Who Are We Kidding? Vote for Biden
Photo by Mike Nozell
Have you ever been paralyzed in front of the ice cream section of the grocery store? So many choices. Plus there’s gelato! And sorbet! But after a while, you just grab a carton of vanilla and head for the checkout.
That’s what the Democratic primary looks like to me. You’ve got everything from Pineapple-Coconut sorbet to Vermont Maple. And maybe you’re tempted to sample all of them. But at the end of the day, you’re gonna pick vanilla. You know you are. And you know what? People LIKE vanilla! It’s actually the most popular flavor of ice cream.
That’s Joe Biden: good old American vanilla. I could extol his many virtues. I could compare his policy plans with those of his opponents. But none of that matters. The smartest thing Marianne Williamson has said in the debates is that you’re not going to beat Trump with policy plans.
And that’s what this is all about, right? You want someone who can beat Trump. That’s the most important issue. Hell, that’s the ONLY issue. And Joe Biden can beat Trump. All the polls show Biden beating Trump in a head to head match. By a far margin. We don’t need a second Trump, we need an ANTI-Trump. We need someone with experience. Someone serious. Someone who won’t be hate Tweeting at 3AM. We need the quintessential “Guy I’d like to have a beer with.” And that is Joe Biden.
Experience: he’s been a local official, US Senator and was Vice President to Barack Obama for 8 years. And even if you disagree with him on policy, you LIKE Joe. EVERYBODY likes Joe. He’s a decent, honest person. The biggest criticism against him has been his “over friendliness,” especially towards women over the years. And that is easily refuted by pointing out who he’s running against.
Democrats lost in 2016 because they had the worst candidate ever who ran the worst campaign ever. To win in 2020, they don’t even have to flip a single Trump voter. They can win by increasing minority turnout in the major cities. All you need are 80,000 votes in 3 states. One of those states is Pennsylvania – Biden’s home state. He can appeal to minority voters AND blue collar white voters. Plus he’s the one candidate most likely to win over moderate Republicans sickened by the Donald Trump experience. I know, because I’m one of them.
If you’re a Democratic primary voter, there’s only one question you need to ask yourself: Do we want to WIN? You can either push a far left agenda full of wokeness guaranteed to alienate over half of America. Or you can go with Joe Biden. Make America Sane Again.
Vote for Joe.
I was wondering who would get the Biden beat. Biden’s main fault is that he, and Sanders, are really way older than I want for a Presidential candidate. Warren to, but she seems healthier and more energetic. Biden does seem to be the plurality choice within the Democratic party at this moment. Plus, I think Trump is more scarred of Biden than any other candidate.Report
For me, its that Biden thinks old, whereas Warren thinks new.
She grasps the destructiveness of the corporate oligarchy in a way that Biden just doesn’t.Report
Biden has a certain nostalgia factor. He was Obama’s VP. That’s got a certain “Hey, the Obama years? Pretty solid. Competence. Hard work. Dedication to understanding and trying to tackle big things. Calmness. Pretty much the exact opposite of now.” and Biden is very heavily associated with that.
In the real world, Obama didn’t pick Biden because the two were in-sync on everything. He picked him because he needed to signal to moderates that Obama wasn’t going to go crazy, to signal to Congress and the party as a whole that he wanted an old Congressional hand on board to help work with Congress, and for a million other reasons that were more about politics than Presidency.
But Democrats are pretty fond of Obama and the Obama years are looking real good right now, so just by being VP during those years, by having the default imprimatur of “I’m the man Obama picked to take over if, god forbid, something happened to him” is undoubtedly reassuring to primary voters.
He makes a good second choice for a lot of people, I’d imagine, simply because he’s so closely tied to Obama and the Obama Presidency.Report
You missed a recent update. Democrats now think Obama was a disaster. His immigration policy was putting kids in cages and his health care plan was a train wreck. Joe Biden would be a continuation of a record of failure.
MSNBC commentators were livid. Obama probably was, too. Night two of the second debate and the Democratic candidates are savaging Obama instead of Trump, all to attack and undermine Biden, who kept raising his Obama-forged Shield of Progressive Racial Unquestionableness. Biden made it through okay, but the shield got dented up pretty badly.Report
Incorrect on every count. The very woke online and arch liberals -might-, if painted in an uncharitable light, think that. The overwhelmingly vast majority of the Democratic Party and a majority of voters in general look back on Obama’s administration fondly.Report
But most of the candidates on the stage looking to take down Biden certainly didn’t. The mask came off, so to speak.
You know how many people have a very low opinion of politicians, thinking they’d stab their own mother in the back if it won them an election? Yeah. That thing.
ETA: And were one of them to actually win the nomination, every attack on Obama they made will probably be featured prominently in Trump ads, especially in areas with a high number of black voters.
Some of the candidates are not really good at this.Report
Right now the candidate in the lead to win has… count em.. zero of those problems.Report
A while ago on LGM, Erik Loomis mentioned a conservation with a staffer at the Oregon State Legislature. The staffer said that a lot of the legislators, including the progressive ones, had a hard time grasping how serious student debt is as an issue for many young voters. They just all went to college at a different time when college debt was non existent or de minimis.
Biden and a lot of the other so called “moderates” strike me as being like the Oregon State Legislature if the account is true. They exist in a different time. They exist when student debt was a nothing issue, when the parties were both largely ruled by white guys with relatively to very conservative bents. Part of Biden’s sell of himself is that once Trump is gone, it will go back to the days of Tip and Ronnie sharing a whiskey after hours and getting things done.
Technically, I am the last year of Gen X but I am usually part of that nowhere crowd between Gen X and the Millennials. Some of my experiences are closer to the Millennials because I entered and graduated law school during the recession.
Gen X is largely looked over because they are so small, just like the Silent Generation. There might not ever be a Gen X President. We might go straight from Boomer presidents (especially because Boomers are a huge generation. Obama was technically a Boomer) to Millennial presidents. If Biden or Bernie get elected to the Oval Office, they would be the first and last silent Generation member to hold the office.
I feel like a lot of the heat and fire in the Democratic Primaries is with Boomers and boomer aligned Gen Xers not wanting to relinquish power* and Millennials are anxiousand impatient for their turn.
*The Democratic leadership in Congress also has a serious gerentocracy problem.Report
The biggest problem with the student debt question is that if you focus on solving it you have a problem that isn’t cheap to solve and either A) if you do it right are transferring funds to a pretty affluent population and one that’s liable to grow even more affluent and B) If you do it wrong you make student loans simply cease to exist going forward.Report
The way to solve the student loan problem is to allow students to declare bankruptcy, with everything that entails on both sides – well, three sides – of the equation.Report
I’m inclined to be sympathetic to that proposal- probably the best and cheapest option to approach it but it means a whole lot of kids and a whole lot of degrees are probably gonna have a whole lot of trouble getting loans. And voters are not gonna be down with the government stepping in to provide loans if the expectation is that the loans they’re providing will be defaulted on.Report
It was not that long ago, not really, that federal student loans could be discharged through bankruptcy, like any loan. But that changed with legislation signed by George Bush in 2005. Plenty of people got student loans before that.Report
Argh my comment keeps getting eaten.
https://slate.com/business/2019/07/parents-custody-financial-aid-free-college.html
Weismann argues that free college tuition giving help to affluent kids is a feature not a bug. It means a system that works for all instead of just finding the truly needy or those willing to cheat the system.
I agree with this. I also think there is a cultural component. The rich kid argument seems to mainly come from right-leaning or conservative voices that don’t like free comprehensive public education because:
A. It means free college for those people;
B. It means higher taxes and boo to that.
All the people I see argue “maybe college should not be necessary” are conservative or conservatish white guys with rural and exurban sympathies. They like to tinker but maybe not be engineers. I never see black or brown urban working class communities fret that free college helps affluent kids because they know it helps them too.
I consider this revealing and I consider it important. There is a racialist (intended or not) component to the “but free college gives money to rich kids” argument and an anti-urban and anti-intellectual bias all around. I am not sympathetic to this.Report
The fact that these particular plaintive cries come from the most media connected and liberally connected constituency in the country elides the rather awkward reality. That reality is that kids who go to college are, by and large, middle class and up and most of them are not minorities. So any proposal to pay off the debts of college going kids or graduates is, in general, a massive transfer of wealth upwards and to non minority people. There simply is no way to sugar coat that.
As for funding… well… the Europeans provide more funding for college, sure, but they ration it in other methods. If the left thinks we can do a European style funding scheme without an European style admissions process (and the left does not want that) then they’re deluded and it’s gong to remain a pie in the sky dream.Report
When college graduates send somewhere around a third of their shiny new paychecks to Wall Street banks, who is NOT getting that money?
What apartments, cars, refrigerators, tvs and couches are these people not buying?Report
Sure, if we want to switch to the Republican “these rich people are the drivers of our economy and we should lavish them with policy love” line we can; but can we at least admit that student debt relief is basically on par with tax cuts for the wealthy only even more direct?Report
How many of these student loans are going to Richie Rich, and how many are going to a Latina from Boyle Heights who got a degree in accounting from UCLA?
Its ironic that we tell Mr. Unemployed Coal Miner to learn to code, then the moment he graduates with a degree in coding, we play the Four Yorkshiremen and accuse him of wallowing in Luggzhuryyy.Report
You know the answer to that Chip and you know the answer is that most college students are middle class and upwards on the income scale and background. In sheer numbers we’re not paying off too many Richy Rich’s but we’re paying off a whole ton of comfortable white privileged Pauls. Yes there’re poor people who manage to go to college with student loans but they’re the exception not the rule. If we got hold of the federal printing press and paid off everyone’s student debt it’d be a huge bonanza for white middle class and upwards people. We liberals talk all the time about how not enough minorities and not enough poor people go to university.Report
Any broad based policy which helps the middle class will help the poor, because the middle class is so large.
A massive infrastructure works program, for example. It would help skilled engineering and construction workers who are already not-poor.
A modern GI Bill would help veterans who almost all have marketable middle class job skills.
Restricting policy to “just the poor and no one else” is not just politically impossible, but not even wise since the tax base for that would need to be, yep, the middle class.Report
Spending the kind of money we’re talking about to help mainly the mid to upper middle class and upwards is… well, obviously not a good deal for the poor and when we’re talking about people with college degrees and student debt we’re talking about the people with the largest income potential in the country. So it’s very much lavishing government largess on our societies “winners” so to speak.
Anyhow, it’s not really surprising that it doesn’t exactly overjoy the masses. I’m personally pretty sympathetic to the cause of student debt relief but I think if it doesn’t address the causes of that debt in the first place then it’ll end up just being a huge bailout program for bloated university administrative departments.Report
Arthur Laffer and David Stockman just smiled. 🙂Report
My friend from Finland believes quite vehemently that all welfare programs should apply to everyone, rich and poor alike. For one thing, it limits the stigma of the welfare recipient, and generally makes a broad swathe of people like the program more.
Personally, I think making Medicare and Social Security need-based would be the beginning of the end for those programs.Report
This is a really good point i.e. social security. Plenty of people could simply rely on their 401K and pension and be just fine but they still take those SS checks. That same approach would absolutely de-stigmatize other social programs.Report
Absolutely, (at least) one foot stuck in the past. When I was on the legislative budget staff in Colorado, I lost track of the number of times I had to find a way to politely say, “Representative (or Senator) X, Colorado hasn’t looked like that for 20 years. The population has grown by two million people. The state is overwhelmingly urban/suburban. We have the second most-educated workforce in the country. Ag and resource extraction are a small and decreasing part of the economy.”
It helped somewhat that I was a Boomer, and it was often obvious that I was older than they were.Report
Most people consider Obama an honorary Gen Xer. Harris misses it by one year so I would count her. Booker is one of ours. We need to get our time in the sun, although maybe we are just better as mayors and governors and jaded Congresspeople. Or Supreme Court justices (big ups to Kavanaugh!)Report
He’s ok except he’s so old and so… well… prone to Bidenisms. Now, granted, the former is matched by his opponent and the latter is so massively exceeded in magnitude and grotesquery by Trumpisms that it probably shouldn’t matter but I don’t blame the Democratic Primary electorate for saying “ehhh… do we have something kind of like this only better and younger?”Report
Biden might be the most centrist candidate but he’s still far to the left of any anticipated median Senate vote, which is the real limitation on a left wing domestic agenda. So I don’t think the policy positioning of a Democratic President matters much for legislative goals like the activist base seems to think.
There’s a pretty plausible argument Biden is the best candidate to help win marginal Senate and House races in 2020 too, and that’s the real ballgame if they win the White House. So he plausibly can get more done than President Bernie or Warren.
The real question with Biden is does he still have his fastball. He didn’t really have it in the first debate and it showed. He’s been out of the game since 2016, so there’s really nothing wrong if he needs some time to stretch it out against soft competition, and a pretty good second debate suggests he can find it again with some practice, bit he’ll have to find it eventually if he wants to be the staff ace in 2020.Report
That’s a good point that I left out: Biden knows how to get legislation through the Senate. More so than even Obama did as president. Partisans on both sides seem to forget that nobody’s dream legislation makes it through the United States Congress.
Before the first Republican debate 4 years ago, Fox showed a video question from Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said “Don’t tell me what your plan is. Tell me your plan to get your plan passed!” That’s good advice for ALL the candidates.Report
“Don’t tell me what your plan is. Tell me your plan to get your plan passed!”
That is a really good line.Report
That really is a good point Brent. Well done.Report
There’s a pretty plausible argument Biden is the best candidate to help win marginal Senate and House races in 2020 too…
Every analysis I’ve seen for the Dems retaking the Senate say that they must win CO and AZ. It would not surprise me if the Democratic Senate campaigns in those states told the national party, “Your money is welcome, but keep the old white guy from Delaware far away.”Report
Senate campaigns in the West don’t so much need a Democratic Presidential candidate to campaign for them so much as they need for the national candidate to not drive the other guys turnout, which is a risk on a few of the other front runnersReport
Democrats lost in 2016 because they had the worst candidate ever who ran the worst campaign ever.
This is a sexist statement. The democrats shouldn’t have done anything differently. The reason Clinton lost is because of the Russians. I don’t need to change, you need to change. The rest of you people need to change. I don’t need to change.Report
Anyway, more to the point, I go to the 2016 electoral map.
The question of whether Biden could win hinges on that map. As I said on the twitters:
Given Biden,
1) Which of Clinton’s states jump into the Trump Column
2) Which of Trump’s states jump into the Biden Column
I think Trump gets NH and Biden gets The Blue Wall back. (Well, today I think that, anyway.)
So let’s look at the map.
We’ll give New Hampshire to Trump and we’ll give Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to Biden.
Biden wins. 274 to 264.
Easy peasy.Report
The question for those who are sufficiently progressive, however, is “for how many candidates is this true?”
Can we put Harris in there and get those numbers? Klobuchar? Williamson?
If we could put Anybody But Clinton in there and get those numbers, why shouldn’t we put Andrew Yang in there, save the country, and give everybody a thousand bucks?Report
Is that a thousand bucks before state and local taxes or after state and local taxes?
In any event, I’m not sure BIden can carry Pennsylvania. His family there voted for Trump last time.
But on the bright side, his son Hunter dumped his other son’s widow and married a South African girl ten days after he’d met her. I’m not sure if that’s the same son who got billions in special deals from China or not, but in any event, nobody was willing to bring things like that up because it would be a Republican talking point.
I have no idea where the candidates got the idea that they shouldn’t use easily anticipated Republican points against each other, but that’s a thing now. I’m all for the policy because it will help Republicans completely blindside and steamroller them in the general.Report
Last night Biden remembered that he was in Detroit and saving the auto industry would be a big deal in Michigan, while nobody else was thinking about that at all. Seems like he has a better handle of what’s needed in the general than the rest of them.
Which goes to how underratedly embarrassing losing Michigan was. Wisconsin you can see happen in a fluke year, while Pennsylvania was always a precarious balance between urban and rural. To lose Michigan on top of it while trying to run up the popular vote in reflected a deep incompetence.Report
According to the writers of Shattered, the seeds of that incompetence were sown during the primay, when Hillary and her team decided to double down on african american support in order to get Bernie to quit early. It backfired, and galvanized a segment of white voters against her, particularly in Michigan. Their internal polls showed that her numbers when down the more she campaigned there.
The moral of the story? Be careful how you campaign in the primary. General election voters are watching.
Or maybe the moral is: be careful how you campaign in one state, voters in other states are watching.
I dunno. But there’s a moral in there somewhere.Report
Also, if you don’t wear it like Tulsi, don’t campaign in a white pant suit.
I think a lot of Democrats didn’t realize how bad she actually was until quite a long time after the election, when she kept falling down or giving reason #137 for her loss, with none of the prior 136 reasons really having anything to do with her.
One of my favorite excuses was that men wouldn’t let their wives or girlfriends vote for Hillary. That still cracks me up. Has she ever talked to an American woman before?Report
Also, if you don’t wear it like Tulsi, don’t campaign in a white pant suit.
Maybe we can revisit the question I asked in the Harris thread.Report
No good will arise from this.Report
The moral of the story?
We white folks are fragile creatures, easily spooked by uppity women and coloreds.Report
Pros for Biden
1- He can talk to the white Rust Belt Obama-Trump voters, and perhaps (I’m willing to go all the way with probably???) bring them back
2- Can’t think of any other
Cons for Biden
1- He’s old (I’m not very original with this one)
1.1- Because he’s old he won’t excite the youth vote. And Democrats need to excite the youth vote. Going on Jaybird’s recipe to win elections, you need to bring your base to the polls. Come the General, I don’t see, for instance, Bernie voters, or Mayor Pete voters, or Beto voters going to the polls for Biden. They might go to vote against Trump, but they won’t get out of bed JUST to vote for Biden.
2. He seems to have forgotten the Obama Administration, and even the Clinton and W. administrations. He says he can work across the aisle, because he used to do it before Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. I don’t think that’s possible today. Obama tried, and was rebuked. Hell, even if GOP Congressional leaders wanted to work with him, their base, and fox News, won’t allow them. Whatever the solution to Congressional gridlock is, Biden doesn’t have it. But worse, unlike warren, for instance, he doesn’t seem to be aware we are not in 1991 anymore.
3- He’s a DC insider. The most DC insider of the bunch by a lot. He makes Trump look like an anti-DC insurgent. In the General election, this will hurt him badly, depressing his base, and increasing the turnout of those that still get enraged by the anti-politics.
So, pretty please, Democratic primary voters, no Biden in November.Report
On the cons:
1- There’s just no getting around this.
1.1- Our difficulty is the votes we’re talking about exciting here are mostly coast in location and while they’re good for running up the public vote tallies they’re not very good for winning the electoral votes that actually matter. And, frankly, I cannot imagine that any of the even remotely politically engaged folks who’d be turned off by Biden’s age wouldn’t already be planning to crawl across broken glass to vote against Trump. Also, the right VP pick could entirely ameliorate this concern.
2- I don’t know if he forgot it or not but peddling the line is electorally advantageous. I would like to think he’s not delusional about the odds of GOP intransigence but even if you accept that as reality it still pays to say to the voters you’ll work across the aisles. The voters like it and it helps with pro #1.
3- I don’t think #3 works very well. Trump’s pretty thoroughly deflated his “drain the swamp” cred with anyone who isn’t a Trump true believe (and IS thus unobtainable as a voter for any Dem). Anyone who is inclined to look at Biden and growl “Insider” will look at Trumps cabinet and then throw themselves into the broken glass to vote against him.
I’ll add some other cons:
4- Gaffes; Biden is known to fish shit up with gaffes big time.
5- Biden’s handsiness: I know we’ve been over this before but it’s so awkward. So far he seems to have flown under the radar with it as being folksy and harmless but once he’s the nominee how many women need to surface saying he sexually assaulted him before it becomes a fiasco? It just feels like a shoe waiting to drop.
6- He’s sooooo old!!! Like, seriously, I mean campaigning isn’t exactly easy stuff. How’s his health going to hold up?
But I still would really rather his support transferred to one of the other moderate candidates.Report
1.1 and 3. I can probably work my way up to eight of the Cabinet members if I spend some time on it. And the fact that I’m leaving a comment on this site says I’m a geek/nerd/wonk. Nine out of ten voters won’t be able to name more than one. With the rate of turnover, that one may be someone no longer in office*. However, I am very much a believer in the NE urban corridor Democratic candidate jinx that goes back to Kennedy (and arguably, Kennedy would have fallen to it without Johnson holding enough southern states). I lost money betting against it in 2016. Biden is not going to be the candidate that breaks it (neither is Sanders or Booker; maybe Warren, but I won’t put money on it this time).
* I’d guess some number would say “Jeff Sessions”, or at least be able to describe him, because Kate McKinnon was so memorable.Report
Biden is not going to be the candidate that breaks it
What VP pick could get him outa that jinx?
Also, reading all these posts and comments about Dem candidates with the accompanying fluff and takedowns makes me curse the day Sherrod Brown said he wouldn’t enter the race.Report
Michelle Obama, the most admired woman in America!
Kidding, sorta.Report
Klobacher? Inslee? Hickenlooper?
Obviously not Warren, Harris or Sanders.Report
TIm Scott?
Heh. Kidding. Of course. I’m just kidding around here….
Add: Sherrod Brown?Report
Isn’t one.
LBJ was Senate Majority Leader, ran for the nomination, and came to the 1960 convention with a significant number of delegates from southern states. He had the leverage to (with high probability) deliver several Democratic southern states that would otherwise break for Nixon.
Today the Democrats have 104-plus-or-minus EC votes in the NE urban corridor; 98-plus-or-minus in the West; 20 in Illinois, and another 10 in Minnesota if they hold it (Clinton won by less than 45,000 votes there). There’s no other block of securely Democratic states that just hate Joe Biden.
Inslee, Hick, Bennet, Harris… already in the 232 count. Warren, Booker, Sanders… already in the 232 count. Could Klobuchar or Mayor Pete deliver WI, MI, and PA? I doubt it. Beto or Castro can’t deliver Texas. No one that obviously delivers FL and GA or NC.
It’s a nasty hole to be in.Report
yeah I get that Michael but if the voter doesn’t know who the cabinet members are then they’re probably not going to be dinging Biden on being an insider that hard. Or they are but aren’t dinging Trump which means they’re right wing Trumpkin voters and thus not obtainable.Report
So far as I can tell, NE urban corridor Democrats simply don’t excite the voters outside of the corridor. Or as a former writer here was known to say, the rest of the country seriously dislikes/resents people from the NE urban corridor. If he’s right and you need to get Democrats in WI, MI, and PA excited, you don’t run someone from Massachusetts or Delaware.Report
I’m not a Democrat (just a reminder for any new kids); I get the appeal. Strangely, I also get a little sad at the prospect of him as the nominee. Like Lucy died of a childhood disease and we all felt sorry for Charlie Brown so we made him President. #mood.Report
I just don’t see Biden getting people excited and out to the polls. Barring an economic downturn this is likely to be a close election. I believe turnout is going to be key. I have a hard time seeing folks being more excited for Biden than they were for Hillary. I can see that excitement being possible for many of the other candidates.Report
Here’s my hot-take about turnout: since it’s pretty clear that the Democrats have no intention of even *trying* to gain a majority in the Senate, every adult voter fully well knows that the aspirational legislative goals of the progressive wing are 100% pure, undiluted pipe-dream nonsense. That basic realization will in turn motivate lots of people to support Joe! as a return to homely but stout institutional stability imbued with basic human decency. It won’t excite the youngs, but it will excite the olds.Report
I just do not see anybody getting excited and doing a bunch of work to achieve a goal of boring. People wanted to stand in line for hours just so they could vote for Obama. People waited in line for hours just so they could vote for Trump, and they will again. I just don’t see the same happening if the goal is just boring.Report
Maybe boring is the perfect antidote to Trump’s hysterical hype? Especially in the states he needs to win – Wisconsin, PA, Michigan, Arizona.
As we learned last time, the winner of the popular vote doesn’t automatically become President.Report
Maybe people will get excited for boring, but I doubt it. Without excitement there is nothing for the “news/twitter/water cooler” to cover. We know that Trump is going to do his very best to keep his narrative front and center. He did it quite well in 2016 and i would expect him to be better in 2020. Additionally, he now has levers of power he can flippty flip in conjunction with his messaging. He is already tracking towards the center to try and lock in votes now. If you think his recent praise of Nancy Pelosi was just about making trouble for the Democrats, I think you are underestimating his focus on winning.Report
I don’t think I’m underestimating his desire to win. He wants to stay out of jail. 🙂
It’s more that there *is* some upside to Biden becoming the nominee, even tho the progressive wing of the Dem party won’t like it, and whether that upside gains traction depends on how Biden sells his candidacy to the public in the general election. Democrats (other than Obama anyway) do tend to be very bad at retail politics, tho.
But more specifically, I’m suggesting that 45 states or so are already in the bag for either the Dem candidate or Trump, leaving only five or so states up for grabs, and the states in play strike me as pretty Biden-friendly places.Report
Thinking about this some more Joe, I think voters would be more and enthusiastic about 2020 if the Dems were actually trying to win the Senate by running good candidates in those races. As it is, at least right now anyway, the Dems will play defense by merely trying to retain the House (which is the cause of Pelosi’s incoherence on impeachment) and try to win the Presidency on an “anyone but Trump” platform. And that’s a hard sell.
I’m not saying it’s easy out there for a Dem, but gosh, you’d think trained professionals could put some lipstick on that pig.
Adding: maybe I’m wrong about Dem efforts to successfully recruit good candidates for Senate races. I hope so.Report
I have a hard time seeing folks being more excited for Biden than they were for Hillary.
I gotta admit, I don’t like Joe! very much* but I’d be *waaay* more excited to vote for him than Hillary.
*As a candidate. I’m sure he’s charming at a dinner party…Report