Read on Twitter
Saw a Bernie diehard tweet that basically asked 'What does Biden actually STAND for? I don't know!' This is pretty common, actually. But the answer pretty clearly explains how Sanders was completely outflanked in the primaries.
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Let's start with the obvious. Biden's platform is pretty easy to find if you bother to look for it. It's a pretty good center-left platform, albeit more center-than-left than I'd like, although it's drifted more leftwards as Biden throws bones to the Sanders/Warren camp.
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But does Biden talk about a lot of policy on the trail and in the news? Not really. And that's why he won the primary. Superior message discipline. That messages was:
"Donald Trump shouldn't be president, and I can beat him."
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"Donald Trump shouldn't be president, and I can beat him."
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This was actually pretty ingenious for a number of reasons. The first reason is that, unless you're knee-deep in policy, the difference between candidates wasn't that stark. As an example, ALL of the candidates stood for some version of Universal Health Care.
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ALL of the candidates stood for increasing the minimum wage. ALL of the candidates stood for action on climate change. The difference was mostly on emphasis, on timetables and on matter of degrees.
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Electability, on the other hand, was the number one concern of something like 70% of all primary voters. It was easily #1 with a bullet. It was also a rare point of clear and obvious differentiation between candidates. CAN Mayor Pete beat Trump? CAN Klobuchar? Warren
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Electability was also probably a cornerstone of African American support. Black voters cared a little more about electability, as one might expect. When there's a white supremacist in the White House, the urgency of winning goes way up for POC.
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Electability proved to be the ultimate pit trap for the Sanders campaign. They literally mocked the idea of electability, repeatedly, calling it a bullshit concept.
In the end, it would utterly overtake them.
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In the end, it would utterly overtake them.
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In the end, exit polling shows that the majority of the people who voted for Biden supported M4A. Electability was just that much more important.
And Joe Biden was the only one making that case.
In truth, Biden's team knew it was a unique vulnerability for Sanders.
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And Joe Biden was the only one making that case.
In truth, Biden's team knew it was a unique vulnerability for Sanders.
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In one of the last major debates, Bernie defended his Castro/Cuba moment. That's when I knew he was doomed. It created a doubt about whether or not a socialist with a history of saying stuff like that could win the vote of suburban moms.
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In that moment, millions of center-left voters who - again - were sympathetic to Bernie and may even agreed with his point - mentally imagined clips like that one pummelling Bernie for 6 months on Fox News.
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Bernie's team ultimately never acknowledged that they had a huge electability problem. If they had, they could have coached it, addressed it, and softened it. But they didn't. Ultimately, Bernie's team believed they'd win on policy. And this election was never about that.
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Flash forward, and Biden's message has shifted very slightly. His campaign isn't talking policy as much as they are talking about effective governance. He still has a long platform, but his message is basically 'Trump is bad at this.'
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And while it helps that Trump is, in fact, uniquely bad at this job, the truth of the matter is that, in an election involving an incumbent president, the election is ALWAYS a referendum on that president. Again, historically, policy isn't a huge deal here.
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This is pretty much 'running presidential campaigns 101'. And while it would be easy to give Biden credit for having a smarter team than everyone else, you also have to factor in the fact that he was the frontrunner from the beginning.
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Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, for example, had much larger hills to climb. They had to introduce themselves to the American public AND convince the public they could win. Biden basically just had to play defense.
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That being said, when they analyze this election in future years (which they will do because its fascinating), much will be made about how the other candidates basically ignored Biden and fought for 2nd place, while Biden topped the polling almost from wire to wire.
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17/fin
