https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/opinion/joe-biden-president.htmlDoes Anyone Actually Want Joe Biden to Be President?
By Jill Filipovic
Contributing Opinion Writer
" Creepy Joe, too close for comfort ..comment IITL"
The most important requirement for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee? Electability. 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.
Case in point: In a field crowded with nearly two dozen candidates, no answer to the electability question is offered more regularly and with more conviction than “Joe Biden.”
Mr. Biden, whose campaign officially kicks off this Saturday in Philadelphia, is the kind of guy you could see sitting behind a big desk, acting as a wise custodian of our democracy without posing any threat of changing much. He is from one of those scrappy Rust Belt cities fetishized by so many pundits — people who believe that the imaginary working-class white voter who is going to deliver the White House to the Democrats wants Joe Biden, which is what, in turn, makes Joe Biden electable.
It is true that Mr. Biden is polling ahead of the other Democrats in the field by a large margin, including with women and voters of color. This early in the race, though, polling is more reflective of name recognition than anything else; the two leading candidates for 2020, Mr. Biden and Bernie Sanders, are recognized by 98 percent of Democratic primary voters. This also makes early polls a poor barometer for electoral success. At this point in the lead-up to 2016, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker were the top contenders for the Republican nomination.
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.
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