America’s former vice president is back from the dead
Hi everyone, great to have you here for Lesson 242 of Plain English. I’m Jeff, JR is the producer, and all the details for this Plain English lesson can be found at PlainEnglish.com/242.
Coming up today, Joe Biden, the former vice president, was left for dead, politically-speaking, just weeks ago. But he’s now the front-runner in the Democratic primary—the contest to see who will face Donald Trump in our national presidential election in November. In the second half of this lesson, we’ll talk about the phrasal verb “write off” and we have a quote of the week.
If you haven’t heard Lesson 165, then you might want to check that one out. In that episode, I talked about the twenty-four Democrats who all wanted to face off against Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Today, only two men are left standing. So if you want a perspective on how the race has evolved, start with Lesson 165 and then listen to the rest of today’s lesson.
Biden flips the script in South Carolina
Joe Biden, America’s former Vice President, staged a dramatic comeback in the race to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. He’s now neck-and-neck with the socialist Bernie Sanders in the contest to take on Donald Trump this November.
Biden is a political dinosaur. The 77-year-old was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, representing the state of Delaware. He served thirty-seven years in the upper chamber of our legislature, but he is best known as being the Vice President for Barack Obama from 2009 until 2017. Unlike many vice presidents, he did not try to succeed his president in office; he sat out the contentious election that featured Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump because he was going through a difficult time personally, grieving the loss of his son, Beau, to brain cancer.
At the beginning of this election cycle, many people thought he was too old, that his moment had passed. He himself had doubts about whether, at his age, he wanted to jump back into the day-to-day scrum of presidential politics. When he announced his candidacy last April, many people thought it was too late for him to make a difference.
He’s had a wild ride. Simply from his name recognition and deep political network, he was the front-runner for months, as dozens—literally, dozens—of other candidates scrapped for attention. But as the grueling campaign season wore on—and we in America have an almost laughably-long campaign season—he faded. Other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Mike Bloomberg, and others, seemed to capture all the attention.
In America, we choose the nominees of each party by state. Each state holds what’s called a primary election to choose who will be the two finalists in the November election. No Republican is challenging Donald Trump, so he doesn’t have to win any of these primary elections. But the Democrats need a nominee, and each state votes to choose who they think should be Trump’s opponent in November.
The votes don’t happen all at once. The first four states—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina—vote one by one. They’re called the early states. Then a whole bunch vote together on a big day called Super Tuesday. And after that, they vote in waves. After all states are done voting, there’s a party convention that makes the official choice of the nominee.
To become the nominee—to have the right to be on the ballot in November—you need to win “delegates.” You get delegates by winning the states as the vote. The way it typically works is, there are a lot of candidates running in the early states. But after the votes in those first states are counted, we can see who’s capable of winning and who’s not. As the primary season wears on, more and more people drop out, and the field narrows to just a couple of people, and by the end, there is a general consensus on who should be the nominee. That person then goes on the ballot in the November presidential election.
In the first state to vote this year, Iowa, Joe Biden came in fourth. In the second state, New Hampshire, he came in fifth. The mayor of a town of 100,000 people won three times as many votes as the former vice president in New Hampshire. Biden was dead. Nobody comes in fourth and fifth in the first two states and wins the nomination—that doesn’t happen. He did a little better in Nevada, the third state to vote, but things were not looking good.
Then everything changed in South Carolina, the fourth state. He won the backing of some key political leaders. Two of his major opponents dropped out of the race and endorsed him. All of a sudden, he got his mojo back. He had won a big, diverse state. And then came Super Tuesday, when fourteen states voted all in the same day. Biden won ten of them. He is officially back from the dead.
He is now in a two-man race with another Senator, Bernie Sanders, who’s even older than Biden is. Sanders describes himself as a socialist and hasn’t even been a Democrat for his long career in the US Senate; as a socialist, he usually voted with Democrats, but didn’t want to join the party. Democrats now have a clear choice. Sanders is advocating for radical societal changes, including free health care, free university tuition, a guaranteed job for everyone, and punishing tax rates on business and the wealthy to pay for it. Biden is offering a more moderate message, embracing the current system, but helping people do better for themselves within it.
I think a lot of people saw the possibility of a socialist going up against Trump and getting badly defeated in November, so they wanted someone more electable, more politically centrist, so they coalesced around Biden. And now they go head-to-head in the states that remain. The rest of the states vote gradually in groups through early June.
One other thing to note. As I mentioned before, Trump doesn’t have to run in these races since he’s the leader of his party and nobody is seriously challenging him to be the nominee for the Republics. That means the longer the Democrats fight among themselves, the less time they have to focus on opposition to Trump. In an election like this, the party out of power—in this case, the Democrats—generally wants to decide on a nominee early. If Biden and Bernie continue to split states through the primary season, they’ll be spending their money and attention attacking each other, and nobody will be happier about that than Donald Trump.
If you’re paying close, close attention, you may have noticed at the beginning of this recording I said, it’s great to have you here for Lesson 242 of Plain English. Previously in that spot, I would have said “episode 242.” I wanted to take just a quick minute to let you in on a little secret.
JR and I are investing a lot of time—and I mean, a lot of time—in redesigning the Plain English web site. That goes for both the free side and the Plain English Plain English Plus+ membership area. And as we’re doing that, we realized that what we produce here is more than just a podcast episode. And we have ambitions to provide all of you—our listeners—with more than just an audio podcast episode.
In the new version of the web site—which should be available sometime in the spring of 2020—in the new version, we’re going to be calling our episodes “lessons,” so I figured, why not get in the habit of just calling them lessons now? So that’s what we’ll do. And over the next month or two, I’ll continue to drop some hints about what the new web site is going to look like and what-all JR and I are thinking in terms of even more great content for all of you. So stay tuned for that.
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