First they said he had no chance. Now they are saying he will not get anything done. Nonsense.
The presidential election campaign is one of the weirdest in modern times. Donald Trump is holding rallies contrary to his own advice about COVID-19. Joe Biden has hardly left the house since March.
It should be political suicide, but it’s working brilliantly. Biden is about 15 points ahead in national polls. He is ahead in the vital state of Florida and has even pulled ahead in Texas. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where the 2016 election was decided, he is ahead by 10 to 12 percentage points.
If you drill down to specific groups of voters, the pattern is even clearer. The middle class in the endless acres of suburbs have had enough. They are worried about the virus and the economy. The same goes for retirees in the Rust Belt who preferred Trump in 2016.
Biden is even leading among voters without a college degree, a group which is practically the foundation of the Republican Party these days. (Trump is still in the lead among white voters in this group.)
Sure, there is a long way to go and the polls reflect a moment in time, not a forecast. George Herbert Walker Bush was behind by approximately the same margin in the summer of 1988, John Kerry led George W. Bush in 2004 and Hillary Clinton was the clear favorite until election night.
Trump can try to scam everyone by banning the right to vote by mail. Biden can mess up a debate or contract COVID-19 and die. (Mind you, so could Trump as they are barely four years apart in age.)
Under no circumstances will the coronavirus disappear by the fall. Most Americans have already decided how they are going to vote. Biden is the favorite. If he wins, Democrats are likely to win the Senate also. That would give them as much room for reform as an American administration could ever expect.
As usual, the Democrats would be taking over in the middle of a crisis. But contrary to the financial crisis in 2008 which put an end to Barack Obama’s plans for reform, the COVID-19 crisis is so significant that it could reasonably help more than hinder.
Biden’s election platform is also more significant than Obama’s. Biden wants to raise the minimum wage, reform the health care system, rejoin the Paris climate agreement and rebuild American unions. (Economists are generally agreed that the weak position of the unions is responsible for both unsustainably large pay gaps and sluggish inflation.)
That would be excellent. The U.S. is, in many ways, a dysfunctional and deeply unfair society that lives on old conceptions of social mobility and free enterprise that are seldom correct these days.
Biden has a better chance than anyone else to turn this around.
The key is not a radical vision, but rather the lack of one. Biden is simply unlikely to frighten anyone off. Just ask the Republicans who are now trying to portray him as Vladimir Lenin. It rings false to everyone who has followed American politics for more than a month, partly because the same Republicans recently fought hard to portray him as a pal to half of Wall Street.
The people in the left wing of the Democratic Party understand none of this, because they prefer dreams and rhetoric over results.
Smarter Democrats get that Biden will be in the driver’s seat if he wins.
If he does win, it will not be because he appealed to core voters with promises of El Dorado, but because he is a pretty nice guy who managed to get the voters in the middle of the political spectrum to lower their guard.
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