Joe Biden’s risky strategy to win the White House
Lesson summary
Hi there, I’m Jeff and I am ready to go here for another Plain English lesson. This is the time of the week where we get to spend about 20 or 30 minutes together talking about what’s going on in the world. It’s my favorite time of the week, recording these. And the fun continues on the web site at PlainEnglish.com/314, where JR, the producer, has posted the full transcript, video lesson, translations, and exercises. PlainEnglish.com/314.
Coming up today: It was an extraordinary gamble, but Joe Biden’s strategy to win the presidential election paid off. He bet that his best way to win was to contrast himself with Trump and to run a socially-distant campaign. We’ll take you through his big decisions on today’s lesson. In the second half, we have a great expression—“make or break”—and we have a quote of the week.
Biden’s long and winding journey to victory
Joe Biden’s journey to the White House was anything but smooth.
His first attempt at the presidency started in June 1987, when the then-Senator ran for the Democratic nomination. In nomination races, candidates try to be one of the two finalists in the race. Biden’s first attempt ended just three months later after one of his speeches closely resembled a speech by a British politician. He was forced to pull out of the race.
His second attempt came in 2007. He had better luck that time, but when the voting started, he didn’t receive much support and he dropped out. However, he did make enough of an impression on the eventual winner, Barack Obama. Obama chose him to be his running mate in 2008 and Biden served eight years as vice president.
It would have been natural for him to run for the top job himself in 2016. As sitting vice president, he would have been able to ride Obama’s coattails and promise to continue to policies of a popular administration. But he had recently lost his son, Beau, to brain cancer and he was still grieving. And Hillary Clinton was a political force to be reckoned with: she was the early favorite to be the Democrats’ nominee. So Biden sat out the race, and for the first time since 1969, Joe Biden did not hold public office. In his mid-70s, his long career in politics seemed to be over.
So you can imagine the surprise when he decided to throw his hat in the ring in 2019, ahead of the 2020 election. Everyone could do the math: if he won, he would be the oldest ever to take office. The competition for the Democratic nomination was fierce. Democrats of all stripes salivated at the opportunity to be the one to beat Donald Trump in what was expected to be an easy election. If Biden wanted to win the nomination, he’d have to beat a wide field of competitive Democrats.
Biden’s 2020 campaign got off to a lethargic start. We detailed his road to the nomination in Lesson 242, but he won a few key endorsements and several other candidates dropped out of the race at the same time. Support coalesced around the former vice president as Democratic voters saw him as the safest, most electable candidate in an important election.
That’s when his race against Trump really started—and it’s also when the pandemic started, upending all the traditional rules about campaigning. Early on, Biden made a strategic decision that he would present himself as Trump’s opposite. He also decided to respect social distancing and run his campaign remotely, forgoing large rallies, extensive travel, and boots-on-the-ground grassroots campaigning. It was a risky strategy that just barely worked.
Start with the first decision: he would present himself as Trump’s temperamental opposite. Unlike Obama in 2008, and unlike Trump in 2016, Biden did not run on any big philosophical ideas. He did not promise big societal changes. I’ve mentioned before, the more ideological wing of the Democratic party is hungry for sweeping changes to public policy. Biden purposely did not embrace the more radical proposals in his party. He published a document outlining his policy priorities—and then almost never mentioned them. When pressed on specific issues, he refused to commit himself one way or another. He would only say that he would study issues, listen to experts, and seek compromise. In other words, he would be Trump’s opposite.
Here’s an example. When the protests against police violence flared up, many in the progressive wing of the party advocated for cutting police budgets and moving the funds toward more social services. They rallied around the slogan, “defund the police” and pressured Biden to adopt their cause. He wisely refused. Instead, he promised to address police violence and discrimination, without saying exactly what he would do. He then said he would seek compromise, while Trump was stoking divisions. His bet was that people disliked Trump’s approach, so he shrewdly positioned himself as Trump’s opposite, without having to defend any firm policy positions of his own.
Throughout the campaign, as Trump downplayed the severity of COVID-19 and disparaged medical experts, Biden again played the opposite. He said he would listen to and respect medical experts. It’s widely accepted that the Trump administration was slow to respond to the threat of COVID-19 and botched the federal government’s response. But Biden didn’t advocate materially different positions throughout most of the pandemic. There were no big Biden ideas on how to deal with COVID. His message was that he’d be more competent than Trump and listen to experts.
That same attitude extended to the campaign itself, and this, I think, was very important. Traditional presidential campaigning is a high-touch activity. The candidates crisscross the country, host large rallies, sit for media interviews, visit diners, kiss babies, tour factories, and shake as many hands as possible. Trump was a germophobe before it became popular, so shaking hands was never his style: you almost never saw him shake a voter’s hand. But he continued to host his signature rallies—often indoors, with a crowd not wearing masks.
Republicans also mobilized supporters to knock on voters’ doors in key states—a classic American campaigning tradition. Armies of volunteers, checklists and mobile apps in hand, disperse across the neighborhoods, knocking on doors, urging their supporters to vote on Election Day. This is called “get-out-the-vote” campaigning and it can make or break a candidate in a close race. Republicans were doing it in force; Democrats, respecting social distancing, largely were not.
The strategy infuriated some veteran Democratic campaigners, but Biden knew that he couldn’t say he was Trump’s opposite, and then mimic Trump in his campaigning style. He bet that the American voters wanted a candidate who followed his own advice, and that of scientists. Biden bet that running a remote campaign would be the image American voters wanted in a president, since all of us were working remotely, too. When Trump and a slew of his advisors all got COVID from a White House event, Biden looked like the savvy statesman. He looked like the person Americans wanted to be in charge.
It just barely worked. I mentioned last week that Biden won, but that Republicans did very well in legislative elections. That means a lot of people split their tickets: a lot of people voted for Biden to be president, but for the opposite party in the legislature. If Biden had boldly staked out radical policy positions, he almost definitely would have lost. His big advantage was his personal contrast with Trump. It was the only thing he ran on, and it was enough.
Plus+ forums
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Recently, someone asked, “What’s the difference between a report of and a report on?” They’re just one letter different, but they mean two very different things. And someone else asked why you would describe an office layout as “light and airy.” I thought those were two perfect questions for the Ask Anything forum and it was my pleasure to answer them.
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