The polls are in the former Vice-President’s favour, but the facts certainly aren’t

Joe Biden’s initial lead has been hampered by his performance in the Democratic Primary debates

The former Vice President has consistently led in the Democratic Primary polls, with the latest results from YouGov and CNN putting him in first place at 26 points, either neck and neck with or just ahead of fellow challenger Senator Elizabeth Warren, an easy ten points over more radical challenger Senator Bernie Sanders.

After a long career of over forty years in the Senate, Biden is now attempting to achieve the crowning glory of his career — becoming the forty-sixth President of the United States. Clearly he has some appeal. The question is, will it translate into a majority at the electoral college come 2020? My answer is no.

Here are my ten reasons why Joe Biden won’t beat Donald Trump in a presidential election.

1. Biden won’t make radical promises

The best response to radical policies on one side of the aisle is to respond with radical policies of your own. Right now, the Republic Party is shifting further and further to the right. In order to moderate between the two sides, you have to surrender any pretence at being left-wing, and join them in moving away from the more restrained (i.e. less actively cruel, more passively uncaring) Republican policies of the past. In spite of this, Biden continues to insist on being the leading “moderate” in the Primary debates, holding the line against the “radical” left. He also insists he wants to work with “the other side”, attempting to form bipartisan coalitions to push forward legislature, in what appears to be a strange imitation of the embattled George H.W. Bush administration.

Biden recognises the challenge that the Republican-controlled Senate will present to any new Democratic President. But he’s decided, instead of answering their radicalism with a real challenge, to cave in to their demands. Did you like the final years of Obama? Imagine that for two whole terms, and you’ve got yourself the Biden presidency. Come election time, people simply aren’t going to turn out for that. Biden will always be hampered by his unwillingness to think radically.

2. Even if he wanted to be radical, he couldn’t

Not that old Joe’s about to join the DSA and start singing the Internationale, but even if he wanted to move away from his aggressively moderate line, Biden simply couldn’t. For his entire career he has been in the pocket of large corporate interests, and where many candidates in the current race have sought to raise money through grassroots organisations, particularly Bernie Sanders, Biden has been comfortable resorting to traditional methods — raising vast amounts of cash as swanky dinner parties, held far out of sight of the average American.

On the higher end of earners in the Senate, Biden’s money would seem unlikely to come from small donations from a great many people. A closer looks tells us that’s exactly the case. His top contributors include the law firms Morgan and Morgan ($427,845) and Pachulski, Stang et al ($210,475), and the MBNA banking corporation ($212,575). When broken down by industry, we see that law firms, real estate companies, businesses involved in retirement services, large businesses, and securities and investment handlers are the largest donors to Biden. None of these groups have any interest in radical change. If Biden wants his money, he needs to obey. Nothing must disrupt the order — be it in law, finances, or healthcare. Radical change might hurt their precious economic interests. Which leads me to my next point.

3. He’s too much like a Republican anyway

As much as his failure to be radical, alongside his inability, will stunt Biden in an election, he will suffer also because of how similar it makes him to a great many Republicans. He’s in favour of gay marriage? The same is true for Republican Senators Susan Collins, Rob Portman, and Lisa Murkowski, among others. Against Trump? See those same people, and more. Meanwhile, down in the House, representative Justin Amash was willing to quit the Republican Party over his dislike of the current President. I’m not praising these people. None of them are about to become great allies of the left. But they’ve been about as active in blocking Trump’s planned reforms as Biden evidently aspires to be.

Biden stands on the right of his own party, far enough to cross over a little here and there into the left of the Republican Party. He’s not too identifiable as a Democrat. While this could sell in the past, it won’t work now. The era of politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who made their mark by forging ahead with a new kind of politics, is very much over. And if you want more proof that this style doesn’t work, check out how well Emmanuel Macron is doing over in France.

4. Voters prefer the incumbent

When you spend too much time in political circles, especially online, you tend to believe politics is a much more volatile sport that it really is. The fact is, voters like the incumbent in any race. Big upsets mean trouble, where people want security. A candidate like Biden already doesn’t want to rock the boat, but choosing him over Trump is bound to tip the boat at least a bit. Four more years of Trump would have its moments, but it would be predictable in some ways. There would be uncertainty, but we could at least be certain of that.

Point is, when you’ve got two rather similar candidates, you’re going to struggle to get people to bet on you. The American public has no reason to believe a Biden presidency will ensure them access to their healthcare. They have no expectations that the proposals needed to save our dying environment will be pushed through. Republican tactics like filibustering are almost certainly not going to be challenged. In the end, the very few people who really remain ‘on the fence’ are not going to come Biden’s way. If Biden was in office, he’d be fine. But he’s not, and he needs to act like it.

5. He has no appeal to non-moderate Democrats

Sure, Biden could count on Democratic voters choosing him over Hillary. This would ignore the possibility of non-moderate Democrats going over to Trump, as many former Obama supporters, and even a tiny collection of frustrated Bernie Sanders supporters did in 2016, but with the Trump presidency in full swing that’s unlikely to make a difference. More important is the risk of non-moderates simply not voting at all, or going over to a third party like the Greens. Either way, it’s fewer votes for Biden. The problem is, he can’t draw those people back to him.

Trying to force through a victory on a wave of ‘lesser evil’ votes fails because it doesn’t draw voters from swing states. Hillary Clinton had almost three million more people vote for her in 2016 than Donald Trump did, but those people weren’t coming from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan. They were liberals, in states the Democratic Party has controlled for years, who favoured anything other than a Trump victory. Their votes couldn’t sway that election, and they won’t sway the result in 2020 either. Chances are, Biden might even lose the popular vote since after the Clinton debacle many of these people have lost a lot of their will to be politically active.

6. He’s no favourite for Trump voters, either

‘Reaching across the aisle’ might sound noble, but that doesn’t mean it’s effective. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The way you win an election, as Trump showed us if you rally your own base. Trying to steal from someone else’s supporters won’t work, not when the Republican camp is making every effort to differentiate themselves from the Democrats. Biden seems to think, probably because he’s been in politics at so many different periods of the country’s history, that this partisan diversion can be undone.

Well, too bad. Almost any poll shows that Trump voters, even Trump voters who once went in for Obama, are “predominantly won over by Trump’s reactionary positions” on issues of culture, climate, and more. Where one study found that 45% of these people view Trump “very favourably”, just 4% say the same for Biden. These people, as much of a shame as it is, cannot be won back. They’ve chosen their side. Trying, as Biden does, to be visibly in tune with the working class, stressing his cultural connection to these people by sporting a baseball cap and showing off a certain old-fashioned charm (which might explain his inability to understand personal space) is an utterly useless endeavour. These people are voting Trump next year.

7. Biden’s behaviour serves Trump

Trump loves nothing more than a personal attack, devoid of real substance. He can’t tell Joe to go back home, or threaten him with criminal charges — well, he might, but it wouldn’t have the same punch as his attacks on The Squad or the Clintons. However, along with bashing him for his political record, Trump has plenty to single out about the way Biden acts. While some naïve liberals with their political intuition stuck back in 2012 might point out that anything Trump says will be massively hypocritical, but that hasn’t stopped him before and it won’t stop him now.

“Sleepy Joe”, as Trump calls him, has increasingly been shown for the man he is. Alongside his behaviour around women, his appalling behaviour during the questioning of Anita Hill, when she attempted to block Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court on account of his sexually harassing her, has come to light. Biden joined his fellow Senators is judging Anita Hill, and defending Thomas, despite the evidence falling in Hill’s favour. It should also be known that Biden was a long-time friend of the far-right South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who defending white supremacy in the United States until his death. Biden even gave the eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral. Trump would love nothing more than a chance to hear all this, then regurgitate it up on Twitter in an extensive string of attacks. All the more to rile up his supporters, and ensure they turn out for him on election day.

8. His voting record is questionable, to say the least

Biden likes to pretend he’s a lot more progressive than he really is. One way he tries to make his mark is actually quite the strong defender of liberal values. Some people buy this. One writer argued that he is “more liberal” than Hillary Clinton (not a hard achievement by any means), while over at the ever-charming Federalist there are warnings that he in fact as a “tendency to move left” with the rest of his party when push comes to shove. If we put Biden’s record up to scrutiny, we can see this is far from the truth.

Kamala Harris made a point of the fact that the man has, during his career, opposed bussing black children to help them get a better education. Biden has also supported capital punishment, supported the disastrous war on drugs, and authored the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which opened up more prison places, sent more police onto the streets and increased prison sentences overall. If that wasn’t enough, he also gave a good degree of support to the PATRIOT Act, opposed Sanctuary Cities and supported George Bush’s Secure Fence Act for the border, supported Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, voted against gay marriage for years, disagreed with Roe v Wade, voted against protections for military members against going into debt, favoured American troop deployments in Africa and Iraq, and lent his full support to Israel on numerous occasions when the state was massacring Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. Rant over. I’d say that’s enough evidence for Biden’s opponent to use against him.

9. His voter base is pretty small

“Electability” is the word used by a number of publications in articles praising Biden. The man is supposedly, if nothing else, incredibly electable, and thus we must all go in for him. The argument here is, however, rather hollow. I’ve written in the past about how you can’t trust the polls, and I’d like to reiterate that here. Polls show nothing. So when people say Biden is electable, and they shove polls in your face telling you that he comes out “nine points ahead in Wisconsin” or ‘beats Trump every time’, don’t believe what they’re telling you.

The hard-done-by working class is already unlikely to turn out. What appeal does Biden have that will convince them to show up to the polls? When Biden offered up no resistance to Obama’s deportation of record numbers of people (hitting a high of 409,845 people in the fiscal year of 2012), why should immigrants believe he will protect them? Those in need of better healthcare aren’t going to the Biden camp, nor are those in desperate poverty. Believe it or not, you can’t carry the election on the votes of the liberal-minded white-collar workers that make up Biden’s voter base. His appeal is so much more hemmed in than Trump’s, and it will punish Biden’s efforts in an election badly, especially in swing states with large working-class populations.

10. His campaign has no USP

Finally, the Biden campaign just isn’t remarkable, due largely to the fact that the man has no real USP. Being ‘electable’ isn’t enough. There are plenty of candidates who have tried to put themselves forward as reasonable, sensible moderates. So far, Amy Klobuchar and John Delaney have fallen behind by making that the entirety of their appeal.

To be clear, Biden would suffer also if he went all-in with a gimmick. Jay Inslee’s pitch of running a single-issue campaign on climate change, though admirable, did him no favours, and he has since dropped out after struggling to reach 1% in the Primary polls. Biden’s problem is that his campaign doesn’t have the radicalism of Sanders, the planning of Warren, the youth appeal of Buttigieg, or even the quirk of Williamson and Yang. There is no Biden brand. He’s like Obama, only he’s pushing no racial boundaries, has one-tenth the ambition, and is already tired of having to do his job. There are no signature policies to stand up against Trump’s own. No answer to the wall, to destroying Obamacare, or to the continued deportation of mass numbers of immigrants. Just mediocre healthcare reform and perhaps, if we’re lucky, a little more money towards green energy. Hoo-rah.