As the Democratic primary heats up, Joe Biden, who hasn’t even formally declared yet, is the latest candidate in the hot seat. At issue: his handsiness, which is generally notorious and specifically detailed by Nevada politician Lucy Flores; his moderate policies, which seem painfully out of touch in today’s Democratic party and the promise that his supporters make, which is that he’s the only candidate who can defeat Donald Trump.

One thing is clear. Joe Biden is the wrong candidate for 2020.

While much of the focus of the latest Biden blowup is Flores’s account of him weirdly sniffing her hair and kissing the back of her head, the real story is Biden’s treatment of women in the policy space.

Biden was anti-abortion before he was pro-choice; his record shows that he is still highly ambivalent and unreliable in his support for a woman’s right to choose. In response to the supreme court legalizing abortion for American women in 1973’s Roe v Wade, Biden said they went “too far” and that a woman shouldn’t have the “sole right to say what should happen to her body”.

In 1981, when Biden was a young senator and abortion rights were under attack, he voted in favor of a bill that would have allowed states to invalidate Roe – something that would have made abortion effectively illegal for millions of American women. He later voted against the same bill, but that didn’t exactly mark a turn toward feminism or reproductive freedom from Biden.

There’s an anti-abortion amendment named after him, which bans federal dollars from paying for overseas biomedical research related to abortion; he also supported the initial iteration of the Global Gag Rule, which cuts off US family planning foreign aid dollars to any organization that performs abortions with its own non-US money, refers for abortion services, or advocates for legal abortion (he later reversed that position, too).

Biden also supported the Hyde amendment, which says that poor women who rely on Medicaid for their healthcare must nonetheless pay for abortion services out of their own pocket, further stigmatizing abortion, taking it out of the healthcare space, and making it much harder for poor women to have real reproductive choices. He voted for the ban on so-called “partial-birth abortion”, a term invented by the anti-abortion right, that outlawed a rare but sometimes necessary procedure. It didn’t end or outlaw later abortions, it simply told doctors that they could no longer utilize a particular procedure, even where it was safer for a patient in need. Biden said that law did “not go far enough” and that if it was up to him, many more procedures would be banned. He continued to support these kinds of abortion bans even when they didn’t offer exceptions to save a pregnant woman’s life.

While Biden now says he supports abortion rights and has indeed voted to uphold them, he won’t comment on some of the most important policies pushed by pro-choicers, including whether he supports ending a federal rule that bars federal dollars from allowing poor women to end their pregnancies. It’s exceptionally clear that the right to choose – this fundamental right that broadly enables women to determine the course of their lives – is not an issue he’ll fight for.

His political stances on race are similarly conservative and narrow-minded. He opposed bussing as a way to integrate schools, helping to entrench racial segregation to this day. In 1975, he told a Delaware magazine that he didn’t buy the idea that black men have been oppressed for 300 years while white men got ahead, and that “In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.” Saying he didn’t feel responsible for the sins of his father and grandfather, Biden added, “And I’ll be damned if I feel responsible for what happened 300 years ago.”

Unsurprisingly, Biden has not come out in support of reparations for African Americans. He also hasn’t changed his mind on bussing as a necessary component of school integration, even though, back then, he was casting aspersions on Brown v Board of Education (the supreme court case that invalidated racial segregation in schools) and said that “To ‘desegregate’ is different than to ‘integrate’.” For Biden, apparently, desegregating was fine, but racial integration wasn’t necessary or even desirable.

Biden also presided over the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings when Anita Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her, and he looked on as she was treated with condescension and even aggression by Biden’s fellow senators; he also refused to let other women testify about similar experiences with Thomas, leaving Hill the target of vast ire and public humiliation.

As New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister writes in what should be the final word on the man: “Biden’s role has been to comfort the lost, prized, and most fondly imagined Democratic voter, the one who’s like him: that guy in the diner, that guy in Ohio, that guy who’s white and so put off by the changed terms of gendered and racial power in this country that decades ago he fled for the party that was working to roll back the social advancements that had robbed him of his easy hold on power. That guy who believed that the system worked best when it worked for him.”

That’s the same case Biden’s supporters make: that he, and only he, can win back the white working-class voters who supported Trump in 2016. The presumption behind that argument is clear: that white votes simply matter more, and are more legitimate, than the votes of those who make up the Democratic coalition: people of color, young people, women.

The truth is that thanks to the electoral college, some votes do actually matter more, and those votes mostly belong to white people. We’ve intentionally set up a system that weighs white rural votes more than others. In response, a few Democratic candidates, including Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, have proposed eliminating the electoral college in favor of a “one person, one vote” system for presidential elections. Biden has been silent on the issue, and it seems unlikely that a thoroughly moderate Democrat would make moves to change the electoral system if he wins.

The claim that only Biden can win also misses the lessons of 2018, when Democrats swept the House on the energy of women and people of color. A record number of women and non-white people entered Congress, nearly all of them Democrats. The middle-aged women snidely dismissed as frivolous “resistance” biddies by both the Bernie left and the Trump right organized, campaigned and voted this new class of congresswomen into office. Winning in 2020 isn’t just about turning Trump voters. It’s about getting Democrats (and would-be Democrats) to the polls.

Biden isn’t going to do that. When the best argument in his favor is that maybe he’ll turn some of the racist and sexist white people who supported Trump, it seems unlikely that he’ll energize the many people who want to work hard for a Democrat who truly reflects their values.

And in the #MeToo era, women are broadly less tolerant of men’s bad behavior, even when that behavior is more subtle than that of, say, Harvey Weinstein. No one is accusing Biden of sexual assault or harassment, but there is a wide range of behaviors that shouldn’t be criminal that are still subtly demeaning and discomfiting, and that many, many women have experienced.

Biden’s propensity for shoulder-grabbing, hair-sniffing, and head-kissing may have long been written off as old-man affection, but women are increasingly having enough of those excuses. In a professional setting, we shouldn’t be kissed and sniffed and grabbed, and our discomfort shouldn’t be waved away because the kisser or sniffer or grabber is an older man. The right will also surely exploit this issue for their own gain. Never mind that the current president has been accused of sexual assault and harassment many times over; “handy Joe” will be the story of the day. And Democrats will lose the crucial high ground on sexism.

Biden, in other words, alienates the exact people Democrats need to vote, to organize, and to win elections. Peeling off a handful of Trump-supporting white guys – who, by the way, have hewed so overwhelmingly to the Republican party it’s unclear whether any significant number would defect to Democrats – would not make up for the lack of enthusiasm the Democratic base will feel for a milquetoast candidate like Biden.

He offers no vision other than a backward-looking one, dependent entirely on Obama, the man whose coattails he rode into the White House the first time. It’s hard to picture diverse Kamala-Harris-style rallies of 20,000 people in support of Joe Biden. It’s hard to picture visionary, exceptionally thoughtful Elizabeth-Warren-style progressive policy proposals from Joe Biden.

Biden offers little more than his identity: mediocre white guy. And that’s not going to be enough to win in 2020.