Over a career in elected public office lasting more than 46 years, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has seen campaigns from the rudimentary, family-run effort that first launched him unexpectedly to the U.S. Senate as a 29-year-old to the sophisticated, data-driven juggernaut that helped elect him and Barack Obama twice to the nation’s highest offices.
But rarely has he trusted anything as much as his own gut instinct, attuned to the middle- and working-class sensibilities of his former neighbors in towns like Scranton, Pa., and Claymont, Del.
And so as he sat in his office one day in October and watched footage of a Donald Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., not far from his childhood home, Biden sensed trouble.
“Son of a gun. We may lose this election,” Biden said, recalling his reaction during an interview in his West Wing office.
“They’re all the people I grew up with. They’re their kids. And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. But we didn’t talk to them.”
Now, as the Democratic Party struggles to understand what went wrong in an election that left them with the least power in state and federal offices in decades, that same instinct leads Biden to offer a diagnosis and a prescription for what he sees as a more successful approach, one which pushes back, if ever-so-gently, against a powerful current in Democratic politics.
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If Biden entered the race, former Sen. Ted Kaufman wrote in the memo, which quickly became public, it would be because of “his burning conviction that we need to fundamentally change the balance in our economy and the political structure to restore the ability of the middle class to get ahead.”Biden, of course, did not run. The emotional toll of the death that spring of his eldest son, Beau, made a campaign an impossibility.
But the clarity of Kaufman’s memo contrasts notably with Biden’s critique of Clinton’s campaign. In the interview, Biden pointed to questions that came even from members of Clinton’s inner circle, revealed in emails made public by WikiLeaks, about whether the Democratic front-runner had figured out why she was running.
“I don’t think she ever really figured it out,” Biden said. “And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run.”
Sure there was an overlap in districts between the Sanders voters in the primary and Trump on Nov. 8. Nevertheless, it’s a long shot to predict Sanders would have beaten Trump if he had been the DP candidate. This is all pure theoretical chatter. The popularity of Sanders with young voters was a great asset and for me an indication Clinton was heading for a tough election night.
President Sanders? Bernie would have beaten Trump | LAT – Dec. 22, 2016 |
Trump won the election by prevailing in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that, together, gave him 46 electoral votes. In Michigan, he edged Hillary Clinton by just three-tenths of a percent. In Wisconsin, the margin was eight-tenths. In Pennsylvania there was a slightly larger gap of 1.2%.
All three of those states usually lean toward the Democratic candidate. This time around, most working-class white voters — many of whom voted for Barack Obama in the last two elections — saw Clinton as the incarnation of a political establishment that was indifferent to their struggles.
They were won over by Trump’s boasts that he would protect American jobs and challenge the influence of Wall Street. Who else in the 2016 campaign made similar promises, with far more conviction? Bernie Sanders, of course.
Polls and interviews with voters, both before and after the election, identified a significant overlap between Trump voters and Sanders admirers. Among non-college-educated whites in the old industrial states, many were simply looking for someone to address their concerns and shake things up in Washington.
They went with Trump on Nov. 8, but plenty of them would have voted for Sanders if he had been on the ballot. Would it have been enough to tip Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? Given the small numbers needed, the answer is very likely yes.