A week ago, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign looked like it was dead on arrival. Accusations of unwanted touching brought forth by several women had become a major issue. Biden was lampooned by Saturday Night Live and by his potential 2020 adversary, President Donald Trump. The conclusion, reached again and again across the liberal commentariat, seemed obvious: Biden’s nascent presidential campaign was in big trouble. Biden and his defenders were lambasted in The Nation as having “learned the wrong lessons from the worst perpetrators such as Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh.” The Guardian’s David Smith, meanwhile, mused that “some presidential campaigns take time to hit their stride while others hit the ground running. But Joe Biden appears to be hobbling even before he reaches the starting blocks.”

The last several months have seen a number of stories examining Biden’s record on everything from student loans and banking, to school busing. The former vice president’s unapologetically “old-fashioned” attitude toward women and their personal space drew attention to other past examples of retrograde behavior, including the then-senator’s shameful treatment of Anita Hill during the 1991 confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. “Experience”—the attribute many expected would be a cornerstone of Biden’s presidential run—increasingly looked like a liability as more people examined his long and problematic career. The now-conventional wisdom (advanced, I admit, by myself, as well as others) was that the idea of “Biden 2020” had benefited from the 76-year-old’s two years out of a bruising political arena. Once voters had a chance to look at his record, however, they wouldn’t like what they saw, and Biden’s lead in early presidential opinion polls would evaporate.



But that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead, Biden has held on to his sizable lead over other Democrats eyeing the presidential primary (and remember, Biden still hasn’t formally declared that he’s running). A Morning Consult poll released Monday found Biden still leading the Democratic field with a nine-point advantage over second-place Bernie Sanders. Politico, meanwhile, reported that “party gatekeepers” in key primary states still had Biden’s back. The former vice president has perhaps been written off by left-leaning media or left Twitter, but not, it appears, by plenty of other Democrats.



One explanation offered up for the disparity between the narrative about Biden on the left and his actual standing among Democratic voters is that social media has warped perceptions of the party’s base. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy, working off of research by the centrist Hidden Tribes Project, found that “the outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse, and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online.” These Democrats described in the Times were significantly less likely to have attended a protest in the past year and significantly more likely to view so-called “political correctness” with suspicion. “Over all,” reported Cohn and Quealy, “around half of Democratic-leaning voters consider themselves ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative,’ not liberal. Around 40 percent are not white.”



The party’s progressive base, they contend, is overrepresented on Twitter and Facebook. “Roughly a quarter of Democrats count as ideologically consistent progressives, who toe the party line or something further to the left on just about every issue. Only a portion of them, perhaps 1 in 10 Democrats over all, might identify as Democratic socialists, based on recent polls,” Cohn and Quealy wrote.

