The president has never looked weaker. So why is the left content with Biden? Absent massive electoral fraud, Joe Biden will very likely beat Donald Trump — and beat him pretty badly.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Joe Biden.
Biden’s campaign presence — even before he sealed up the nomination — can be charitably described as anemic. Even Biden’s campaign advisors have tried to keep him out of the public eye. He has been dogged by low voter enthusiasm, especially among young people. Most damagingly, Biden has been accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault by former staffer Tara Reade.
Nevertheless, Biden is in a strong structural position against Trump. Pundits, political consultants, and even activists tend to focus on voter enthusiasm, TV ads, social media campaigns, and get-out-the-vote ground games, but as Biden himself proved in the primary, a winning candidate does not necessarily need any of those things in order to win. And for all of Donald Trump’s supposed political genius, he is an incumbent president with a decidedly mixed record who is presiding over an economic catastrophe. This is not a structural situation that tends to lead to an incumbent’s reelection.
We can see this reflected in the polls. Biden has consistently led Donald Trump in head-to-head polls for months. A national Monmouth poll from the end of April has Biden at 50% to Trump’s 41%. Other polls tell a pretty consistent story. Biden is up by four points in the latest Economist/YouGov poll. A CBS poll has him up by six points.
Of course, Hilary Clinton also led Trump by similar margins in national polls — a May 2016 poll from CNN put her at a whopping 13-point lead. Clinton’s final popular vote tally was not only considerably narrower — she beat Trump by two points in November — but the national polls were ultimately irrelevant. Trump won through the Electoral College — the polls in swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida were what actually mattered.
Even in swing states, however, Biden looks strong. The former vice president was up three points in Wisconsin in March, and is running eight points ahead of Trump in Michigan, according to a recent Fox News poll. Biden is competitive in North Carolina, and he’s pulling even with Trump in the ultimate red state bulwark, Texas.
Trump never appeared to have a lock on reelection. He has been a pretty consistently unpopular president throughout his four years in office, his term having been marred by controversies and an impeachment. Democrats, meanwhile, have seen solid gains in state and congressional races over that time span. About the only thing going for the incumbent ticket was a superficially strong economy and low unemployment.
Then the pandemic came.
Thanks to the coronavirus, the Trump administration must now contend with both the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, with nearly one in five Americans unemployed, and the most mass deaths — north of 80,000 — America has suffered since World War II.
The political effects of crippling unemployment and mass death from a pandemic are unknown, for the simple reason that this has not happened in almost anyone’s lifetime. There are a very small handful of people still among us who were alive and politically conscious during the Great Depression, let alone the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, when something like 675,000 Americans died.
But if we look at unemployment numbers since the 1940s, there’s a pretty clear trend: incumbent presidents and political parties who see unemployment numbers rise while in office tend to not win reelection. John McCain could not hold the White House for Republicans in 2008; George H.W. Bush lost in 1992 in no small part thanks to a stalled economy.
The one major exception to the trend is Ronald Reagan, who saw unemployment rise to over 10% in 1982 but nevertheless won reelection in a landslide in 1984. But while unemployment spiked in the middle of Reagan’s first term, by November 1984 the unemployment rate had consistently fallen for nearly 18 months.
That the Democratic Party has opted for Biden represents a catastrophically squandered opportunity for meaningful reform in the greatest economic and political crisis of a lifetime.
In order to win reelection, Donald Trump will have to turn the economy — and the coronavirus pandemic — around. There is little indication this will happen. The administration’s desperate attempts to reopen the economy and throw people off unemployment are not going to work. Invoking the Defense Production Act to force meatpacking plants to stay open won’t prevent shortages. The death toll will increase. Unemployment numbers may stabilize, but considering that even in states that have “reopened” demand is weak, there is little to indicate that we’re in for a strong recovery.
The 2020 election is a referendum on Trump and his pandemic response. Biden’s strong performance in the polls has more to do with Trump’s failings than it does Biden’s strengths.
In this environment, any of the 2020 Democratic leaders, be it Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Pete Buttigieg, would beat Trump in November. That the Democratic Party opted for Biden in the final weeks of the pre-pandemic era now looks like a catastrophically squandered opportunity for meaningful reform during the greatest economic and political crisis of a lifetime — and that’s saying something.
It’s not simply that Biden has been making conciliatory moves toward Never Trump Republicans — most of whom have been deeply complicit in the far-right turn in American politics over the past generation. It’s that he’s also embraced the worst centrist tendencies in Democratic politics over the past generation — the cost of doing business as a “unity” candidate. Larry Summers, by all rights, should never work in Washington again — and yet the Harvard economist, the architect of the Obama administration’s inadequate response to the 2008 financial crisis, is one of Biden’s top policy advisors. Bruce Reed, Biden’s former chief of staff from 2011–2013 and one of the major architects of Bill Clinton’s disastrous welfare reform in the 1990s, also holds a senior policy position in the Biden campaign. And Biden is reportedly strongly considering Amy Klobuchar as his VP pick.
Biden has told reporters that he envisions himself as another FDR. But absent credible commitment to those politics — not the least of which would be a prominent role for Elizabeth Warren in a Biden administration — there are reasons to be skeptical.
The left was largely blindsided by Biden’s win in the primary, in no small part because it was seemingly inconceivable that an apparently inept campaign which had underperformed in every contest before South Carolina could actually pull off a victory. The emotional catharsis of a left-wing candidate finally seeming to pull off the impossible and win a national election lulled otherwise smart people into a false sense of security about Bernie Sanders’ electoral strength and Joe Biden’s weaknesses.
So much debate on the left has been about the question of structure — whether or not Sanders’ defeat was structurally determined by the Democratic Party and media elites. Ironically, many on the left who argue that Bernie’s loss was structurally determined also tend to argue that Biden, an inept candidate, is likely to lose to Trump in November.
Political assumptions guide political strategy. Assuming Biden cannot win is a bad assumption, and will lead to bad political strategy.