Almost two months ago, I wrote a diary titled "I think we're all underestimating how popular Joe Biden will be," talking about contemporaneous polling suggesting that Democratic primary voters were leaning more towards “someone who can win” than “someone I always agree with” compared to 2016, characterizing themselves more as “Obama Democrats” or” Moderate Democrats” more than “Progressive” or “Democratic Socialist.”
I also went through a series of tweets from a focus group of African American women expected to vote in the South Carolina Democratic primary which suggested a strong comfort level with Joe Biden, where the participants dismissed arguments about his past opposition to busing or his handling of the Clarence Thomas hearings. In all, that diary yielded 1,000 comments. (Exactly.)
While the plural of anecdote is not data, I nonetheless want to draw your attention to a NYT story from over the weekend, interviewing Pennsylvania voters, which confirms those earlier propositions about where Biden’s support is coming from. There’s a comfort level with Biden, plus profound fears of not-beating Trump:
“Just to be in the house and assisting Barack when he was in the house, he would already have my vote for that alone,” said Ciarra Walker, 30, a small-business owner.
Kerry Chester, 53, a network engineer working at his laptop, said he voted for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2016 Pennsylvania primary. But for 2020 he thinks it is so important to defeat Mr. Trump that Mr. Biden is preferable, even compared to the two top African-American candidates, Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California.
“I’m going to be completely honest: I think with the country going the way it is, I think we’re kind of safer on the Democratic side going with a white male right now,” he said.
Neither Mr. Chester nor other black voters interviewed said Mr. Biden’s record of championing anti-crime bills — as a Delaware senator in the 1980s and ’90s — that led to mass incarceration were impediments to their support.
“That was 20 years ago,” Mr. Chester said. “I can’t hold everything against him.” He added that compared with other candidates, “I trust him a lot more.”
Do read the whole article, which matches a pair of tweets from the WaPo’s Dave Weigel this morning:
I was also struck by the comments in the NYT article from Nasya Jenkins, 21, who was asked about the Anita Hill question. “I’m not really so caught up on what happened in the past,” Ms. Jenkins said. “We’re here now, with all the problems we have. What do you plan on doing to change that — period?”
Obviously, Biden is only starting to roll out the “what will you do?” part of his campaign — advocating for a $15/hr minimum wage and Medicare as a public option in his kickoff speech yesterday — but while so many of the candidates attractive to Kossacks are fighting over the Who’s Most Progressive banner, Biden is “targeting a swath of voters — including older, less educated and less liberal Democrats — who are often ignored by other candidates chasing younger voters more in keeping with the leftward energy in the party.”
And to be sure, the article talked to voters who reject Biden’s moderation and favor the Sanders/Warren wing of the party. But those of us who want to see a nominee who wants to push policies in a more progressive direction need to recognize and respond to the voters who (a) want to make sure we beat Trump, (b) don’t care about the past as much as the future, and (c) may not be as progressive as us.
There’s no question that there is a lot of gound to go before people start voting, certainly in Pennsylvania (our primary is April 28, 2020), and as with 2008 seeing who’s winning and building support elsewhere is going to yield momentum here:
The name of Ms. Harris, a former attorney general of California, was mentioned as a top choice by many of the same people leaning toward Mr. Biden, including patrons of Uncle Bobbie’s in Philadelphia and suburbanites in Upper St. Clair. It was a reminder that the race is in its early stage, and coalitions could break apart and reconstitute multiple times around someone new.
