As much as it pains me to admit it, Joe Biden certainly seems a clear front-runner in the Democratic primary for the 2020 presidential election. The former vice president and 36-year Delaware senator had a healthy lead in polls as far back as October, long before he officially announced his entry into the race in late April. He’s still out in front.

The 2016 election taught me many things, one of those lessons being that it’s dangerous to put too much faith in polling as an indication of how a race might actually shake out. But another lesson I learned was that when it comes to the Democratic primary, a candidate with the right moderate sensibilities and plays-well-with-Democratic-leaders attitude can keep an upper hand against more progressive challengers, both in the race and within the party itself.

And so I think that even if the polls could be very, very wrong, it’s important to consider the very real possibility of Biden winning the primary, even if doing that makes me sick to my stomach. In just the last week, the candidate has given me more than enough to wish we had an alternative to electoral politics for creating change.

As reported by CNN, Biden said Tuesday, June 18, at a New York fundraiser that he missed working with segregationist senators in an era when "at least there was some civility.” The idea that there was anything civil about United States lawmakers attempting to segregate our society is still a head-scratcher, especially from the man who lambasted Trump for his both-sides response to the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in his campaign announcement video. Biden himself historically opposed busing (a tactic used to racially integrate schools) and played a role in the 1994 crime bill (which helped worsen the mass incarceration of people of color).

But Biden’s week on the campaign trail didn’t end with him reminiscing about the pleasantness of building bipartisan relationships with people trying to further institutionalize racism. On Tuesday, ahead of his donor speech, Biden stopped by the Stonewall Inn, the site of the legendary Stonewall uprising in June 1969. With the 50th anniversary of the riots looming, The New York Times reported that Biden stepped behind Stonewall’s bar and bought a round of beers and photos show him taking selfies with patrons.

Biden was one of the first Democrats to announce his support for marriage equality in 2012, leaving the Barack Obama White House scrambling to clarify that his remarks didn’t signal an official position change. Obama would announce his support for the issue just days later.

But the people who started an uprising at Stonewall weren’t upset about marriage inequality. Stonewall veterans recently told the Times that they were mad about police raids and the criminalization of queer lives, generally. Two of Stonewall’s most legendary figures — Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — would go on to found a group called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which the Global Network of Sex Work Projects remembers as “a shelter and social space for trans sex workers and other LGBT street youth” that the duo hoped could be used to teach reading and writing.

This might not seem related to Biden’s photo op visit to the site of a riot that was a turning point for the LGBTQ movement—which helped focus the radical energy of activists—and it probably would only be a bitter irony if it weren’t for something else Biden said that same day at a fund-raiser for wealthy donors in Manhattan.