2020 race: Joe Biden’s election formula: two big themes, man

Joe Biden is leading in the polls because his message is that the country is ready to unify, and the coronavirus is a big deal.

Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 in part because he understood a few big things about the country’s mood, and stayed focused on them.

In similar fashion, Joe Biden leads in 2020 because he has bored in on two big themes that turn out to have broad resonance: The country is ready to unify rather than divide, and the coronavirus is, as he might say, a really big deal.

That focus doesn’t mean he’ll win in three weeks. But it’s why he has prospered thus far despite scepticism within his own Democratic Party at the outset, and shortcomings elsewhere as a candidate.

The ability to define the purpose of a presidential candidacy is an essential if underrated attribute. The history of presidential politics is littered with the failed candidacies of otherwise capable politicians who couldn’t answer the simple question of why they were running, and what the rationale was for their prospective presidency.

One of the secrets of President Trump’s success in 2016 was his ability to offer a clear rationale for himself and his candidacy. While the campaign, and the candidate, were famously undisciplined in many ways, they were highly disciplined when it came to articulating, over and over again, three core positions: end illegal immigration, throw out bad trade agreements and finish off “endless wars.”

As an aside, one of the weaknesses of the Trump re-election campaign has been the failure to offer a similarly clear rationale or agenda for a second Trump term.

For his part, Mr Biden launched his candidacy with a clear statement of purpose. In the video he released announcing his campaign 18 long months ago, he framed his candidacy as an attempt to win what he called “the battle for the soul of this nation.” Invoking the march by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia., earlier in the Trump term, he positioned himself as the candidate best able to end a divisive turn in American social and political life.

That was long before the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, before protests and violence in America’s streets, before a long summer of racial ferment.

At the time, the Biden message seemed insufficient for the Democratic Party’s moment. The rest of the field already was engaged in a hot policy debate about how to push the party and country to the left. The party’s activists were advocating unrelenting battle with the president and the entire Republican party.

Meanwhile, there, on the debate stage, stood Joe Biden, talking about his centrism and his ability to bring people together to make deals, sounding a bit out of step.

Over time, though, the Biden message has come to sound more resonant.

Then, with the outbreak of the coronavirus, the Biden campaign decided management of the pandemic would become the core issue of the general election. Mr Biden inadvertently handed Mr Trump a rebuttal by initially opposing the president’s decision to cut off travel from China.

Since then, though, he has positioned himself as the candidate who took the virus more seriously, even at the risk of seeming to take it too seriously at times. If there is a symbol of the Biden 2020 campaign, it probably should be the face mask.

This focus helps explain the huge gender gap that is fuelling the Biden lead in national polls. In every poll, Mr Biden enjoys a giant advantage with women voters. It’s no coincidence that women, who tend to be more focused on health care, have expressed more concern than men about the coronavirus, and also are more drawn to a unifying message.

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last month, for example, women were more inclined than men to cite the coronavirus as one of the top issues upon which they would be basing their vote — and by a whopping 55 per cent to 15 per cent they said they thought Mr Biden would handle the pandemic better.

Similarly, when asked who they thought would have the greater ability to bring the country together, women chose Mr Biden by a 30-point margin, 56 per cent to 26 per cent. Men, by contrast, chose Mr Biden by just an 18-point margin on that question.

While this focus — and the discipline to stick with it — helps explain his lead in the polls and in fundraising, it doesn’t guarantee victory. Mr Trump’s law-and-order message may have broader resonance than is apparent now, and his handling of the economy, the core issue to which most presidential campaigns return in the end, remains his ace in the hole.

Nor does Mr Biden’s focus necessarily translate into a clear governing mandate if he wins. He has shifted leftward, but hasn’t resolved a big ideological struggle within his own party that would burst to the surface after a Biden victory.

Still, the Biden campaign has shown the virtue of having a clear rationale, and sticking to it.

The Wall St Journal