Eric Gay/AP Photo
Joe Biden following a visit with students on the campus of Texas Southern University, Sept. 13, 2019.
If the story of Joe Biden’s campaign in its early days was about an older candidate suddenly having to answer uncomfortable questions about things like busing and his handsiness with women — and doing a pretty bad job of it — the new story about Biden is about his resilience in the polls. Despite a campaign that has been essentially a running series of controversies, cringe-worthy statements, and weak debate performances, Biden’s support hasn’t changed much over time, hovering around 30 percent of Democratic voters.
To Biden’s staff and advocates, this is evidence of his strength and ability to beat Donald Trump in a general election. As one aide told Politico, “I don't know of anybody who has taken as sustained and vitriolic a negative pounding as Biden and who has come through it with the strength he has.”
Biden himself may not share that comically naïve view of presidential campaign history, given that the “pounding” he has taken since entering the race this spring is an infinitesimal fraction of what he would be subjected to in a general election against Donald Trump. But it does raise a vital question for Democrats: Which candidate can actually take the worst pounding and still win?
There may be no more important determinant of which candidate is actually the strongest opponent for Donald Trump—more than their ideological positioning, the details of their records and plans, or the appeal they allegedly have to various demographic groups.
Indeed, if you look back at past elections, you see a particular pattern. Every candidate experiences periods when things are not going well. Every candidate commits “gaffes.” Every candidate confronts some kind of scandal, whether genuine or contrived. The candidates who win are the ones who can absorb those setbacks and move past them.
Let’s take an example. When Barack Obama ran in 2008, Republicans at first stepped gingerly around the issue of his race; many even praised him for the unthreatening face he presented to the public. “He never plays the race card,” gushed William Bennett at one point. "He has taught the black community you don't have to act like Jesse Jackson; you don't have to act like Al Sharpton.” But once it became clear that Obama might actually be the Democratic nominee, they knew they needed to activate white fears and resentments.
They found the vehicle in Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor, who had given fiery sermons about the persistence of racism, allowing Republicans to paint Obama as a secret black nationalist. “You start getting some sense of who he is, and it’s not the Obama you thought. He’s not the Tiger Woods of politics,” said GOP consultant Alex Castellanos, who knows a thing or two about the political potency of race-baiting.
The story we’ve told about what happened next is that with white racism rousing from its hibernation, Obama gave a thoughtful speech about race in Philadelphia, and that put the whole matter to bed. But the number of people who actually saw the speech was tiny (though some larger number saw a sound bite or two from it on the news). Would that really have been enough to charge millions of minds, convincing a significant portion of the electorate to alter how they thought about Obama and race?
The deeper truth is that, as good a speech as it might have been, it wasn’t what made the difference. Instead, Obama had the charisma, the skill as a strategist and campaigner, and the timing to move past the issue of Jeremiah Wright, hold on to the support he had, and assemble a majority. And despite the undoubted role of racism in the opposition to his candidacy, he handled the issue of race in ways that made it, if anything, an electoral asset rather than an impediment.
If you want a contrast, you can look at almost any losing candidate in recent history. Hillary Clinton couldn’t overcome the apparently vital issue of whether she used the wrong email. Mitt Romney couldn’t undo the perception that he was a ruthless corporate raider happy to toss people out of their jobs to make a buck. John Kerry struggled with the slanderous attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Al Gore couldn’t convince Americans that he was in fact an honest person despite the trivial misstatements of which the media had made so much.
The successful candidates did what those candidates couldn’t. George W. Bush won in 2000 despite a last-minute revelation of a drunk driving arrest. Bill Clinton overcame a whole series of scandals to win in 1992, including accusations of affairs and a controversy over his draft deferment.
And then there’s Donald Trump. In addition to being probably the single most corrupt and dishonest figure in the American business world, he was caught on tape bragging about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity. And he won.
Which brings us to a reality about 2020 that can’t be ignored: There is literally no Trump scandal that at this point could in and of itself create a meaningful change in the outcome of this election. We could discover that he is a serial killer with the corpses of 37 hobos stashed in the walls of his Trump Tower penthouse, and it would be just one more thing that captures our attention for a few days before everyone moves on. Within hours, the Trump campaign would be selling Trump-branded bone saws on its web site, eagerly snapped up by fans eager to Own the Libs.
So how well will Joe Biden—or Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders, or any other Democrat—handle the scandals they’ll find themselves dealing with if they’re the nominee? At this point all we have are hints from how they’ve dealt with controversy in the past; it’s awfully hard to tell what would happen in the unique context of a presidential general election. The trouble is that we won’t know for sure until it’s too late to choose someone else.
