually underestimated. The serious commentators kept waiting for an establishment wave of moderate Republicans to make first Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, and then even Ted Cruz happen.

The case for Biden’s invincibility is especially baffling-- he’s been running for the Democratic nomination (and losing) since the 1980s. It simply boils down to Obama coalition supporters (particularly black and brown voters) going with the most familiar face to rid of Trump era upheavals.

But electability is just one element of what voters are looking for, and Biden is running on nothing else. He has failed to adequately address his past positions in favor of Medicare and Social Security cuts, his engineering of loathed free trade deals, or his opposition to important desegregation measures.

While other candidates are galvanizing people around Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and calls to redistribute wealth and power from the 1% to working Americans, Biden is offering nothing. Poke one hole in his electability bubble and his campaign looks ready to implode.

This early in the race things are constantly changing-- many people are still undecided and won’t start paying attention until much later on-- so we would do ourselves a lot of good not to live and die with every poll. However, if there is one lesson from the 2016 general election worth remembering it’s this: most people might have not liked Donald Trump, but he gave those who did a real reason to turn out on Election Day. He was a candidate with very obvious convictions running against someone who seemed to focus group and triangulate her every position.

Joe Biden is Hillary Clinton 2.0. Perhaps Trump’s time in office has been enough of a disaster that idea-avoidance will work this time. But if voters want to be inspired, they’ll turn elsewhere or just stay at home again.

One more thing on Biden this evening: his toxic brand of bipartisanship has always meant one thing: the Right winning... every.single.time. Branko Marcetic, noting that "if worship of the U.S. Constitution is an American civic religion, with the Founders as prophets and Capitol Hill as a place of worship, then bipartisanship is its holy sacrament," reminded us that "For Biden and his generation of Democratic lawmakers, bipartisanship has long been hailed as a worthy end in its own right, no matter the result. He has pledged that a new day will dawn once Trump is removed from the White House. 'This nation cannot function without generating consensus,' Biden said in May. 'You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.' But as moderator Chuck Todd told Biden at the first Democratic debate, 'It does sound as if you haven’t seen what’s been happening in the United States Senate over the last 12 years.'"

An increasingly far-right GOP has ruthlessly obstructed Democrats while dangling cooperation to lure them rightward. The outcome has been a disaster for progressives. The parties have cooperated to water down or kill left-leaning measures and advance a right-wing agenda, from shredding the New Deal to ramping up deportation, turning the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama into graveyards of progressive policies. Democrats increasingly understand that, if they want to generate consensus, they’ll have to do it some other way than meeting a right-moving GOP in the “middle.”

... Joe Biden's political career is an exemplar of the price the Democratic Party paid as the Right slid into the dark reaches of the political spectrum.

As overt racism faded in polite society after the 1960s, those committed to beating back the advance of civil rights found proxy issues to dog whistle a racist tune: crime, drugs, welfare and busing. They found a willing partner in a 30-year-old freshman senator: Biden.

Biden hailed from Delaware, whose culture and borders straddled the Mason-Dixon line and whose political and economic life was dominated for decades by the Du Pont family that had helped jumpstart the rebellion against the New Deal. (As Biden would later assure a Republican Rotary Club in South Carolina in advance of his 2008 presidential run, Delaware, a slave state, had only “fought beside the North... because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”)

As conflict over court-ordered busing roiled his home state, Biden led a crusade against the civil rights measure, later boasting that he made it politically acceptable for other liberals to oppose it. He built alliances with Republican racists like Sen. Jesse Helms (NC) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (SC), the record-holder for longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour attempt to stall the Civil Rights Act of 1957. During the Reagan administration, Biden, Helms and Thurmond would help usher in an era of mass incarceration, working together to establish racist crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

Biden also led the way on budget-slashing: In 1984, with Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (IA) and Nancy Kassebaum (KS), Biden put forward a budget “freeze” that cut deficits by $100 billion more than Reagan proposed and eliminated scheduled increases to Social Security and Medicare. Biden also ranked among the sizable number of Democrats who gave their stamp of approval to signature Reagan victories like increased military spending, privatization and lower taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was cutting his teeth in this same punishing era. In 1980, Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas after raising car license fees to fund highway repairs and trying to rein in the timber industry. The loss taught Clinton to eschew challenging corporate power and, instead, embrace what Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg termed “the politics of ultraconsensus.”

While Clinton’s presidency is remembered as a time of partisan warfare, bipartisan consensus was a quiet fixture throughout. Clinton brought in his own personal Rasputin in the form of political operative Dick Morris, who laid his strategy out in a memo: “fast-forward the Gingrich agenda” to make “Republican issues less appealing” and take the wind out of their sails. Unbeknownst to Clinton, Morris also created a back channel to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS), a former client, whom he giddily told: “We’ll pass everything.”

“Everything” meant measures like welfare reform, a balanced budget, cuts to Medicare and an immigration overhaul that helped create the deportation state currently operated by Trump.

Biden was an important player in these bipartisan deals. As Senate Judiciary Chair under Clinton, Biden led the passage of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill and worked to make sure Clinton would fulfill his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” With Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (PA), Biden lamented “the polarizing partisanship and presidential politics that have permeated the issue” and insisted that a “tough, bipartisan welfare reform bill is easily within reach.” In 1996, the Senate passed welfare reform (what Lott described as “the Holy Grail of [the GOP’s] legislative master plan”) thanks to the votes of 51 Republicans and 23 Democrats.

“These were great monuments to consensus in Washington,” says Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? “They were just downstream of racism.”

Bipartisanship reached its apogee after September 11, when Biden swiftly became one of the most prominent Democrats to hitch himself to President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The terrorist attacks created a stunning uniformity of opinion, and Biden, up for reelection in 2002, would soon be heavily criticized in the Delaware press for a speech that appeared dovish. Biden told reporters they should count him “in the 90%” of voters who backed Bush. He stacked a hearing on Iraq with pro-war voices and made regular TV appearances parroting the administration’s talking points about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And, like 28 other Democratic senators, Biden voted to authorize the war in Iraq.

In 2008, Vice President Biden found a home with “postpartisan” Obama, who, Perlstein says, “was wedded to the myths of consensus in a way that a lot of his supporters hadn’t realized at the time.”

Obama had risen to stardom with his 2004 convention speech denying the existence of a “red” and “blue” America, a feeling that suffused Democratic politics. Nary a 2008 primary debate went by without Sen. Hillary Clinton (NY), for example, pledging something or other of a bipartisan nature: a “bipartisan process” to tackle Social Security, a “bipartisan way” on immigration reform, even “bipartisan diplomacy” headed by “bipartisan emissaries.”

But once president, “Republicans used Obama’s own longing for consensus and bipartisanship against him,” says Frank.

Obama ran aground upon a decidedly partisan opposition that took advantage of racist sentiments against him. He tried for months to secure minimal Republican buy-in on Obamacare so he could slap a “bipartisan” label on it, only for “moderate” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) to use it as leverage to endlessly delay and erode the bill. Obama ramped up deportations as a bipartisan gesture, and the GOP continued to obstruct immigration reform.

Nothing spoke more to Obama’s futile attempt to reach common ground with Republicans than his 2011 attempt at a “grand bargain” on cutting the deficit. Biden was dispatched to negotiate with a radically anti-tax, anti-government GOP. He capitulated to every Republican demand, including cuts to food stamps, Medicare and Social Security, while agreeing to rule out new taxes. Ironically, it was only thanks to the Tea Partiers’ obstinacy that the deal did not pass.

The public was not so lucky in 2010, when Biden made a deal with Sen. McConnell to extend unemployment insurance in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the estate tax. The deal was so lopsided that it outraged even conservative Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and prompted an eight-hour filibuster by Bernie Sanders. Two months later, in the midst of affectionately paying tribute to McConnell at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for the senator), Biden pointed to the deal as “the only truly bipartisan event that occurred in the first two years of our administration.”

“We both got beat up, but we knew we were doing the right thing,” Biden said. “The process worked.”

He explained to the audience that, whether they were liberals, conservatives, Tea Partiers or Blue Dogs, little actually divided members of Congress.

“We basically all agree on the nature of the problems we face,” Biden said, as McConnell, leading a historically radical campaign of obstructionism against the Obama administration, looked on.

A continuing faith in compromise may well be the last gasp of a dying era.

“A lot of the things that made bipartisanship sound attractive are now vestigial,” Perlstein says. “Like a lot of neuroses, it was a response that was useful for dealing with trauma that was present and important at the time, but has outlasted its usefulness.”

Or, as Robin says, bipartisanship is “a mourning for a neoliberal accord between Democratic and Republican party elites.”

Today’s Democrats increasingly recognize the folly of seeking progressive change by partnering with a GOP that’s fundamentally opposed to it. A new generation of Democratic lawmakers is taking a combative, unflinchingly progressive approach reminiscent of the 1979 class of freshmen GOP legislators that included Gingrich.

As Ocasio-Cortez told journalist Ryan Grim, “The older members really cling to the idea that things are going to go ‘back to normal’ [after Trump]. For us, it’s never been normal, and before that, the bipartisanship was shitty anyway and gave us the War on Drugs, [the Defense of Marriage Act] and stripping the leg[islative] branch of everything.”

These young progressives are backed by social movements whose adherents have no desire to cooperate with nativists and corporatists. Together, they are seeking to remake the existing governing consensus in their image, just as Reagan managed to do four decades prior. The irony is, they’d be following the Right’s own road to success.

“The rise of the Right is the closest thing we have to an example of a political success story in our time in America, and it was largely achieved by smashing consensus,” Frank says.

But MacLean warns it would be a mistake to believe that obstructionism alone is a path to victory. “The radical Right is winning now because its chief architects played a very sophisticated, well-funded, integrated long game and built a vast infrastructure that is well-aligned to achieve their agenda,” MacLean says.

For inspiration, today’s progressives might look back to the anti-slavery movement, which went from a relatively small band of uncompromising, “radical” activists to controlling the presidency and Congress.

“Abolitionists were never anywhere near a majority in the North or anywhere else,” says Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. “They were a vanguard.”

Abolitionists worked at both the grassroots and official levels to enact change, whether through legislation and court decisions or direct action and education. They made pioneering use of cutting-edge technology such as the printing press, the railroad and the telegram to spread their message. Their efforts helped lead Abraham Lincoln to drastically shift his thinking, jettisoning ideas like gradual emancipation and instead embracing black citizenship.

“Abolitionists and radicals were able to shift the pendulum to the left, and were able to make moderates inhabit radical ground,” says Sinha. “In the end, it wasn’t the abolitionists who abolished slavery,” Foner says. “It was more moderate people like Abraham Lincoln. But without the abolitionists, there’s no Lincoln. There’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Political shifts require years of movement building, but change ultimately happens suddenly. Thirty years after the abolitionist movement took off, there were nearly 2 million more slaves in the United States. Three years later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

“The abolitionist movement lasted for a long, long time, and for a long time failed abysmally,” Foner says. “Radicals have to not give up.”

The time is looking ripe for another hegemonic shift. The Trump administration has sparked a wave of political activism and organizing by Americans previously disengaged from politics. A bevy of socialist intellectual organs and figures have risen to newfound prominence, their arguments cited by mainstream news outlets and shared quickly and easily over the internet, much like the cheap, ephemeral books and magazines passed around by conservatives in the mid-20th Century. Workers are showing a renewed militancy, from the teachers who went on strike in red states across the country to the flight attendants who helped end the government shutdown in January.

Polls suggest the public has moved left, supporting everything from Medicare for All and the Green New Deal to a much higher minimum wage. Even as Trump stokes a racist anti-immigrant campaign, polling shows a public more pro-immigrant than ever.

Republicans will demonize these movements. The Democratic establishment will try to ignore them. But as the ranks of today’s radicals grow, and the more a concerted movement to remake the country expands, the harder it will be for even the most committed centrists to hew to their vision of consensus. As Biden told the audience at the McConnell Center eight years ago: “Reality has a way of intruding on one’s tightly held view.”