From the moment Biden announced his candidacy last April, he took a lead in the national polls that he only briefly relinquished in mid-February, before reclaiming it this week. Biden’s popularity was surely a by-product of name recognition and his years of public service. And many political journalists, myself included, largely assumed that his third campaign for president would eventually go the way of the first two, and implode.

Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, Biden’s triumph wasn’t all that surprising. His path to the Democratic nomination had been clear for months, as long as one could look past the conventional wisdom.


We obsessed over his lackluster fundraising hauls, even though there is significant political science research that questions where money plays a decisive role in campaigns. We poked fun at his uneven debate performances, even as few voters were paying close attention. We focused on his comparatively small campaign rallies and his anemic ground game. It turned out neither seemed to matter much.

Biden was too gaffe-prone, we said. He didn’t scintillate on the stump. He couldn’t raise money. He was too old.

We put a heavy emphasis on the results from Iowa and New Hampshire, ignoring the fact that it’s been 16 years since either state played a decisive role in the Democratic nominating contest. In 2008 and 2016, it was South Carolina that picked the Democrat’s presidential nominee and no candidate could match Biden’s well-earned advantage with Black voters in that state. So much of the coverage of Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders elided the crucial fact that no Democrat has won the party’s nod in 32 years without winning a majority of the Black vote — and none of those candidates had shown the ability to top Biden among this critical constituency.


It wasn’t just Black voters. Biden’s support comes disproportionately from working-class and older voters — the kind of people who aren’t especially well-represented in the campaign press corps.

But there was another message that we kept hearing from Democratic voters that perhaps didn’t receive the attention it deserved. No issue mattered more to them than their deep and visceral antipathy toward Donald Trump.

For all the time reporters have spent talking to baseball cap-wearing Trump voters in diners, the most important political force in American politics since November 2016 has been the backlash to the president’s election — especially among the suburban women for whom Trump’s victory was their entree to political activism. What mattered most to them was defeating Trump. Everything else paled in comparison.

Both Warren and Sanders wanted to turn this race into something much bigger — a call for revolution. But this was a fundamental misread of the Democratic electorate.

There are certainly many voters who want the “big structural change” for which Warren advocated. There are plenty of others looking for Sanders’s “political revolution." Far more, however, simply want a return to the way things used to be — before Trump took office. Biden’s sepia-tinged call to “restore the soul of America” might sound like boilerplate political rhetoric, but it also happens to reflect what millions of Democratic voters want above all else.


Biden has frequently been derided for his pledge to work with Republicans in Washington (and not undeservedly so), but it is a message that spoke to an electorate desperate for a respite from constant political conflict. Rather than a liability, Biden’s age was proof of his experience and reason to believe he could get things done in Washington.

Biden doesn’t brag about the plethora of detailed plans posted on his campaign website. But presidential candidates rarely, if ever, win on the strength of their policy prescriptions. Values, character, trust, and a candidate’s vision of America have long played a more decisive role. As one female friend who had volunteered for Biden in Massachusetts said to me, “I think he’s a decent, good man — and couldn’t we use some decency in the White House right now?” As trite as it might sound, Biden’s integrity, empathy, and virtue were for many Democrats the key attributes that led them to vote for him on Tuesday — that and the fact that he appeared to be the best bet to rid America of Trump.

Sometimes politics can be as simple as that; a desire not for grand, sweeping change, but for a far more basic transformation — replacing a bad guy with a good guy.

Michael A. Cohen’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @speechboy71.