Until he decisively won the South Carolina primary, it never occurred to me that Joe Biden could be the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nominee. In a field of nearly thirty candidates for the Democratic nomination, some of them, like Elizabeth Warren, Pete Boot-a-judge, and Cory Booker, terrific candidates, Biden was easily the worst and least likely to win. He was an unconvincing candidate, uninspired on policy (Can you tell me what his policy is on anything?), embarrassingly bad during the debates, and an often listless and intermittent campaigner. He raised very little money. He didn’t assemble a campaign organization capable of winning. His heart was never in it. He acted like he didn’t intend to win or even believe it possible that he could. And yet he did. Well, not quite. Technically, he’s still competing for the nomination with Bernie Sanders. But he has the nomination won. There is no path for Bernie to overtake Biden’s lead in pledged convention delegates. So Biden will be the Democratic nominee. Can you tell me what Biden did to outshine the other candidates and win the nomination? I don’t know. I can’t answer that question either. But if I had to guess, I would say he did nothing. The nomination was just given to him.
In the week before the South Carolina primary, I drafted what I thought was a pretty good analysis of how Bernie Sanders could win the 270 electoral college votes he would need to beat Donald Trump in the general election on November 3. I was sure Bernie would be the Democratic nominee (no one else — certainly not Joe Biden — could win the nomination) and would narrowly defeat Trump in the general, and I explained how. You’ll need to dig through the trash can in this Coto de Caza house we’re in if you want to read that.
None of that Bernie analysis applies to a Biden campaign other than that even with Biden at the top of the ticket, the Democrats will again win the popular vote. But Biden cannot beat Trump in the electoral college. So while Biden will be the Democratic nominee, he will lose in the general and Trump will return to the White House for an evermore chaotic and destructive second term.
I have been among the many who over the last couple of years have been saying that the Democratic Party — led by such giants as Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Tom Perez — would somehow find a way to lose to the Republicans and Donald Trump again in November 2020. And they have.
Candidate Biden has no message — other than “I’ll take you back in time to 2008”. Like Hillary Clinton, he has no answer to the question: “Why do you want to be president?” His policies are weak appeals to moderation in the face of a Trump-led impending catastrophe. He vows to compromise with Republicans despite their demonstrated commitment to crushing democracy in the interest of partisan advantage and power. He refuses to fight for the free health care needed by millions in the name of preserving private insurance companies. Biden’s lack of any message is not exactly going to produce an enthusiastic Democratic electorate.
Biden’s general election campaign will be no different from his primary campaign. He’ll be unconvincing and uninspiring. He’ll be an intermittent campaigner showing up for campaign events only sporadically. At 77, he doesn’t have the energy or endurance a national campaign requires.
But here’s the bigger issue: Biden is suffering from obvious mental decline. He’s beyond senile in his own enfeebled world somewhere. This is evident in his speeches, his interviews, and, of course, in his debate performances. At his Super Tuesday victory celebration, he couldn’t tell his wife from his sister. Biden increasingly has trouble forming coherent sentences, and, it now seems, coherent thoughts. This was most obvious during the debates — and will be on display again when he debates Donald Trump. He flailed at times, losing track of his own thoughts in mid-sentence. He cut himself off prematurely when he realized his arguments were going nowhere. Then there was that strange statement about a hypothetical naked woman walking through his rally. And this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by — you know, you know the thing.” What’s actually self-evident is that Joe is gradually losing his mind, and lacks the mental faculties to serve as president. Someone needs to see if we can invoke the 25th Amendment before Biden is officially nominated.
Donald Trump is at his best attacking a rival in whom he sees his own traits and weaknesses. He will go after Biden’s diminished mental state relentlessly on Twitter and in campaign speeches and ads. It’ll be awful to watch.
And he’ll go after Biden’s corruption as well. Biden has never come up with a cogent response to Trump’s claims of Biden corruption related to his son Hunter’s activities while on the board of the Ukraine company Burisma — just like Hillary Clinton never came up with a good answer to Trump’s e-mail and server allegations during the 2016 campaign. Trump hounded Hillary about her e-mails and he’ll hound Biden about Ukraine corruption. Bill Barr will have the justice department begin investigating Joe and Hunter Biden. The Senate will spend the rest of this year investigating the Biden family’s Ukraine activities, and make it look like another Benghazi investigation. It won’t matter whether there’s any merit to Republican allegations of Biden corruption. The investigations coupled with Joe’s inability to articulate an explanation will cause most people to conclude that Joe and Hunter are dirty.
Biden brings a lot of other baggage from his fifty-year political career that Trump can exploit, but he will be done in by the corruption allegations and his obvious mental decline — neither of which he’ll be able to cover up.
Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election with a thread-bare, amateurish campaign staff and very little money. That won’t be the case in 2020. Trump filed papers declaring he was running for reelection on the day he was inaugurated. Since that day he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and assembled a smart, impressive campaign team led by Brad Parscale. They have big leads in money, technology infrastructure, big data, online messaging, organization, and talent that a Biden campaign will never match. As I’m writing this, Donald Trump has $225 million in cash on hand. Joe Biden has $20 million in the bank. On Twitter, Biden has fewer than 5 million followers. Trump has more than 75 million — more than the 63 million votes he received in the 2016 election.
Once there was a time — during the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign — when the Democrats enjoyed a significant advantage over the Republicans online. No more. Since then, the Democrats have devoted their energies to childish infighting between the old guard and younger party supporters trying to drag the party forward, and failed to keep pace with the evolution of the internet, while the Republicans have become the online innovators. The Democrats have nothing compared to the Trump campaign’s massive online presence. Neither Joe Biden nor anyone on his campaign team is capable of understanding their problem, and leading an effort to catch up with the Trump campaign.
In 2016, millions of Republicans and potential Trump voters didn’t vote for Trump because they were embarrassed by him or couldn’t stand him. That’s changed. Donald Trump’s embarrassing behavior and regular outrages have been normalized over the last four years. People are no longer put off by him. And he became a mainstream Republican by passing a tax cut and appointing conservative judges to federal courts. Other Republicans stayed home and didn’t vote in 2016 because they assumed Trump had no chance of winning. Those Republicans who stayed home in 2016 will turn out to vote for him in 2020, and he has the campaign organization and data to insure they do. The Biden campaign will be over-matched in every respect.
In 2016, hundreds of thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Donald Trump in the general. Those votes were crucial to Trump’s narrow victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Those same voters will be just as aggrieved this year when Biden takes the Democratic nomination from Bernie. They’ll again express their deep unhappiness by voting for Trump in November.
In addition, Trump will enjoy all the benefits of incumbency in 2020, and, so far, has at his back the lift of a strong economy.
And I’ve not yet even mentioned Trump’s other big advantage: The help he’s getting from Vladimir Putin and Russia. The Russians were just warming up in 2016. They’re back this year with what they learned from four years ago and, having gone unpunished for their 2016 election interference, will be willing to be far more aggressive and overt in their election interference on behalf of the Trump campaign. Poor, hapless Joe Biden doesn’t stand a chance.
And finally, there’s the Trump campaign’s willingness to fight dirty. There’s nothing they won’t do to smear Joe Biden and win. The Democrats have proved time and again that they would rather lose than be accused of doing something less than honorable. Joe Biden is not the candidate to change that pathetic mindset.
So how does it end? Biden will certainly match Hillary Clinton’s three-million-vote popular vote win, but Brad Parscale knows he’s in a turnout battle for electoral college votes and will successfully defend Trump’s electoral college advantage and return Trump to the White House for a second term. Democratic enthusiasm for a Joe Biden suffering from dementia will not be much more than that for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And the Democrats have not done enough since 2016 to overturn the Republicans’ very successful voter suppression measures. The turnout war will go to the Republicans. Biden will be able to take Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes from Trump, but that will not be enough to prevent Trump from accumulating a total of more than 270 electoral college votes again in this election.
The Democratic primary campaign has become a rerun of the 2016 campaign — with Joe Biden playing Hillary Clinton and Larry David playing Bernie Sanders. The 2020 general election will be a replay of the 2016 general. Republican enthusiasm and turnout in the B1G states will be a replay of the 2016 general, and that will be enough to hold the electoral college for Trump.
Poor Jim Clyburn, who is currently basking in his new king-maker status having turned a moribund Joe Biden into the Democratic nominee, will be among those sharing the blame for this fiasco on November 4, and, like others in the party, blaming instead Biden and his weak campaign for the loss. These people had all the evidence they needed from the first three caucuses and primaries of Biden’s cognitive deficiencies and inability to put together a winning, professional campaign. But they chose to ignore the evidence.
