This week I’ve been hearing a lot about Joe Biden. According to some of what I’ve been hearing, the story is that Biden is the person who can beat Trump. The thinking goes that Biden is a regular working class guy who can win back some of the voters in the Midwestern states Trump won. As David Brooks puts it:
Joe Biden has spent nearly his entire adult life in the Senate or as vice president, but no one could fairly accuse him of being haughty or elitist. People still have the instinct to call him Joe. Average Joe.
How will Biden’s working class persona hold up under scrutiny? Can he win back voters in the Midwest that cost Clinton the election? With this in mind, let’s look at what someone might look like who can win back working class Midwestern voters and take a look at how Biden and others measure up.
Whether you like Michael Moore or not, in July 2016 he predicted Trump would win the election and he predicted exactly how he would do it—by winning Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The criteria he used were:
- Midwest math—Stance on “free” trade policies (that destroyed the Midwest)
- The last stand of the angry white man—There’s a lot of white men who feel endangered in the Midwest.
- The old way of doing things—The establishment that has been fucking things up since the ‘80s is not popular with millennials.
- Depressed liberals—Liberals who aren’t excited will still probably vote Democratic but won’t do much else (like volunteer or convince others to vote Democratic)
- The Jesse Ventura effect—This is basically when people get so angry or frustrated that they vote just to fuck things up. Sometimes it’s almost like a joke to piss others off.
How does Biden compare against these criteria?
1. Midwest math
Moore claimed correctly that Trump’s strategy was to focus on the Midwest and winning working class voters. Trump did this by repeatedly hammering Clinton on her stance regarding “free” trade. He claimed that NAFTA and Clinton’s vote for NAFTA screwed working people in these states. And he said he’d slap tariffs on Mexican cars shipped back to the U.S. and iPhones built in China.
And working people here in Ohio turned out for him.
He turned a state that voted for Obama in 2012 red. According to Tim Burke, Hamilton County’s Democratic Party chairman:
Democrats generally missed the boat in understanding just how deep the dissatisfaction of working class, largely white, voters was. You look around the entire Midwest at the sweep by Trump and it was, in the end, the loss of the white middle class.
Trump was able to stick Democrats with these policies even though they were all also pushed by Republicans because he was running against a Clinton and Bill Clinton had signed NAFTA.
Joe Biden also voted for NAFTA. His top campaign donor for 2 decades was MBNA. He voted to deregulate banks. He voted to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act.
He comes with a lot of baggage that’s going to be an easy target for Trump supporters. One Fox pundit is already calling him “Job Killing Joe.” How do you turn someone with this much baggage into a working class hero? Even David Brooks could only stomach:
Biden is a populist in his person and makeup — where he comes from and how he relates.
2. The last stand of the angry white man
In this category Biden does slightly better than Hillary because he’s an old white man. But he’s not ranting about libtards and how the world’s being taken over by black Muslim transgenders coming across the Mexican border. So I don’t really see him doing much better in this category.
None of our candidates do well in this category though because you have to say a lot of racist, misogynist stuff to do well in this category. We shouldn’t be trying to win in this category. This is the one that I hear people saying Biden can win. He can win back these folks because he’s a white man.
In my opinion, at best there’s a little amelioration.
3. The old way of doing things
Is Biden popular with young people? Or does he represent the establishment of the last 40 years? I think this question answers itself.
He doesn’t generate excitement in the way that Barack Obama did. Or the way that Bernie Sanders does. Or the way that even Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, or Beto O’Rourke do. As I often say to folks though, don’t believe me. Explore this yourself. Ask people supporting Biden why you should vote for Biden. Ask young people what they think of Biden. See what kind of responses you get. What I’ve gotten so far tends to look like this …
Almost all the answers I’ve gotten are some form of “He’s the most winelectable.” This sounds a lot to me like Clinton’s pitch.
Compare this with Pete Buttigieg:
I’ve grown up in a time when you can pretty much tell that there’s tension between capitalism and democracy, and negotiating that tension is probably the biggest challenge for America right now.
Or Elizabeth Warren talking about how she switched parties after fighting credit card companies for 10 years:
I looked around in the middle of that fight and I realized: all the money was on one side, and all the hurtin’ was on the other. And that’s when I jumped in politically. I got in that fight, and I fought it for ten years. And by the end of that fight, I fully understood that every Republican stood there for the banks, and half of the Democrats did. So my party was the party that at least we got half of them to stand up for working people, and that was the big change for me.
When I talk to millennials, I hear something like this:
Now Joe Biden’s video where he says he’s getting into this because of Charlottesville isn’t bad. At least he’s picking a fight.
But when I talk to people about Biden, they’re not saying what the video is saying. That is, their ideas about Biden have largely already been shaped. They don’t see him as a concerned citizen. They see him as the establishment candidate.
4. Depressed liberals
As someone who supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, I’m used to being attacked and “spun.” I’ve been called a BernieBro. And I supported Clinton. In fact, I wrote several articles supporting Clinton. I canvassed for Clinton. I tried to convince others about Clinton.
I’m saying what I’m saying because it was hard. People didn’t buy it. I’m trying to explain why because I also care about winning.
The problem with the progressives in the Democratic Party isn’t that they didn’t vote for Clinton. By and large, we did. It’s that it was hard to get excited about Clinton.
Moore calls this a depressed voter:
The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” – meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked why she’s voting for Hillary. A depressed voter.
This is what I experienced again and again with voters in 2016. They couldn’t get excited about Clinton because she was the establishment candidate.
Now maybe people are tired enough of Trump that this won’t be a problem for Biden in 2020. I don’t think that’s the case. I think he’s a tough sell as someone who will really fight for people.
Again, don’t get me wrong … if he wins the primary, I’ll vote for him and try to help him win. What I’m saying is that it’s going to be harder for me to convince others to do the same than it would for any of the candidates.
The only other candidate who’s even close to having as much establishment baggage as Biden is Cory Booker.
5. The Jesse Ventura effect
This is a weird one that I would never have thought about but now it’s hard to ignore. This is similar to people who write in Mickey Mouse because “I might as well get some enjoyment out of voting.”
Trump has tapped into this vein as well. As someone told me:
Either Trump fixes things or he destroys the country. Either way, I win.
What does he mean by “I win”? It largely means he can say he was right. But the gut level emotion is very much “Fuck you.” I heard versions of this again and again before the election in 2016.
Now you might say liberals wouldn’t do this but I see it happen all the time. When people feel that logic breaks down, conversations often get nasty. Moore calls this the Jesse Ventura effect after Minnesota voters who voted for Jesse Ventura as a joke.
This effect can be attributed to feelings of disenfranchisement. If you feel your vote doesn’t matter, why not vote for a clown?
I don’t know as this hurts any of our candidates too much this time around because Trump is the incumbent, but it doesn’t help that Biden is the most traditional establishment of the candidates running.
Why write this?
I want to win in 2020 too. I understand it’s going to be tough because beating incumbents is always more difficult. In some ways, maybe we have less to lose fighting an incumbent.
If the key to winning is indeed winning back states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and my home state of Ohio, I think we’d have a better chance if we picked someone who wasn’t from the old establishment.
It might help if we use these criteria when talking about who can win with working class voters in Midwestern states. I think we need someone willing to fight for the working class who doesn’t have to defend his votes against the working class. I think we need someone who our working-class base can get excited about and sell to other voters.
David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (ebook now available).