Joe Biden has been the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for President since before he entered the race last year, but he has been an unusual kind of front-runner. He is on the road less than his rivals, he speaks to smaller crowds, and, perhaps most surprising for a politician of his pedigree, he has raised less money than several other candidates, despite having some of the biggest donors. He has introduced no memorable policy ideas, he is the subject of broad disdain on Twitter, and in the debates he has often faded into the background. Even “Saturday Night Live,” where the impressions of the Democratic candidates have generally been sterling, has struggled to get a read on Biden, first assigning Woody Harrelson (who played him as dim and voluble) and then Jason Sudeikis (who reprised his impression from the Obama Administration, playing Biden as backslapping and over the top). Both impressions cast Biden as a younger version of himself, a pol who played to the rafters, although the figure who has appeared on the stump this year has been—for a Presidential candidate, and for Joe Biden in particular—unusually subdued. Biden’s handlers have generally kept him away from contentious interviews, and, though he has occasionally snapped at a reporter or challenged a hostile audience member to a fight, the strategy seems generally to have worked. Biden has proceeded through the early nominating contest as if he were encased in bubble wrap.

Biden’s swing through Iowa this past weekend was meant to include four events, but an ice storm shrank it to two. (Ominous highway billboards warned commuters not to venture “north of Ames.”) On Saturday morning, he arrived at the first one, a candidate forum sponsored by the state teachers’ union, in a West Des Moines Sheraton, a few minutes late and apologetic that his wife, Jill, a longtime English teacher, had not been able to join him. The educators had imposed a strict fifteen-minute limit on the speakers (Amy Klobuchar’s microphone was cut off when she exceeded it), but even within these strict confines Biden wandered. He spoke with his head bowed, his eyes mostly on the prepared text in front of him and his voice often subsumed into a throaty mumble, giving a thickly emotional account of the labor of teaching. Biden described it as a work of “anguish” and “pride” and called it an “embarrassment and a shame” that teachers were not more highly valued. “A child brings every problem they have to school—everything, their hopes, their dreams, and it’s not just their talents and their aspirations but their fears and their anxieties,” he said. “It requires a considerable amount of empathy and understanding on your part, and, I might add, an awful lot of patience, and, I would argue, love.”

Biden recalled working as a school-bus driver while he was a law student, in the late sixties. He remembered an eighth grader he dropped off, “and the parent was never around.” The welfare of these children hinged on the bus driver and on the janitor, he said, and on “the passion it takes to do all these jobs.” With the clock winding down, Biden mentioned that he wanted to fully fund a federal special-education program and significantly increase funding for schools that serve poor students, but those seemed incidental to the speech. A union official presented Biden with a bouquet of yellow roses, the same one that each of the other candidates had recieved, and the former Vice-President took the opportunity to dawdle, saying, “My special gift to—I shouldn’t say this but I will—when I’m in trouble or I really, really want to tell her how much I love her for real, it’s a yellow rose.” The teachers gave a long, expressive “Awww,” and then Biden was gone, replaced by Pete Buttigieg, whose speech was so crisply plotted that you could have measured its turns with a protractor.

Biden is a singular character in this field, because his politics are not about ideology or policy but about emotions. His campaign inevitably tunnels back into his history or his character—it is always finally about him. The Irish critic Fintan O’Toole, in a penetrating essay for The New York Review of Books, recently called Biden “the most gothic figure in American politics,” and on the trail the heavy subject matter of his life comes up often. At Simpson College, in Indianola, that afternoon, a warmup speaker told the story of the first great tragedy of Biden’s life: the death of his first wife and infant daughter, in a car accident, in 1972, just after his election to the Senate. “I didn’t expect to talk about this,” Biden said—he would say versions of this three times—but he obviously wanted to talk about it, more than student debt or public health care or national security, and so he did. “I was in Washington hiring staff, and I got a phone call from my fire department saying there’s been an accident, that my wife and three children were broadsided by a tractor trailer and my wife was dead and my daughter was dead and my two boys were in bad shape.” He said all this quickly, matter of fact. “And it’s true, I did not want, at the time, to go to the Senate.” But a group of senators, both Republicans and Democrats, sat with him and talked him through it, and encouraged him not to give up his office. Biden said, “In retrospect, the decency of the people I’ve worked with on both sides of the aisle saved my sanity.” Everything grows more personal through Biden’s eyes: the hand on the shoulder, the phone call, the Oval Office, the Senate chamber, the hospital bedside, the late-night host’s desk where he and Stephen Colbert commune about loss. He is still trying to make politics small enough that it can be understood as an emotional transaction, in which reconciliation is possible.

Sometimes this works better than others. When the New York Times’ TV series “The Weekly” ran an episode featuring the editorial board’s interviews of the Democratic candidates, its warmest scene was the encounter, in the Times’ elevator, between Biden and a security guard named Jacquelyn. “I love you, I do,” Jacquelyn said, shaking her head with the gravity of it. Biden, matching her seriousness, said, “Thank you,” and then, “You got a camera? Once we get out, we’ll take one, O.K.?” The video went viral. He came out of the interview not even among the editorial board’s top four choices. It wasn’t clear which scene—the encounter with the security guard or the failure to sway the opinion leaders—was the setup and which the punch line.

One of the most interesting lines on the 2020 primary has been advanced by the aides to Bernie Sanders, who have long argued that Sanders is not primarily in competition with Elizabeth Warren, the other progressive in the race, but with Biden. Though Sanders’s support skews younger and Biden’s older, both campaigns depend on working-class voters. The contest between the two older men is not exactly hermetic, as Biden’s summer conflicts with Kamala Harris and Sanders’s recent ones with Warren have shown, but as the nominating contest reaches its critical phase the contrast between them is still the race’s most elemental one. The demands that each candidate is making of working-class Democrats are different but weighty. Biden is asking that they place their trust in him personally, above any political program—in his judgment, in his good faith, in the significance of his history with Barack Obama. But Sanders is in some ways making an even more ambitious demand: that they believe in the transformative power of politics itself.