As summer draws to an end with Labor Day next week, presidential campaign season is kicking into high gear. As of Monday, we’ll be four months out from the Iowa caucuses, and heading into core crunch time for the major contenders.
There is still time for a different set of front-runners to emerge, but as it stands, it looks like the contest will ultimately be a showdown between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. If so, it will also then be a great test of political theory regarding voter behavior. Do voters actually vote on policy? Or instead, do they vote on personality?
If you’re reading this piece, odds are your instinct says the former. But there’s a big argument to be made that normal, average, everyday people — the ones who actually decide these contests because their numbers are massively more numerous — disfavor policy wonks who veer towards the overt Left and Right. Warren is hoping there are more of us (or the Democratic version of us), in practice, while Biden is banking on that pool being outnumbered.
As it stands, Biden continues to occupy first place. He has been lighter on policy details than Warren (and others); a Google search for “Joe Biden” and “policy” conducted while sitting in Biden’s home state of Delaware literally delivered as the second-highest result, behind a Wikipedia article, a June Vox piece that straight up says “Biden has released only two notable proposals of his own.”
But Biden also has personality in spades. That same Vox piece dubs him “an extraordinary extrovert.” His sunglasses inspire news coverage of their own. He might be the only presidential candidate in American history whose Onion coverage is hard to distinguish from reality.
That’s just a bit different to Warren, the former Harvard professor who has a plan for literally everything, probably including your meals and workouts and networking coffees for the next week and a half. She so relishes wonkery that she’s willing to elevate no-name opponents polling in the low, low single-digits in debates just to get her point across. Early in her campaign, she did “personality-highlighting” stunts like videos of her drinking beer in her kitchen or chatting from an Acela train. It didn’t really play.
So, she’s back to being her, and Democrats seem to be liking it. Where Bernie Sanders is falling, Warren is rising. The RealClearPolitics average puts her and Sanders neck-and-neck. But it’s easy to see her eclipsing him as the race moves forward. Her policies are almost indistinguishable from Sanders’, yet better spelled-out and more detailed. She has better thought through how to defend them (unworthy of defense though they may be).
Her voters clearly dig it. This weekend, the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel tweeted that, at Warren events, supporters are seriously now chanting “C-F-P-B/she has got a plan for me!” Never mind that entity, Warren’s brainchild, engaged in about the least “woke” behavior by a government agency ever, allegedly being ground zero for a bevy of racial and gender-based discrimination and associated retaliation claims (perhaps what happens when you deliberately create a bureau designed to be unaccountable to elected officials) and targeting certain lenders who happen to be members of a particular minority.
Yet Biden’s still seem not to dig wonkery — and in practice, Sanders fans may wind up not favoring it either. It’s true that, according to CNN polling from earlier this year, a quarter of people intending to vote in the Democratic contest call themselves Republicans or independents, and two-fifths identify as moderate or conservative, and that according to Professor Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University, Sanders-inclined folks actually seem to be a little more conservative than Biden-lovers.
But it’s also true that personality still counts — and likely disproportionately.
As Gabriel Lenz documented in his book Follow The Leader, voters tend to “first pick a politician and then adopt that politician’s policy views.” So, personality matters more. To quote Lenz, “even when a policy issue becomes highly prominent, voters rarely shift their votes to the politician whose position best agrees with their own.”
That’s good news for Biden, and probably not such great news for Warren. While she doesn’t come off as a highly unlikable candidate in the way Hillary Clinton (and, for that matter, Donald Trump) did, she hasn’t put the focus on selling herself, as opposed to her ideas, and when she tried, it didn’t much work. By virtue of Biden having been vice president for eight years, following utterly unremarkable presidential campaigns of his own, his personality has always been more prominent than his policy ideas. It has had to be.
We’ll see how it plays out for Warren, but this is why the smart money continues to be on Biden prevailing in this contest. But nothing in politics is a certainty and a lot can change in four months, just jump in the time machine and go ask Rick Perry sometime around October 2011.
Liz Mair (@LizMair) is the founder, owner, and president of Mair Strategies LLC and a GOP political consultant. She is a longtime critic of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
