This front-page article in today’s NYT illustrates the problem: Biden is having success among white swing voters…
“Biden comes across as someone who’s moderate and has experience on both sides of the aisle,” Mr. Zimdars said. “My close family and friends, who are a little more on the Republican side of the fence, said if Biden became the nominee they would vote for him.”
Such persuasion is at the core of Mr. Biden’s campaign strategy, designed to bring together moderates, seniors, working-class voters across races and former supporters of President Trump. The approach has helped him jump out to an early lead in polling, both in national surveys and in swing states like Wisconsin, where Mr. Trump won by less than 23,000 votes in 2016. It has also helped him fend off attacks from Mr. Trump, who has sought to cast Mr. Biden as a radical progressive despite his lengthy career as a moderate lawmaker.
And is successfully navigating rising expectations from social justice advocates…
“Biden is part of the problem. He helped with the War on Drugs and doesn’t really understand the issues we need him to,” said Ms. Rodriguez, 18. “The people I talk to don’t want to vote because they don’t want to participate in a corrupt system.”
But Ms. Rodriguez still said she planned to vote for Mr. Biden in November, though both she and Ms. Gladding wished he embraced more activist rhetoric on matters of racial equality and defunding the police.
What the article doesn’t mention—and which I haven’t seen discussed in the context of recent polling—is that Biden’s self-imposed deadline for naming a VP pick is just a couple of weeks away now. And he’s already eschewed pairing up with another reassuring old white guy.
Whoever he picks, it is likely to cost him. In fact, regardless of whether it’s Kamala Harris, or Elizabeth Warren, or Val Demings, or Tammy Duckworth, he’s likely to see a drop in his lead.
My guess is the filled-in ticket will see a sharp drop in support from swing-voting “moderates,” because misogyny and racism, and because he’ll no longer be able to cover up his progressive policy bonafides with regular-white-guy I’m-one-of-you charm.
I think he will also see a drop in support from “progressives” as—rather than being validated—they will have a whole new target for their dissatisfaction with everything Democratic establishment.
Nate Cohn’s Upshot today might be reassuring, but he’s not even looking at the VP dynamics of the race, which are very different from the five previous contests he uses for comparison.
Buckle your seat belts. August 1 is coming.