Two days before Election Day, last November, Joe Biden sidled up to a podium at Johnson College in his hometown of Scranton, the tough, working-class town that has figured prominently in the up-from-the-bootstraps story that Biden has been telling about himself for decades. In many ways, it should have been a victory lap: Biden’s poetic final political homecoming at the end of a 44-year Washington career that has included tenures as Senate Judiciary Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman, and, finally, President Barack Obama’s smiling wingman in the White House. But the crowd on that Sunday afternoon was notably thin—maybe a couple hundred people, and only a handful of reporters—much smaller than it should have been two days before a presidential election.
Over the years, Biden has developed a habit of extemporizing, occasionally to his own detriment—calling Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” for instance, or telling wheelchair-bound Missouri state Senator Chuck Graham to “stand up”. Biden, who has twice run for president, has never quite seen his workmanlike self-image cohere in Iowa or New Hampshire. Nevertheless, his political radar remains impeccable. And on this November morning in Scranton, Biden could tell something was amiss in Pennsylvania. “It all may come down to Pennsylvania,” Biden warned presciently. “This is not hyperbole. . . . Not a joke. And by the way, the two places that are going to determine the outcome here are going to be Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and Pittsburgh. We gotta do well here.”
Biden was right about the defining characteristic of the election. Places like Scranton—white, blue collar, culturally conservative, and struggling to figure out their place in our new economy—did determine the outcome. Obama and Biden captured Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County in 2012 in blowout fashion, winning by nearly 30 percent. A few days later, however, Hillary Clinton would only win the county by a few thousand votes; she would be devastated by Trump in the counties around Pittsburgh.
Politics is no longer about what’s in front of you. It’s about what’s on your screen. Alongside Obama and Clinton, Biden has been privy to three national campaigns that celebrated the use of technology and algorithms to target and persuade voters. But Biden is still like that football coach from the movies. He calls you “champ” and tells you to go for it on fourth and goal when every sane person in the crowd says kick the field goal. In other words, he remains a gut guy in a moneyball world. He remains a heart-on-his-sleeve Irish gabber who likes to quote William Butler Yeats, brags about his working relationships with Republicans from the late Strom Thurmond to Mitch McConnell, and isn’t afraid to talk openly, sometimes through tears, about the death and pain that have tainted his personal life. If he decides to run for president in 2020—a hypothetical that his recently published book and subsequent media tour seamlessly invite—Biden will test whether an old-school politician with old-school values can win the presidency in an increasingly young, technology-obsessed America that depressingly seems to prize combat over compromise.
Biden, for his part, seems genuinely conflicted about running, almost as tortured as he was in 2015, when he flirted with the prospect of joining the Democratic primary against Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley. He ultimately backed away, with Obama’s blessing, because the emotional wounds from the untimely death of his son Beau from cancer, the subject of his new book, Promise Me, Dad, were still too fresh. I asked Biden about the idea of running again a few weeks ago, after he delivered a talk about civility and bipartisanship at the University of Delaware alongside Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, who seems likely to mount his own long-shot challenge against Trump in 2020. “I’m just not sure that it’s the appropriate thing for me to do,” Biden told me, haltingly.
We were conducting a somewhat academic interview for my Snapchat show, Good Luck America, about whether his defining political code—an old-school faith in compromise and character—is viable in today’s self-interested political culture. That discussion enlivened him. “Institutions are nothing more than the lengthened shadow of a man,” he said, paraphrasing Emerson. He boasted about working overtime with Republicans just before leaving office to pass the 21st Century Cures bill, allotting $6.3 billion for cancer research. “I’m confident we can get back to the way it used to be,” he said of our gerrymandered Congress. “We’re used to sitting down and not judging each other. We are used to sitting down and saying, ‘How can we fix this?’”
In his speech with Kasich, Biden bemoaned the erosion of a political center while in the next breath lashing Trump as a crypto-fascist in the mold of Mussolini who might unleash a nuclear war. But Biden also said he regularly fields calls from other heads of state and Republicans in Washington who are looking to make sense of what the executive branch is doing.
In Biden’s mind, Trump is an aberration, not the new normal. Biden believes, perhaps quaintly, in the system, in institutions, and in the ability of good men and women to work together in service of the country. For him, compromise is in itself a kind of victory, an eternal fetish of centrist Washington pundits whose erogenous zones were stroked by a photo-op of Biden, Kasich, Obama, and John Boehner playing golf together in 2011. Biden himself can’t seem to go a week without marveling about how he—a Democrat!—was asked to give the eulogy at Thurmond’s 2003 funeral in South Carolina.
But the First Baptist Church of Bipartisanship isn’t as popular among partisans out there in the world. “It’s minimizing the issues that we are facing, I think, by saying that if we just all got beers together then we can solve everything,” one University of Delaware graduate student told me after the Biden-Kasich event. “Because that’s not true. There are actual differences in the content of what we believe.”
In our interview, when all this talk of service and our better angels veered into talk of his own political ambitions, Biden winced and gathered his thoughts. “I’m not doing anything to run, I’m not taking names. I’m not raising money, I’m not talking to anybody,” he said. “But something’s got to happen, man. We’ve got to turn this ship around. But I’d much prefer to be helping someone turn it around than being the guy turning it around.”
What Biden knows but won’t say is that he is, by far, the most obvious vehicle for Democrats hungry to unseat Trump. Blessed by Obama, famous worldwide, and accustomed to the national stage, Biden could step right into a presidential contest with ease—and happily throw a punch at Trump with a grin and a wink before going out for ice cream with some bikers. Biden’s gut may not be there yet, but the data supports him. Among all Americans, Biden has a favorable rating of around 55 percent, about as good as it gets in our polarized times—especially for a politician known to pretty much every breathing American voter. Among Democrats, his numbers are golden: 74 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of him, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll from this summer, far outpacing other names in the 2020 conversation like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris. No matter what he’s telling interviewers on his current book tour, Biden aides say privately that he’s paying close attention to how his possible rivals are approaching this unsettling political moment.
There is, of course, the age thing. At 74, he is three years older than Trump, but by all accounts in good health. Democrats, though, are searching for a new generation of leaders, and young mayors and members of Congress like Seth Moulton, Eric Garcetti, and Tim Ryan are already making pilgrimages to Iowa and New Hampshire. New faces will be even more critical for both parties as the country ages up: by 2020, more millennials will be eligible to vote than baby boomers.
But I’d look at it this way: Biden is an aviator-wearing meme-machine custom-built for our fragmented media environment. Google “the Onion” and “Biden” and you’ll see what I mean. Authenticity has always been a fetish in politics, but as the guardrails of privacy are ripped away by the all-seeing Internet, it matters more than ever. You might not like Biden, but no one will ever accuse him of being a phony. The same dynamic worked for Sanders in 2016. Young people didn’t care that Bernie was a septuagenarian during his campaign. They did care that he was unyielding in his principles and unashamed of his disheveled hair and cranky demeanor. And millennials chose him over Clinton throughout the primaries.
If he runs in 2020, Biden’s biggest challenge wouldn’t be competing against Trump. As Virginia’s election of a charisma-deprived but generally capable doctor named Ralph Northam proved, suburbanites, women, millennials, African-Americans, and the Democratic base would show up to vote for a plastic CVS bag if it had a (D) next to its name and was running against Trump. Importantly, Biden is at ease inside the contours of the current Trump-driven political conversation, centered on the question of whether a Democrat can re-capture downscale white voters who flocked to Trump in 2016. That debate favors the Scranton kid. “I understand the Rust Belt,” Biden bragged to NBC’s Megyn Kelly on Monday. “Donald Trump has no notion of what those people are going through.”
Biden’s biggest challenge would be the Democratic primary, which will be crowded, noisy, and almost certainly riven by the same progressive-centrist split that flared so dramatically during the protracted Clinton-Sanders battle. As the party has grown younger and more diverse, it’s become more progressive and less comfortable with the promise of compromise that Biden so passionately believes in. The party’s restive progressive wing is empowered by shifting attitudes on issues like single-payer health care and free college education. In a recent poll of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters, Sanders led the field with 31 percent of voters. Biden was just behind him at 24 percent.
Running against a Sanders or a Warren, would Biden get tagged with the centrist label that bedeviled Clinton? Despite his outward populist veneer, Biden has close ties to the financial-services industry and powerful credit-card companies that call Delaware, with its generous tax policies, home. For a liberal base hostile to Wall Street and monopolies, those won’t be fun relationships to explain.
There’s also the landmark crime bill Biden authored in 1994, which expanded the death penalty and led to an explosion in African-American incarceration. Earlier this year, I talked to the rapper Killer Mike, a prominent Sanders supporter, about criminal justice. He went out of his way to blame Biden for writing “that shit crime bill” that sent “more black men to jail for bogus drug laws than anyone else.” These are issues Biden would have to explain, re-litigate and quite possibly apologize for. Maybe he doesn’t have the appetite. And maybe’s he’s just tired. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he confessed, when we spoke, sighing weightily.
But if he runs, Biden will rely on what’s gotten him this far in life: an enduring conviction that personality and values are the only things that matter in politics. That a good story wins the day, that a certain set of ideals tether us together as Americans, and that above all else, character counts. The next year will likely determine whether that is woefully naive or the best message imaginable to defang Trump.
Peter Hamby is the host of Snapchat’s Good Luck America. His interview with Biden will be live in the app for 48 hours starting at 6:00 A.M. on Tuesday, November 14.
