US election: Joe Biden’s popularity continues to surge against Donald Trump amid COVID-19
The early days of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign had more than a touch of Stephen Bradbury to it, but as Donald Trump continues to stumble through COVID-19, the tide is turning.
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When Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus, it is always with a sneer.
He is not alone in despising the pandemic, but with just 100 days until the US election it’s looking increasingly likely it could cost his job.
Even as he was considered one of the most divisive US presidents, Trump was a solid favourite just months ago for a second term as he rode a wave of jobs and economic growth. Now, battered by the disease that is ravaging communities across the country, more and more Americans are looking instead to a man who was written off by his peers, many in his party and the electorate when he announced his third tilt for the presidency.
If polling is to be believed (and history shows that this should be a very big “if”), then the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden will not only be the 46th president of the United States.
According to some models, Democrats could take both houses of Congress in one of history’s most stunning rejections of a first-term president.
Of course Trump wasn’t supposed to win the first time around. But either way, it’s going to be a hell of a race.
Joe Biden wasn’t the candidate that many Democrats wanted. Indeed his victory after a bruising primary race had more than a touch of Stephen Bradbury to it.
His age, long history as an establishment figure in Washington and studiously moderate agenda paled in comparison to the captivating revolution being steered by the progressive frontrunner Bernie Sanders.
Popular as he was and fondly recognised for serving as Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years, Biden’s lack of razzmatazz also came up short when stacked against the showbiz pop of Donald Trump.
He flagged in initial debates and came fourth and fifth in early primaries before a key, late endorsement from a powerful civil rights leader helped snare the black vote in South Carolina and turn the race his way in late February.
As the Democratic Party machine swung behind Biden, his moderate challengers dropped out and offered their endorsements and by April he was the presumptive nominee.
Then came the virus and the shutdowns, and although Biden has been accused of doing not much more than “hiding in his basement” for several months, he has surged ahead of Trump in not just national polling but all six of the swing states the president needs in order to win.
Americans have, in large numbers, rejected Trump’s handling of its dual crises of the worst civil unrest in decades and COVID-19, and even though Trump retains the solid 40 per cent support that he has held since assuming the role, disapproval continues to build among the moderates he needs and in the states which swept him to power in 2016.
It’s a dynamic of which Trump is keenly aware, as this exchange last weekend with Fox News revealed.
“The enthusiasm for Biden is non-existent,” Trump said to interviewer Chris Wallace.
Wallace: “But the enthusiasm against you is high.”
Trump: “Well that’s okay. That’s his only shot.”
But as political scientist Kathleen Dolan points out, Biden’s advisers know exactly what they are doing by keeping him relatively under wraps.
“In politics we always say that when your opponent is hurting himself or herself, let them continue. Don’t get in their way,” said Professor Dolan from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
“There is almost nothing that the president is doing that’s going well for him lately, so let him make unforced error after unforced error.”
“In some ways it is early enough (in the campaign) that the Vice President is well served by coming out occasionally to make a speech or doing interviews on television,” said Dolan, who is also the co-editor in chief of the American Journal of Political Science.
“At this point the clear plan is to let the president hurt himself as often as he might be able to.”
But while Biden’s enemies paint him as “boring” and “sleepy”, Prof Dolan said Biden’s record stood for itself.
“As somebody who has watched Vice President Biden for many, many years, I take issue with the idea that he is sort of bland and not very interesting or inspiring,” she said.
“In his element, he can be quite an effective speaker around a core set of values of decency that I think will serve well in this campaign because I think that is going to be one of the key Democratic themes.”
Joe Biden’s aversion to bruising, direct conflict was something that started at a young age, according to Democratic strategist Moe Vela, a former senior adviser who helped establish his vice presidential staff in 2008.
Vela recounted that when Biden was getting a hard time as a teenager in the blue-collar Pennsylvania city where he was raised, he would spend his evenings in front of a mirror with a torch under his chin, trying to teach himself to speak properly.
Known widely at school as “Stutterhead” and teased even by his Catholic nun teachers about his verbal stumbles, the young Biden would recite the poetry of Yeats and Emerson, in a “personal war” against his affliction.
It was this or try to fight his tormentors.
Six decades later, Biden’s speech impediment still occasionally comes back to haunt him and he’s infamous for verbal gaffes, but he can still give a word-perfect recitation of some of those passages.
The Biden stutter has caused him to falter several times during the campaign and has lead to speculation he will avoid presidential debates against Trump.
Vela said this wasn’t likely.
“I think that you’re going to see the Joe Biden that we’ve all grown to know, respect and admire,” Vela said of the debates, scheduled to start in late September.
“You’ve got to also remember, he was he was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania. That doesn’t mean a lot to the Australian people, probably, but it’s a scrappy area, it’s working class families.
“And so what I mean by this is Joe Biden will not be bullied. I think what you’re going to see on the debate stage is: ‘No, Donald, you’re not going to bully me. You’re not going to get away with this. Your tactics won’t work with me. I’m a scrappy kid from Scranton’.
“But you’re also going to see it completely and beautifully balanced with who Joe Biden also is, which in this case is a figure of unity, and that’s what our country needs right now.”
Biden’s verbal missteps have also given ammunition to his detractors who say they are indicative of mental decline.
When Donald Trump won in 2016 at age 70, he was the oldest person to be elected US president. Ronald Reagan was the oldest serving president at 77, the age Joe Biden would be when he assumed the mantle.
The advanced years of both candidates, while not uncommon for leadership roles in the US, have been grist for attacks from both sides and prompted frequent questions about their ability.
Mr Biden’s stutter, which often makes him pause before speaking, has been regularly derided by Mr Trump.
But the fact he was polling so well meant this “bullying” wasn’t effective.
“Americans are sick of it and it will backfire,” says Vela.
“People are sick of the hatred, sick of the division, sick of the name calling.
“They think how dare you go after this man who served our nation over 40 years with dignity and integrity.”
Decency is the word Biden’s supporters most commonly use to describe him, and there is no shortage of anecdotes in Washington DC about him going out of his way to display it.
Progressive Democratic community organiser Amanda Litman said she had not supported Biden to lead the party, but that after a personal encounter in 2017 she was convinced of his generosity.
After being introduced to Biden at a meeting in Washington, Litman said her “Grammy would be furious if she knew I was at a meeting with you and didn’t get a photo”.
“Grammy? Let’s call her!,” Biden said. Litman said she dialled her grandmother and interrupted her bridge game, handing the phone to Biden.
“I could hear my grandma through the phone. She’s a very loud speaker. Mr Biden told her that she should be so proud of the work we were doing.
“She has 18 grandkids and she’s so proud of all of us and was telling him.”
Litman’s grandmother explained that one of her daughters, Litman’s aunt Michelle, was ill with colon cancer at the time
“I saw the vice president get very still in his posture and change his whole tone. On the phone with my grandma he starts saying how sorry he is, how hard it is for a parent to take care of a sick child, no matter how old the child is.
“He walked away from the group of us standing there to talk to her more about grief and pain and cancer and at the end he said: ‘I’m giving Amanda my personal home phone number, if you ever need anything. I can come to the hospital in sympathy or whatever you need. Give me a call.’”
Litman said that her aunt died five months later and that Biden not only sent a sympathy note to her grandmother, but one to her uncle as well, whom he had not met.
“It was really meaningful for them to feel cared for by someone and it seems kind of an unusual level of empathy that he has with people who are having those sorts of experiences,” she says.
This sense empathy is central to the Biden story, coming as it does from a place of terrible tragedy.
Just a month after he was first elected a senator in 1972, Biden’s wife Neilia and their one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident that seriously injured their sons, Beau and Hunter.
Biden spoke about the horror in a 2015 address at Yale University.
“While I was in Washington hiring staff, I got a phone call,” he said.
“My wife and three children were Christmas shopping. A tractor-trailer broadsides them and killed my wife and killed my daughter.”
Biden continued on, raising his boys alone after they were released from hospital, commuting three hours each day by train from Delaware to Washington for his 36 years in the Senate.
Earning the nickname Amtrak Joe, it wasn’t until 2008 that he moved to Washington to take on the role of VP, making the veteran politician a social newcomer in the city.
Legendary DC socialite Sally Quinn and journalist said at the time: “I’ve never seen Joe Biden at a party in Washington”, an anomaly for a senior political figure.
Known for being a committed single father, Biden married his second wife Jill only after his boys suggested it.
By chance, the now Dr Jill Biden had met Neilia Biden a month before she died, and recounted the tragedy in her autobiography, Where the Light Enters.
“She had an easy, natural beauty,” Dr Biden recalled of her predecessor.
“It was profoundly unfair. To take a mother from her children; to take a daughter from her father. Joe Biden had everything, and in a horrible second, it was gone.”
Later, eldest son Beau Biden followed his father into politics and was often described as his best friend.
An army veteran and lawyer who ran for governor of Delaware, he died aged 46 from brain cancer in 2015 after a five-year battle.
It was a devastating loss for Biden, and he still becomes emotional when he speaks about his son.
“Beau should be the one running for president, not me,” Biden said in tears during a January interview with TV host Joe Scarborough.
“Every morning I get up Joe, not a joke, and I think to myself, ‘Is he proud of me?”
Biden’s youngest son Hunter has struggled for decades with substance abuse and through several scandals.
His controversial role on the board of corrupt Ukraine energy company Burisma, for which he was paid tens of millions of dollars over five years until 2019 despite having no relevant experience, has also drawn immense scrutiny.
Joe Biden was for part of this time responsible for US outreach with Ukraine, and Republicans have repeatedly accused the Bidens of corruption.
Mr Biden denies these charges and in January said that despite the “attacks”, he felt compelled to keep working towards the leadership.
“I can’t let my anger overcome the desire and the need to have to unite, heal this country,” Biden said.
“I’ve got to move beyond me and beyond my family. Because it’s about your family, it’s about everybody else’s family, not mine.”
After a lifetime in politics, this is Biden’s third run for president.
The first ended with humiliation in 1988 after he was found to have plagiarised parts of speeches, a claim which continues to haunt him.
His second was in 2008 and he bowed out after a disappointing showing in the first primary contest, the Iowa caucuses.
But even that short-lived campaign was marked by a verbal misstep, when he cringingly referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy”.
There were echoes of this statement in a comment Biden made last year while campaigning that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”.
His claim during an interview in May that “if you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black” also caused shockwaves.
Biden is best known to Americans as the popular “Uncle Joe” figure who served as Barack Obama’s deputy for eight years, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that Obama gave his overt support to his bid.
Now regularly campaigning and helping his “dear friend” achieve recent blockbuster fundraising, Obama said previously he had held back his endorsement so that the party could unify behind the eventual candidate.
“You’re all feeling a sense of urgency, the same kind of urgency I’m feeling right now,” Obama said last month during an online fundraiser.
“I’m here to say: Help is on the way.”
Describing the defeat of Donald Trump as “serious business”, Obama warned “whatever you’ve done so far is not enough”.
“We can’t be complacent or smug or say it’s so obvious this president hasn’t done a good job,” he said.
“Look. He won once.”
Obama’s delay in standing publicly behind someone who was so tied to his own presidency had given Republicans another opportunity for attack and to characterise the Biden candidacy as lacklustre.
But in his statement of support, Obama stressed that the grief Biden had endured made him the right person to lead a country so divided by not just the pandemic but also a historic racial reckoning.
“This is somebody who has been touched by tragedy in a direct, profound way and as a consequence has enlarged his heart to embrace other people who are undergoing tragedy,” he said.
And on the night the race turned for Biden, after months of dismal showings and before America’s current state of calamity, he offered himself as champion of the downtrodden.
“For all of those of you who have been knocked down, counted out, left behind – this is your campaign.
“Just days ago, the press and the pundits had declared this candidacy dead. Now, thanks to all of you, the heart of the Democratic party, we’ve just won and we’ve won big because of you,” he told a crowd in South Carolina.
“I told you all that you could launch a candidacy. You launched Bill Clinton (and) Barack Obama to the presidency. Now you launched our campaign, on the path to defeating Donald Trump.”
Originally published as US election: Joe Biden’s popularity continues to surge against Donald Trump amid COVID-19