If he had run and been nominated, do you think former Vice President Joe Biden could have defeated Trump in last year’s election? Why or why not?
Hard to know. Hillary Clinton could have defeated Trump in last year’s election. She just didn’t. We still don’t know why, not in the sense of a consensus existing. Many of us find it implausible that Trump could have defeated anyone under any imaginable circumstances. He did.
Yes, because Biden is personally quite popular and wouldn’t have collapsed quite as much among white working-class voters as Clinton did in key Rust Belt/Blue Wall states. I’m convinced nearly any Democrat besides Mrs. Clinton would have won in 2016 given how narrow the odds were.
Biden would have gotten quite a bit of the millenial “ironic” vote out of his bitching Trans Am, I’ll tell you that much.
At least he wouldn’t have had the Comey thing happen, though the Russians would still have monkeyed with the election. Ultimately, I’m not certain how much Biden would have affected the ‘change for change’s sake’ anti-establishment vote, though. We don’t know how he and his advisors would run his campaign, either.
Would that have been the first pitting of two 70-somethings in a Presidential (general) election?
Personally I doubt it. Like it or not Trump was the one that read the electorate right in the past cycle.
He didn’t read shit. He ran as a publicity stunt, saying the most outrageous shit just to get time on the news. It was just by happy accident for him that so many white working class voters happily lapped up his verbal diarrhea and proclaimed it to be divine chocolate fudge ice cream.
I would lean toward ‘yes’ but it wouldn’t be a blowout victory, either. Many of those who voted against Hillary Clinton had already started turning against Barack Obama’s Democratic party. I think Hillary Clinton’s campaign and messaging woes amplified concerns that white working class defectors had.
What could have made the difference for Biden is that he is from coal and steel country. And he still very much identifies with working class people. He communicates in a way that seems much, much more authentic than Hillary Clinton, and I think that his record of being a mainstream moderate might have differentiated him from Obama at least a little bit.
Even so, the fact is that voters were in a mood for something different and there area lot of people who would have voted to shake things up with Trump no matter which Democrat was running against him.
I’m thinking this’ll do better in Elections.
I’m inclined to say no. Biden showed in 2008 that he wasn’t a great campaigner and had a bad case of “foot in mouth” disease, and I doubt that had changed.
Don’t get me wrong - Biden would likely have been a good president, but in order to be president you need to be able to campaign and it wasn’t a strong point for him.
He would have destroyed (by current relative standards)Trump. Normal people were desperately wanting any viable alternative to Trump, but there wasn’t one.
I think it’s likely Biden would have gotten at least a fraction of a percent more in MI, WI, and especially PA, and thus I think it’s likely he would have won. Not certain, of course.
I doubt it. Hillary lost because blacks and other core Democratic constituencies didn’t turn out to vote. Biden doesn’t have any more charisma than she did. They wouldn’t turn out for him either.
Plus “it’s time we had a woman President” has at least slightly more appeal than “it’s time we picked another old white guy”.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s just one reason out of many – if she had gotten just a very slightly larger fraction of white working class voters in MI, WI, and PA, she would have won the election. I think it’s likely (but not certain) Biden would have done so.
They did pick another old white guy.
The whole election cycle would have changed, Trump might not have been the GOP candidate as a result. Biden in the election would have taken away one of Trump’s big advantages, that he wasn’t Hillary. He still wouldn’t be Hillary but it wouldn’t have mattered. Biden would have been better prepared to handle attacks by Trump, he would do it like Kasich did, and Hillary wasn’t smart enough to do. Biden probably would have held the Blue Wall.
Trump was going to win that nomination no matter what. The GOP tried like hell to stop the Trump train precisely because they assumed, like most pundits, that he would lose to Hillary Clinton. They feared that his white nationalist campaign would forever brand the GOP as the part of racists – and I still suspect that it could – but they overestimated Hillary’s strength just as the Democrats did. He was a phenomenon. I’m not sure it’s a phenomenon that can be repeated but he wasn’t going to lose the nomination no matter whom the Dems chose.
This does lead us back to the original question, which is how he would have fared against Joe Biden. That question leads me to consider another: how would Joe Biden have fared against Hillary Clinton and a strong Bernie Sanders insurgency. It’s entirely possible that Hillary Clinton, who absolutely was going to run for the nomination no matter what, would have gotten into a political brawl with Biden over the heart and soul over the establishment. Meanwhile, there’s this other guy over here to the left who somehow keeps building a cult following, only in this scenario, he quite likely wins some of the primaries he lost because two establishment candidates keep siphoning votes from each other. In this scenario, the same situation that bedeviled Republicans confronts Democrats: a guy who wasn’t even supposed to be here is now in a tight 3-way race because there’s no clear victor. Now maybe, just maybe, Biden consistently finishes a strong 2nd in races that he loses to Bernie and maybe Clinton consistently finishes in 3rd a la Jeb Bush. And then maybe as it was with Bush, the pressure builds for her to concede by late February. But does she? And meanwhile you’ve got the legion of Bernie Bros attacking the Democratic establishment, calling it a "rigged’ system and that they’re the party of Wall Street. Even if Biden finally gets Hillary off of his back, he’s still got a much stronger Bernie Sanders contingent to deal with now. Maybe Biden comes away with a win before the convention but it’s conceivable in this scenario that this thing goes to the convention without either side having the needed delegates. The convention turns into a brawl over super delegates. Suddenly, what was supposed to be a nightmare for Republicans becomes the nightmare for Democrats instead.
My guess is also that Biden would have won. As mentioned by others, some voters went with Trump because they wanted an old white guy. Biden offered the same alternative.
Trump had the advantage of being both a revolution and a counter-revolution. He was a revolution in the sense that voters thought they were getting a businessman and an ordinary guy who could just cut like a hot knife through butter and get things done. He was a counter-revolution in the sense that he was the polar opposite to Barack Obama, in every possible sense. And there were a lot of republicans he was not necessarily a revolution at all, and that he’d just continue the status quo of the GOP being a government of corporations, by corporations, for corporations. You look at someone like Trump and think ‘How the hell could this guy win’ but when you consider those three advantages more deeply, it makes sense even if it never, ever should have come to that.