In 1896, William McKinley won the presidency while sitting on his front porch smoking cigars. Over a century later, former Vice President Joe Biden may need to do the 21st-century version of the same thing.
The former vice president is reviving the ‘front porch’ style of campaigning to connect with voters amid the pandemic. Photo illustration.
The coronavirus has brought the 2020 presidential campaign “back to the future,” with Biden revisiting elements of the front porch campaigns that were the norm in American politics for the better part of a century.
“Until the end of the 19th century, it was considered uncouth for a candidate to campaign for himself,” said H.W. Brands, an award-winning historian and professor at the University of Texas. Instead, presidential hopefuls stayed home and let others do the work for them. Rallies would still be held but without the candidate. In some cases — like that of William Henry Harrison’s “log cabin and hard cider campaign” of 1840 — attendees would get free drinks instead.
But the model front porch campaign is McKinley’s. The Ohio Republican faced off against William Jennings Bryan, the first major-party presidential candidate to ever hit the hustings on his own behalf. McKinley did not bother to compete with Bryan, one of the greatest political orators in American history. Instead, he stayed home and brought the campaign to him. Railroads were persuaded to issue special fares to McKinley’s hometown of Canton, Ohio, where he would greet visitors from his front porch. Over 700,000 made the pilgrimage to see him there.
The world is a very different place now. Even without the pandemic, it is unlikely that hundreds of thousands of people would organize excursions just to see Biden sitting on his porch, from which he said he now visits at a safe distance with his grandchildren. But Brands notes, “When William McKinley was on his front porch, he could not speak to the country as a whole. When Joe Biden is… he can if he wants to.”
The campaigns of the 19th century took place in an era before radio, let alone television or the internet. Today, Biden can address the entire world from his porch — or the rec room in his Delaware basement he’s transformed into a television studio.
After Biden’s election night rally in Ohio on March 10 was canceled due to fears of the pandemic spreading, a campaign official said there was a realization that the coronavirus was going to present serious obstacles and require a new approach to campaigning. “We needed to have a way for the vice president to do events and do interviews and statements and be seen publicly really quickly,” the campaign aide said. The campaign reached out to television networks and other outlets about what would be required technically to keep Biden on the air. This had to do with a range of concerns, from how fast the internet needed to be to get the lighting right, along with making sure it was a setup that ensured Biden “was looking presidential from his basement.”
While the campaign official acknowledged that this was “nothing like being on the campaign trail,” modern technologies and high-speed internet have created options that might not have been possible even 10 years ago. “It is much more feasible and a lot easier to interact with everyday folks,” the official said. “Everyone uses Zoom. Even before Covid, everyone used FaceTime. People are used to it.”
It’s unlikely that American politics will revert to the 19th century, with candidates continuing to campaign from home after the pandemic. But the limitations imposed by the coronavirus may accelerate other lasting changes in how campaigns are run. “Rallies, in a lot of ways, are a relic of a bygone era,” Addisu Demissie, the campaign manager for Cory Booker’s 2020 presidential bid, said. “We saw that in this primary, races are nationalized and news and information travel across artificial borders. So there actually is plenty you can do from your basement to run for president,” he added.
The reason to do rallies, Demissie argued, is “to mobilize volunteers and to earn press in specific media markets. You can do both of those things from behind a keyboard, behind a camera… just as you can from physically being in a location.” While “in person is still the best way to do any kind of communication,” the arithmetic is changing now that digital natives are aging into becoming reliable voters, he said. “Millennials are now in their late thirties.”
Of course, Biden still has to use these digital tools effectively. His first online town hall in mid-March was plagued with technical difficulties, though they have gone smoothly since. Zac Moffatt, a veteran Republican operative who served as digital director for Sen. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, thought that the Biden campaign had missed a number of opportunities. “I don’t see them doing things that I would do to take advantage of this,” said Moffatt. Instead, he described Biden as mounting “a homebound version of a 1990s campaign.” And the Republican scoffed at the presumptive Democratic nominee’s operation. “Biden talks about innovation by doing a Zoom fundraiser? It’s a little bit sad,” he said.
In contrast, President Donald Trump has not been limited to his basement. The advantages of incumbency allow Trump his ubiquitous daily press briefings and all the technical advantages and paraphernalia of the presidency — including the ability to travel if so desired. (Trump spoke in Norfolk, Virginia in late March when a hospital ship departed for New York, and Vice President Mike Pence spoke this weekend at the Air Force Academy’s commencement ceremony.) From the White House, Trump can speak indoors and outdoors and even hold events with other public officials and business leaders, all of them having been rapidly tested for the coronavirus before entering the president’s presence.
Demissie noted this is just an extension of the Rose Garden strategy that many presidents before Trump have run. “It is very difficult to compete with that in the midst of a crisis,” he said, especially when Biden is not a current officeholder.
For all the downsides of campaigning from home, social distancing does apply as much to intermediaries in the press as it does to everyone else. “Self-confident candidates have always wanted to address voters and constituents without the filter of newspaper editors, television executives,” said Brands. “We are really in the golden age,” he continued, for directly speaking to voters — just as long as speaking directly to them involves staying six feet away.