Horowitz: The Biden Comeback

Tuesday, March 03, 2020

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Joe Biden

Joe Biden’s impressive win in South Carolina on Saturday, garnering nearly half of the vote-- about 2 ½ times as many votes as his nearest opponent, Bernie Sanders-- provides a potential springboard for a strong Biden comeback. As primary voters who had written Biden off because of his disastrous showings in Iowa and New Hampshire and his lackluster performances in debates now take a second look, however, the former vice-president needs to be crisper and more energetic on the stump and in television interviews as well as give people a graspable sense of what his presidency would be about beyond a restoration of the Obama-Biden Administration.

The old cliché that elections are about the future is still mainly the case. Biden must compellingly outline his priorities and his vision of the office--not just take us on an admittedly pleasant trip, at least for most Democratic primary voters, down memory lane.

There have been some recent positive signs that Biden is moving in the right direction, delivering much-improved performances. He turned in perhaps his best debate appearance of the campaign last week, gave an excellent victory speech in South Carolina Saturday night, and was effective in interviews on all 4 major national Sunday shows in the wake of his victory.

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” said Samuel Johnson famously. Biden knew that if he didn’t win handily in South Carolina, his candidacy was in all likelihood effectively over. He met the challenge and the moment.

Joe Biden is advantaged going forward by the fact that as the field narrows and the real options for primary voters become clearer, he can now implicitly contrast his candidacy with the front-runner Bernie Sanders. He made the straightforward electoral case on Saturday night, playing to the fears of many primary voters that Sanders will not only lose to Trump, he will hurt Democratic candidates for the House and Senate: “The decisions Democrats make all across America in the next few days will determine what this party stands for, what we believe, and what we’ll get done,” Biden said. “If the Democrats nominate me, I believe we can defeat Donald Trump, keep Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives as Speaker, and take the U.S. Senate.”

Just as importantly, Biden more crisply made the substantive case for his candidacy. He hammered home his belief that the “soul of the nation” is at stake in the general election and that he believed we must work to find common ground, rejecting a Sanders-like us versus them politics, saying “This multi-ethnic country we call our democracy, America, it can’t survive unless we focus on our goodness.” Biden elaborated, “Most Americans don’t want the promise of revolution. They want more than promises. They want results.”,

And on issues, he is beginning to more effectively narrow in on his strongest contrasts with Sanders: on gun safety and on his more incremental approach to health care, strengthening Obamacare and adding a public option, rather than Medicare for All, which will take away people’s current health insurance.

Bernie Sanders is still likely to emerge well ahead in pledged delegates when the Super Tuesday results come in tonight. With only three days between South Carolina’s results and today’s contests in 14 states and one territory, including the delegate-rich states of California and Texas, there was insufficient time to put most of the $10 million that the Biden campaign raised over the weekend to work in these contests and the former vice-president’s campaign was so out of money that he was doing no meaningful advertising in any of the Super Tuesday states before this new money came in. Additionally, early voting in several of these states means that many votes that will be counted tonight were cast before the South Carolina results.

Still, the momentum of his South Carolina victory, amplified by favorable and saturation media coverage, coupled by the fact that the composition of the primary electorate in a number of the Super Tuesday states is heavily African-American, provides Biden the opportunity to have a reasonably good night with some primary victories upon which to point(Biden won 60% of the African-American vote in South Carolina).

As more candidates are likely to join Pete Buttigeig and Amy Klobuchar after Super Tuesday in suspending their campaigns, Biden has a good chance in the near future to have the essentially two-way contest with Bernie Sanders he wants. It is a contest he has a good chance to win, but only if his performance is on par or better than it has been for the past week--with no reprise of the listless and meandering performances that so often characterized the initial months of the campaign.

The good news, if you are for Biden, is my fairly educated guess that no one recognizes this hard fact better than the candidate himself.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.

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Horowitz: The Biden Comeback

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