So far, at least, Biden’s appeal seems to be working. He has been polling as the national front-runner for most of the race, though in Iowa, he’s polling on par with Senator Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. The 77-year-old is dominating the primary field among black voters, and a recent New York Times/Siena College Poll in six key swing states showed that Biden is the Democrat who fares best in matchups with Trump.

Biden has pitched himself as the candidate who can ensure that Republicans and Democrats will not only get along, but actually work together. “Our politics has gotten too ugly, too mean, too divisive,” Biden told the crowd in Fairfield. “With this president out of the way, we in fact can begin to change the dynamic.” He knows Republicans; he’s friends with them. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends … you are seeing the talk, even the dialogue is changing,” Biden said at a campaign event last spring, drawing criticism from progressives that he was being unrealistic.

His stump speech is a long and gentle meander through a forest of feel-good-isms. Biden talks about “decency” and “honor” and “restoring the soul of America.” At the event in Fairfield, Biden recalled his mother’s old saying about not “denigrating people,” getting a laugh from rally attendees when he described how she would wash his mouth out with soap when he used profanity. Everyone in the audience is referred to as “folks,” and sometimes, when he’s feeling especially passionate, his voice wobbles in an old-timey way, like he’s George Bailey defending the Building and Loan to the hateful Mr. Potter.

Read: What Joe Biden can’t bring himself to say

Biden’s fans get almost misty-eyed when they talk about his time in the Senate and in the Obama administration, where he cultivated relationships with Republican lawmakers. “He knows so many of those people,” Patty Miller, a teacher, told me in Fairfield when I asked whether she expects Biden to bridge the partisan divide in Washington as president. “When he’s elected, and things settle down—things will have to settle down—then I think he will.” Paul Gandy, a Fairfield lawyer who said Biden is one of three candidates he is considering, told me that he’d expect Congress to work much more effectively with Biden as president: “I’d look for him to do what he says he’s going to—which is build consensus, reach across the aisle, pass legislation in the Senate, have conversations with Republicans and independents, and move the nation forward.”

While it’s possible that Democrats could win both the White House and the Senate in 2020, Biden’s critics claim that it’s impossibly naive to imagine that a Republican-held Senate would be eager to work with a Democratic president. Perhaps no one should know that better than Biden himself: The Obama presidency, during which he was vice president, was marked by historic Republican obstruction, with the GOP-led Senate filibustering a slew of bills and ignoring many of the president’s judicial and Cabinet nominees. It culminated in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s holdup of Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court.