Joe Biden’s supporters point to his winning strategy: attracting older voters and moderates to the Democratic Party while trying to minimize losses among younger voters who often don’t vote anyway. Biden mostly ignores higher-income progressives, who don’t have anywhere else to turn and will therefore stay in line and vote a straight Democratic ticket.
And it’s working rather nicely for Biden. He’s way ahead in the polls and will likely defeat Trump handily. But I think a closer look at the evidence shows two ways to beat Trump. Biden took one path.
I’m more interested in the other.
It’s All About Trump
Incumbents often drive elections. But that’s especially accurate in 2020 with Trump. National polling shows that Trump drives the state of the race. Trump wins the votes of those who approve of him, and Biden wins the votes of those who don’t. About 43% of Americans like Trump, and about 44-45% of Americans approve of his job as President. He wins about 43-45% of the vote in polling against Biden.
From that, we can tell there’s nothing special about Biden. Biden is roughly a generic Democrat who voters hardly notice. That there’s nothing special about him defines his role in the 2020 campaign. His job is to sit there and receive the votes of people who don’t like Trump.
For the most part, Biden’s opponents in the 2020 primaries did about the same. Trump polled a tad better against Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren, with Trump winning more like 45-46% of the vote. But that’s all pretty close. Biden and Bernie Sanders polled almost exactly the same.
The gist of it? Despite months of liberal hand-wringing about ‘electability,’ it probably didn’t matter much who they nominated. It’s likely any Democrat would lead Trump. The more interesting question is how they’d get there.
Two Ways to Beat Trump
Biden found one way to beat Trump. His way forces the Democrats to rely on elevator words (like ‘fascism‘) and claims about Trump stealing the election in order to move reluctant and unexcited Democrats to show up at the polls. It also forces Democrats to continue their relentless march to the right on political issues as broad as Antifa to fracking. Using this kind of strategy, Democrats will never adopt social democracy as a social and political vision.
So, what’s the second way to beat Trump? Sanders offered the possibility of using a bold, social democratic vision for the future that would put together young people and non-voters in sufficient numbers to overcome losses among older people and moderates.
Would it have worked? I don’t know. We didn’t get to find out. But, again, Sanders polled just as well as Biden, and Trump’s low favorability dominates the election. We have plenty of reasons to believe it would have. The ‘Sanders way’ would’ve carried risks, namely losing the short-term due to low turnout among young people. But the ‘Biden way’ carries plenty of risks of its own, namely losing the future by alienating an entire young generation and de-sensitizing people to authoritarianism and fascism by identifying it with a mainstream U.S. political party.
2024? 2028?
I’ll leave with a final note. As I’ve mentioned before, the ‘Sanders way’ isn’t exactly wedded to Sanders. In theory, someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might put together a more successful version of it in the future. It will be interesting to see whether that succeeds.
