Is Biden Really the Most Electable Candidate?

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via Business Insider)

Joe Biden does not have a whole lot going for him at the moment. He's long been gaffe-prone, and doesn't seem to have gotten better with age. The first debate saw him get brutally dragged by Kamala Harris. While he performed better in the second, he was out-shined by a number of other candidates, Elizabeth Warren being perhaps the prominent. Barack Obama has yet to endorse him, despite Biden's incessant attempts to glide along on Obama's lasting popularity. He does not have have a whole lot of new and exciting ideas, as Warren and Bernie Sanders do, nor would he make any sort of inspiring first were he elected president (unlike many of his opponents). However, he does have one big, important thing going for him: electability.

According to a recent Economist/YouGov poll, 65% of Democrats think Biden would probably win against Trump in the general election—the highest number for any candidate. And according to another recent poll (this one from Reuters/Ipsos), 36% of Democrats are just looking for someone who will beat Trump. Those two numbers undoubtedly have a lot to do with Biden's continued (albeit narrowed) lead in the polls for the Democratic primary. Conventional wisdom would, indeed, dictate that Biden is the most "electable" candidate, being a moderate who can boast a lot of experience in government, including eight years as vice president under a reasonably popular president. But anyone who still trusts conventional wisdom at this point has a case of amnesia that's worse than the guy in Memento. So is Biden really the most electable option we have? Personally, I don't think so.

Granted, Biden is doing well in head-to-head polls against Donald Trump. But we're still very early in the campaign. Through much of the summer of 2015, Hillary Clinton was consistently pulling a double-digit lead over Trump, and we know how that panned out. We have a long campaign ahead of us, and a great deal could change between now and Election Day 2020. Trying to guess which candidate is the most electable is a crap shoot at best, as the last presidential election painfully demonstrated—but if we must do so, we need to consider a lot more than just what the polls are saying right now.

One obvious thing to consider is Biden's propensity for "gaffes"—a term that's no doubt too generous for some of his recent unforced errors. Let's review just the times he's misspoken or gotten confused over the past few weeks:

• In his closing statement at the second debate, he asked viewers to "go to Joe 30330." He later stated that he had accidentally said his own name, Joe, instead of the word "text."
• He referred to former British Prime Minister Theresa May as Margaret Thatcher (for the second time this year)
• He told a crowd of people that "we choose truth over facts"
• He said that "poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids"
• He twice said that, as vice president, he met with survivors of the Parkland shooting—which happened over a year after left office

To reiterate, these are just his slip-ups from the past few weeks. Now, it may seem petty or unfair to focus on this sort of thing, and it may feel simplistic to argue that Biden's gaffes make him less electable. To that, I would respond by simply pointing to one of the most infamous phrases to come out of the 2016 campaign: "basket of deplorables." This was an unfortunate turn of phrase from Hillary Clinton, describing a group of Trump supporters (those who are openly racist, sexist, Islamophobic, etc.). It's very hard to actually dispute the point she was making (which I say as no great fan of Hillary Clinton): a lot of Trump's support comes from genuinely disgusting people with horrible views. But Clinton's poor choice of words had serious consequences. Diane Hessan, who was tasked by the Clinton campaign with following undecided voters, later wrote that "[a]ll hell broke loose" after the "deplorables" remark and that it marked "the one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice." In her book What Happened, Clinton herself would write that the remark had been a "political gift" to Donald Trump. Of course, Clinton may still have lost even if she'd never used that wording, or tried to make the point she was making. But the point is, gaffes absolutely matter. And at this point, you would be hard-pressed to find a major candidate that seems more likely than Biden to hand Donald Trump another "political gift" by saying something unfortunate.

That's not the only reason to question to question Biden's electability. Another undoubtedly important factor in the 2020 election will be the youth vote. In 2018, the percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds who voted surged significantly from previous midterm elections and "almost certainly helped the Democratic Party take control of the House of Representatives," according to an analysis from The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). The ability to turn out younger voters will undeniably be important for the Democratic candidate in 2020, so it makes sense to take a look at what younger voters favor politically. For starters, a Harvard Institute of Politics poll found that a solid plurality of young voters support Bernie Sanders, probably the most left-wing candidate, for the Democratic nomination. And this result is not surprising if we look at the policy preferences of younger voters. A separate Harvard IOP poll from last year found commanding majorities of 18- to 29-year-olds are in favor of a federal jobs guarantee, free college and single-payer healthcare. Among young "likely voters," 53% favor democratic socialism while only 48% support capitalism. 

Trump's unpopularity among young voters will obviously help whichever Democrat gets the nomination, but that doesn't mean that youth turnout will be the same no matter what. These numbers suggest that Bernie Sanders, or at least Elizabeth Warren, is the sort of candidate that can turn out the youth vote, because these are the candidates that line up with the majority of younger adults politically. On the other hand, Joe Biden—unlike most young voters—is outspokenly against single-payer healthcare, is decidedly not a socialist of any sort, and has mocked the the idea that millennials have it tough, responding: "Give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it. Give me a break." It's obvious that Biden will do the Democrats no favors with young voters if he's the nominee. 

We should also address Biden's vulnerability with black voters. Granted, Biden remains the top-polling choice among black voters for the time being, but there's reason for concern nonetheless. In this very campaign, Biden has touted his close working relationship with segregationists in the past—and when criticized for doing so by Cory Booker, said that Booker should apologize to him for daring to criticize what Biden had said. Biden played an important role in turning liberals against desegregation busing and has had a long, prominent history in supporting tough-on-crime laws that were often promoted by appealing to racist fears and resulted in disproportionately harsh treatment of black Americans—a history he has recently defended. Should Biden be the nominee, Trump's campaign is likely to highlight these facts to try to lower turnout among black voters, and it could work. Certainly, most black people aren't about to embrace Donald Trump just because of Biden's troubling past—but many could end up sitting out the election, as happened in 2016. Biden's current popularity among black voters is certainly part of the reason he's polling so well against Trump; in a recent Fox News poll, for instance, 84% of black voters said they would support Joe Biden over Donald Trump—a higher percentage than said they would support Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris in their hypothetical match-ups against the incumbent. But if Biden's current popularity among black voters begins to fade, so will his advantage against Trump—and given his poor record on race-related issues and his propensity for gaffes, it's a possibility worth considering. His support among black primary voters softened considerably after his first debate performance, when Kamala Harris took him on over his opposition to desegregation busing; it would be naive to assume that something similar couldn't happen again.

While it's not directly related to electability, I think we additionally must take the issue of Biden's mental state seriously. He has been making a great deal of missteps lately—so many that his political allies have started to float the idea of changing his schedule and reduce his opportunities for "gaffes." Combined with his age (if elected, Biden would turn 80 before his first term was even halfway over), this begins to raise some real questions. To be fair, Bernie Sanders is a year older than Biden, so I can hardly oppose Biden based on his age alone. But Sanders still seems sharp in a way that Biden decidedly doesn't. When we're choosing who should become one of the most powerful people on the planet, it's probably better to be safe than sorry.

So, if not Biden, who should those voters whose number one priority is to defeat Trump support in the Democratic primary? Well, for one thing, I question how much emphasis we really need to place on choosing the most "electable" candidate in 2020. Donald Trump has been a consistently unpopular president, and there are reasons to suspect that the economy might soon be in a recession, further dampening his odds of reelection. In 2016, Trump was only able to narrowly win against a highly unpopular and frequently inept Democrat (and even then, he lost the popular vote). While it's understandable to emphasize the importance of defeating Trump, it would be awfully short-sighted to focus on just choosing the most electable candidate when it's likely that Trump will be facing an uphill battle for reelection no matter who the Democrats nominate.

But for those still desperate to find someone who can beat Trump, my answer to the question "whom should I support?" is the same as my answer to anyone else: Bernie Sanders. Sanders has often polled as well, or nearly as well, in head-to-heads against Trump as Biden has, and I don't think he has the same vulnerabilities. A ticket headed by Sanders would be practically guaranteed to turn out young voters in droves and, contrary to the notion that he would alienate swing voters, a recent poll showed Sanders narrowly ahead of Trump in Texas. Americans are simply not afraid of socialism in the way they once were, and policies like a $15 minimum wage and higher taxes on the wealthy are broadly popular. 

In the end, though, I really would urge people to decide their candidate based on policy over "electability." I think just about any of the top Democratic candidates could beat Trump—but none of them are guaranteed to, either. In the last election, Democrats chose the supposedly far-more-electable Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, while Republicans chose the unelectable Donald Trump over the various more electable options (Bush, Rubio, etc.)—and Republicans came out of the election with the presidency, both houses of Congress, and a stronger position than they'd had in decades. But even if you do insist on making electability your top priority, Joe Biden is not the person you're looking for.