Joe Biden is the current polling leader of the Democrats and he's not currently running. However, Biden's high approval ratings are likely a product of several factors:
- He's got the highest name recognition of any candidate.
- He benefits from Obama nostalgia.
- He appeals to a certain important segment of the Democratic electorate.
But there's a counterpoint to all this:
- Name recognition is a weak predictor of future electoral success, especially when there are so many extremely capable candidates in the field. Lots of that name recognition is a function of a long career. A long career means a target rich environment.
- Obama and the people around him have never really given Biden full throated support. And Biden is just...not Obama. He's gaffe prone and impulsive, where Obama was disciplined. He's a career politician where Obama was an outsider.
- That segment of the Democratic party that Biden appeals to is shrinking in importance.
I believe that Biden would have beaten Trump in 2016, because he would have likely won Pennsylvania and Michigan. Biden does have some appeal to WWC voters and he wouldn't be damaged by the latent sexism that hurt Clinton. I believe that Biden could beat Trump in 2020, but then I believe most of the Democratic candidates can beat Trump in 2020. (Remember several important things: Trump voters are older, so there are less of them each year; he ran an inside straight to win the Electoral College; a lot of voters said "what's the worst he could do" and now regret that.)
The question is: Which candidate can thump the Republican party so hard that it takes several electoral cycles for them to recover? Who can usher in the next stage of building a Democratic coalition that will be as ascendent as the FDR and Reagan coalitions? Who knits together people of color, college educated whites and single women into a majority party that consistently wins elections for the next 20 years?
THAT is the goal for 2020. Biden is a look backwards. He's old. He's never been a good campaigner at the national level. He suffers from fatal flaws as a Democratic candidate today: his closeness to the financial sector (Bankruptcy Bill), his past lamentable votes (the Crime Bill) and his inability to read where women are at this moment when it comes to entitled behavior from powerful white men.
Biden's touchy-feely personal style isn't really the problem, it's that he's old, when the party skews young. His tone-deaf joking about this issue shows how little he has a read for the bulk of the party and how prone he is to stepping on his own dick.
The Onion had a lot of fun lampooning Biden as Vice President (at least in part because Obama proved so hard to mock). They did it by basically depicting him as your loser, dropout relative who cleans pools to buy a used Camaro because the chicks dig it. They mocked him as being a man out of time. He still is that.
Biden is not going to save the Democratic party, because he's not a very good candidate. He wasn't in '92. He wasn't in '08. He is very much not today.
UPDATE: This.
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