More than 30 years after his first campaign, Joe Biden is on the verge of becoming the country’s 46th president.
In 1987, Biden was a young, Kennedy-esque candidate, but his campaign stumbled before Iowa after he was accused of plagiarism, twice.
Three decades later and after almost a half-century in public life, he emerged from a historically crowded primary field as the 2020 Democratic nominee, a centrist party elder believed to be the Democrats’ best hope of ousting an impeached President Trump.
Biden, 77, launched his third presidential campaign in April 2019 with a general election-focused bid. His battle cry was that the coming contest against Trump would be a fight “for the soul of the nation,” citing the deadly Charlottesville unrest in 2017.
And despite a turbulent cycle roiled by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and race-related riots, Biden hasn’t diverged from that character-driven message. In fact, he’s simply updated his stump speech for the campaign’s closing weeks with an economic pitch drawing on his working-class roots as an Irish Catholic born in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Besides Trump, Biden’s campaign has been predicated on his personal story. From his childhood stutter to the loss of his first wife, Neilia, and one-year-old daughter Naomi in a 1972 Christmas season car crash, he’s connected with voters via his own narrative on the trail.
He’s told voters how, as a newly elected senator, he would commute to his adopted state of Delaware every work night to be there for his surviving children Beau and Hunter and, eventually, his second wife Jill and their daughter, Ashley. And he’s shared his grief over losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, one of the reasons he provides for not seeking the presidency four years ago.
Hunter Biden has been referenced more by Republicans than his father. Aside from the younger Biden’s tabloid personal life, his questionable business dealings in countries such as Ukraine and China were fodder for Trump’s impeachment in January and now again in October after his laptop hard drive reportedly fell into GOP hands.
If elected on Nov. 3, Joe Biden has vowed to end Trump-era divisiveness. That promise has been mocked as naive, coming from Delaware’s 36-year senator who was on Capitol Hill when bipartisanship was more common. He joined Barack Obama’s administration as his vice president in 2009.
After becoming the sixth youngest senator in 1972 at the age of 30, if Biden wins, he’ll be the oldest president inaugurated at 78. Ronald Reagan turned 77 before he left office in 1989.
And if Biden bests Trump, he’ll be one of the most liberal Democrats elevated to the White House, having veered further to the political Left in the name of party unity after the primary.
Biden spent a year explaining his lengthy record to the ascendant Democratic Left. The conversations covered his support of the 1994 crime bill and the Iraq War to his opposition to federally mandated busing and “Medicare for all.” There was discussion, too, of his treatment of Anita Hill during Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings.
Biden eagerly embraced Obama’s endorsement when the former president finally gave it in the spring. But during the primary, he also had to distance himself from their policy failures, including immigration and deportations.
Since becoming the Democratic standard-bearer, Biden has compromised with former presidential rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on issues such as healthcare coverage and free college. And he’s borrowed language from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy reform and student loan forgiveness proposals, as well as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” as he tries to enthuse younger, more liberal voters who admit they’re settling for him.
Biden’s lurch to the left presented the Trump campaign with an opportunity. The Trump camp has used Biden’s platform to belittle him as a liberal puppet, an extension of its attacks on the two-time aneurysm survivor’s age and mental acuity.
Biden hasn’t been able to engage in conventional retail politics because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But his so-called “basement strategy” hasn’t fully protected him from his propensity to get confused, make politically incorrect statements, or have awkward interactions with women and children either.
Biden embarked on his second presidential campaign by describing Obama as “articulate and bright and clean.” This iteration, he touted his friendships with former Senate colleagues who were known segregationists last summer. He then compared the academic performances of “poor kids” and “white kids.” And this spring, he suggested to a black radio host African Americans considering voting for Trump “ain’t black.”
And Biden’s egregiously stretched the truth, again. Last summer, he wove a false war story, stitching together several different events at a campaign stop. That was shortly after he erroneously claimed to have met family and friends of 2018 Parkland shooting victims when he was vice president. And last winter, he had to walk back assertions he was arrested in South Africa during apartheid.
But despite his verbal flubs and more flagrant missteps, Biden’s still polling ahead of Trump as Election Day nears.
When Biden announced his candidacy in Pennsylvania, a state many predict will be this season’s tipping point, he entered the fray as the front-runner. Now, 18 months on, he averages a high single-digit lead on Trump nationally.
