Just two days before he’s set for a rematch with flailing foe Kamala Harris, former Vice President Joe Biden cemented his frontrunner status with a new Quinnipiac poll pushing his RealClearPolitics average back to a comfortable 31.3%. Biden is back to besting runners-up Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders by more than double their vote shares and securing a 20 point lead over Harris.
Outside of Twitter, Biden’s return to prominence wasn’t entirely unpredictable. After all, Harris didn’t tackle a widely held concern from voters, such as Biden’s age or even his position on federally legalizing marijuana, but rather federally mandated busing, a policy Harris herself even conceded she doesn’t support. Plus Biden benefited from the well-dressed extremism of Harris and the left-lane of the party taking a backseat to the unpracticed extremism of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez her ilk. Most importantly, Biden took a backburner on the headlines, a strategy that would surely carry our current president to re-election.
Like Trump, the obvious cases against Biden’s candidacy are already baked into a cake of half a century in the public eye. The nomination is his if Biden wants it. He just has to act like a winner.
Biden doesn’t have to go low, but he does have to treat Harris like the disingenuous, bad-faith political actor she is. If Harris tries to ding him on gender, he just has to point out that while she was locking up sex workers and endangering them, he was spearheading the Violence Against Women Act. If Harris tries to attack him on race, he just has to point out that his career began as a public defender and ended as the sidekick to the nation’s first black president. Her career was bought by Willie Brown and colored by the criminalization of behaviors disproportionately targeting Californians of color.
Biden can fight Warren, Sanders, or whoever comes to dominate the left lane of the primary. That will be a noble battle, and one that the Democratic electorate clearly wants to wage. But the cheap character attacks from Harris degrade the primary and the party, and it’s up to Biden to put an end to it.
