Joe Biden and the Great Awokening

Joe Biden has led the national polls in the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination since last year. He’s ahead in the first three contests, also, with leads ranging from seven points (Iowa) to 13 points (New Hampshire) to 28 points (South Carolina). He’s first in fivethirtyeight.com’s endorsement primary. And though he didn’t launch his campaign until the second quarter of 2019, at which point Bernie Sanders had raised the most money, his nonstop fundraising schedule, and great first-24-hours number, suggests that his second-quarter haul will be impressive. Going into tonight’s Democratic debate, there was no reason to doubt Biden’s status as the Democratic frontrunner. Indeed, while head-to-head matchups 16 months before an election are worthless, one might as well have considered him the frontrunner to become the 46th president of the United States, too.

And yet there is an air of unreality surrounding the Biden campaign, a widespread expectation that the former vice president just can’t last. He’s run twice before, with terrible results. He’s old. He has a tendency to let his mouth take him places his political advisers would rather not have him go. And he has baggage. Lots of baggage, from his creepy-uncle vibe to his votes for NAFTA, the Iraq war, and the 1994 crime bill, to his devotion to the principles of bipartisanship and civility, including with the segregationist and racist senators with whom he has served. He’s about as Washington as you can get. There might not be an Acela corridor without him. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for one, is not impressed. “He’s not a pragmatic choice,” she says.

One of the questions the 2020 Democratic primary will answer, then, is whether the party is more like Biden or AOC. Is a long career, devoted service to Barack Obama, and the purported ability to win the support of working-class whites enough to win the party’s nomination? Or have the Democrats moved so far left in recent years that Biden’s experience is actually a weakness, his geniality a liability, his folksiness a handicap?

The evidence is mixed. Biden’s sustained poll position has led some analysts to conclude that, MSNBC and CNN to the contrary notwithstanding, the Democratic party is older and more moderate than people think. Biden doesn’t need to capitulate to Sanders to win the nomination, he doesn’t need to apologize to AOC or to Cory Booker. And Biden hasn’t apologized, not for his sniffing hair or for his remarks about working with segregationists. And his lead remains significant. Maybe the audience for identity politics and far-left social liberalism is small.

On the other hand, Biden has had to reverse himself on taxpayer funding for abortion, signaling just how essential unrestricted abortion rights have become to the Democratic electorate. And he’s wishy-washy on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which his former boss, the biggest name in Democratic politics, negotiated. Biden’s performing a high-wire act, in other words. He has to navigate the shoals of the Great Awokening that has turned the Democratic base, white progressives especially, into zealots for social justice. Up until Thursday, his strategy has been to lay low. Focus on donors. Avoid interviews. Wrestle with Trump, not with the other Democrats.