It's extremely hard to make any kind of comparisons between 2016 and 2020 because Trump is now the incumbent and the country is in the midst of a once-in-a-century catastrophe due largely to his failures. But...

it's notable to me that the core of the Biden message: calm, steady, compassionate leadership representing a big tent of Americans spanning the left, center and center-right, isn't really that different from Clinton's 2016 message!

Biden's policy agenda is in, some key ways, to Clinton's left, reflecting the momentum of the party. But if you ask, why is this message resonating so differently than it did in 2016, there are, I think, three factors.

1. The country is in the midst of a disaster and Trump's presidency isn't a weird abstraction, it's a reality, and a horrifying one at that.

2. The right spent 30 years villifying Hillary Clinton in way they never did Joe Biden.

3. Joe Biden is a white man.

There's no real way to know right now how much each of these respective factors are playing a role (#1 is most imp), but something that lurked over the entire primary was the notion of "electability," which often was a euphemistic way of saying "moderate-appearing white man."

I railed against how pernicious this was! And it was. But it also seems possible that given the electoral college and *who* the marginal swing voter is that it really is the case that nominating Moderate White Man itself is enough for a 3-4 point bump.