Yesterday, Biden made what now calls his "official" campaign kickoff event-- meaning the one at the home of the Comcast lobbyist for multimillionaires wasn't and that the one in the Potemkin Village union hall in Pittsburgh wasn't. The title of his speech should have been, Why I'm not fit to lead the Democratic Party in 2020. It was so dull and so boring and so uninspiring that he could just endorse Trump and save us all a lot of time. "Some say Democrats don’t want to hear about unity," he said. "That they are angry-- and the angrier you are-- the better. That’s what they are saying [you] have to do to win the Democratic nomination. Well, I don’t believe it. I believe Democrats want to unify this nation. That’s what we’ve always been about. Unity! If the American people want a president to add to our division, to lead with a clenched fist, closed hand and a hard heart, to demonize the opponents and spew hatred-- they don’t need me. The already have a president who does just that,. I am running to offer our country-– Democrats, Republicans and Independents-– a different path."Biden stands for nothing at all. Just "Elect me; I'm Joe Biden. And everything will be alright. I'm Joe Biden... I'm Joe Biden. I'm Status Quo Joe Biden. I'm Joe Lieberman. I'm Joe Manchin. I'm Joe Biden."Jill Filipovic, the author of The H Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness, asks a question plenty of people who follow politics closely are asking, Does Anyone Actually Want Joe Biden To Be President? "The most important requirement for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee? Electability," she asserted. "It matters more, we keep hearing, than nominating a candidate who has good policies. It matters more than nominating a candidate with a track record of passing progressive legislation. It certainly matters more than nominating a candidate who could be the first female president. Unfortunately, very few people who say they are putting electability first seem to understand what “electability” means, or what today’s electorate actually looks like."She reminded her readers that "at this point in the lead-up to 2016, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker were the top contenders for the Republican nomination." Walker dropped out of the race the first time Trump shouted "boo" at him. Most of the field withered away as Trump grew in popularity among a base the GOP had been cultivating for decades, a base most mainstream Republican politicians still didn't know how to relate to. Trump did.
The case that people make for Mr. Biden’s electability is not that any one group of people is particularly excited by him, but that he stands the best chance of getting independents and perhaps even some moderate Republicans to cross over and vote Democratic; unenthusiastic lefties will nevertheless vote for him because this is an emergency and Donald Trump is so much worse. It’s Politics 101: The candidate closest to the median voter will scoop up the biggest share.But getting elected is not about appealing to the bland median. It’s about appealing to the people who actually feel motivated to turn out and vote.The Democratic Party of 2019 does not look much like Joe Biden. Women, African-American, Latino and Asian voters are all much more likely to say they support Democratic candidates than Republican ones. White voters, male voters and especially white male voters generally support Republicans.Statistics on who votes Democratic also suggest that the Democratic Party is more diverse than the experts deciding who is electable.Those assumptions about electability reflect entrenched biases more than political science, and have a dash of arrogance to boot. An electable candidate, the thinking goes, has to be authentic and broadly appealing. But authenticity itself is coded as white and male when it’s defined by white men.This perpetual reading of the white working-class tea leaves (or beer hops?) only makes sense if those voters are actually more influential than all the others. In the Democratic Party, they’re not. Just under a third of white men without college degrees said they voted for a Democrat in the 2018 midterms. And Democrats don’t need anywhere near a majority of these men to win. Women vote in larger numbers than men; voters with college and post-graduate degrees turn out in larger shares than those without. These high-turnout groups are the same ones that are trending Democratic. If they're motivated to turn out to vote, a Democrat will wind up in the White House.But what about those Obama-to-Trump swing voters who will reportedly make or break this election, as they did the last one? The Democratic Party shouldn’t leave anyone behind, but working-class white men are declining as a share of the Democratic base, while whites generally are declining as a share of the general population. The entire premise that white men without college degrees are the only possible swing voters is a faulty one.There’s also little evidence that most voters pick a candidate based on policies and that a moderate candidate who wrote campaign talking points to appeal to a broad swath of voters would do significantly better than a more visionary and progressive one. Instead of trying to win back a waning electoral and demographic force, Democrats would be better served to consider what will get voters to the polls. Hillary Clinton’s loss can only be explained by a long list of factors, but surely one of them was apathy: The certainty that she had the election in the bag probably depressed voter turnout.Contrast that to the 2018 midterms, which had a record-setting turnout-- and a record number of women elected. Disgust with the Trump administration surely pushed voters to the polls. But so did a slew of exciting candidates who don’t look like the old models of “electable.” They looked a lot more like the people actually electing them.Women made record numbers of political contributions in 2018 and, at least anecdotally, dominated campaigns behind the scenes. Mr. Trump’s white working-class base still voted Republican, although in lower numbers than when he triumphed. Women of color, and particularly black women, continued their trend of staunchly supporting Democrats, and turnout among racial minorities hit a high at 28 percent of voters, and 38 percent of voters under 30. A majority of white women with college degrees voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but it was this group that gave Democratic candidates a new advantage in 2018, increasing its support for Democrats over Republicans by 13 percentage points from two years earlier.UPDATEIn several key states, including Ohio and Florida, white women with college degrees flipped: A majority voted Republican in 2016 and Democratic in 2018. White men, regardless of education, did not. It’s white women, not working-class white men, who are the most promising swing voters for Democrats in 2020, and who could wind up as loyal lifelong Democrats.Strong turnout among voters of color, a Democratic shift among white voters, and significant flips by college-educated white women all reaped dividends for the women who ran in 2018. Female candidates in the midterms outperformed male ones by a significant margin, on both the left and the right (and the gap was larger with Democratic candidates than Republican ones). In other words, if the 2018 election is any indication, women are more electable than men are-- especially, but not only, with Democrats.History is a limited guide when it comes to who can win. After all, an African-American law professor with limited national political experience and a foreign-sounding name was not exactly the picture of electability; neither was a thrice-married former reality TV star turned accused sexual assailant and verified compulsive tweeter. But both tapped into something alive and hungry in the American electorate.Yesterday's Democrats.com straw poll-- top 3Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, no force has been greater, bolder, louder and hungrier than women. Beginning with the Women’s March, segueing through the #MeToo movement, and hitting full force with the 2018 midterm women’s wave, women have been the most vibrant and effective political constituency in Trump’s America. Within that group, it is women of color who are the backbone of the Democratic Party.It is baffling, then, to know all of this and conclude that the most electable candidate is Joe Biden, an older white man tightly associated with sexual harassment and racism, even if he is polling ahead more than a year before the election.A white male Democrat has not won the White House in more than 20 years; a white male Democrat has not won a majority of American voters since at least the 1970s (and Hillary Clinton, it bears repeating, won a larger share of the electorate than Donald Trump).Despite all of this-- who votes for Democrats, who works for Democrats, who has actually won the White House as a Democrat in the past two decades-- many people have surveyed the field and concluded that Joe Biden is the most electable of the bunch. That conclusion does tell us a lot about what we still assume the rightful custodians of power look like. But it doesn’t tell us much about who can actually win in 2020.
