On The Trail: Biden’s bet pays off

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. launched his campaign for the White House a year and a half ago on a promise to restore the soul of the nation, a foundational bet that Americans were weary of the tumult of the Donald Trump era and ready to return to a kinder, gentler politics.

At the same time, he offered Democrats heartbroken by the 2016 election that elevated Trump to the presidency the hope that he could rebuild the winning coalition that handed the party a plurality of the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.

On Saturday morning, Biden’s bets paid off. He is no longer former Vice President Joe Biden; he is President-elect Joe Biden. 

Through the chaos and turbulence of a presidential campaign cycle that put Biden repeatedly on the ropes, his message never changed. He adopted some of the more progressive values advocated by his Democratic rivals but never so much that Trump and his team could paint him as a radical liberal bent on disruptive change.

Political parties often make the mistake of fighting the last war rather than adapting to the new realities of an environment that evolves over a president’s four years in office. Though Democrats still stung from the 2016 defeat, it was Trump, more than Biden, who repeated the tactics that had worked in the past: Trump routinely brought up Hillary Clinton, his defeated foe from four years ago, and in the closing weeks of the campaign, he sought to manufacture a fake scandal surrounding work Biden’s son Hunter did for several international firms.

Biden instead fought a new war, on new terrain, with an appeal to new voters and those who in the past have sided with more traditional Republican candidates. 

In the end, Biden rebuilt more than the coalition that sent Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to the White House before him. Biden added huge swaths of younger voters, college-educated white voters and more minorities than have ever voted in an election in American history.

His campaign team weathered criticism from even some members of his own party who wanted to see him on the trail more and investing resources in Texas and elsewhere.  

But Biden’s team and its outside allies focused intently on three Midwestern states that were once a cornerstone of their path to an electoral college majority — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — as well as a handful of expansion states such as Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida. 

Biden captured five of those seven.

In the process, the scrappy son of blue-collar Scranton, Pa., who has known more personal tragedy than anyone should have to endure, won more votes than any presidential candidate in American history. 

He will enter office alongside Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, the first woman, the first person of African and Indian descent, and the first Democrat from the West Coast ever to hold the job. 

Biden and Harris will enter office in January facing a series of crises virtually unprecedented in modern times, greater than those that faced Obama and Biden in 2009 and perhaps rivaling the challenges that faced Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. 

They will grapple with a global pandemic that infected nearly a quarter million Americans over just the last two days, an economy that is struggling to rebound from the calamitous hit it has taken during the outbreak and global allies whose trust in the United States has been shaken to its core. 

They must do so at a time when the nation is riven by the deepest political divides since perhaps the Civil War and with the distinct prospect of a divided Congress in which the Senate is, in the absolute best-case scenario for Democrats, tied.

Few presidential candidates have overcome the hurdles that Biden’s campaign faced, from an early primary season during which he raised less money than other contenders who promised a new and different approach to a series of early states in which he finished far behind the front-runners. 

But his comeback win in South Carolina, on the heels of a game-changing endorsement from House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), propelled Biden to the head of the pack. 

As Democrats coalesced around his campaign, Biden brought in a new roster of seasoned operatives to add to a stable of advisers who have been with him for decades. He won the support and cooperation of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), his last remaining rival, who ended up stumping for Biden in the campaign’s closing days. And he won support from a long roster of Republicans, veterans of previous Republican administrations and even a sitting Republican governor who had been turned off by Trump’s handling of the presidency.

In his first official communication as president-elect, Biden returned to the theme that launched his campaign, the one that saw him through a rocky primary season and the promise he made to voters in the general election campaign.

“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation,” Biden said. “It’s time for America to unite. And to heal. We are the United States of America. And there’s nothing we can’t do, if we do it together.”

On The Trail is a reported column by Reid Wilson, primarily focused on the 2020 elections.