The Biden Campaign's Alarming Insouciance

A new profile paints a picture of unearned confidence despite major missteps

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

If you want to go into the holiday a bit unsettled, read this long, reported New York magazine piece by Gabriel DeBenedetti about the Biden campaign’s blithe view of the state of his re-election. I’ll get to that in a moment. 

But before I do, let’s set the stage a bit. 

In broad strokes, Joe Biden and Democrats imagined the campaign unfolding a bit like this: He’d spend three years governing the United States through a period of turbulence, get us to a better place than we were in when he took over, then spend the election year pointing to all he’d accomplished, and the ensuing consensus that America was better off, and argue something like “don’t throw away all this progress and hand the country back to that deranged criminal.”

Float above the fray until the choice—Biden or Donald Trump—was ripe. 

But that meant putting a lot of eggs in the basket of improving material conditions—particularly for 100-200,000 Rust Belt swing voters who’ll decide the election—on the theory that people vote their wallets. 

“What’s already clear now,” the journalist Ron Brownstein wrote way back in January, “is how much Biden has bet, both economically and politically, on bolstering the economic circumstances of workers without advanced education by investing literally trillions of federal dollars in forging an economy that again builds more things in America.”

“I don’t know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs,” a senior White House official told me, speaking anonymously in order to be candid. “But we are going to run that experiment.”

Well, they ran the experiment, rooting nearly all of their politics in their governing record, and here’s where it landed them: 

Oops!

That’s Biden’s gloss on things anyhow, according to CNN’s sources. I think the real situation is both a bit better and worse than Biden imagines. 

It’s better insofar as he has actually ran the experiment he wanted to run. And not just for 120,000 factory workers, but for low and middle earners across the country. It’s just that relatively few jobs are coated in gruff American nostalgia; most jobs don’t lend themselves to photo ops with imposing factories or bridges in the background.

It’s worse because the experiment delivered him approval polls that make him an underdog for re-election. In a way it would be nice if the disconnect here were purely about visuals. If that’s all it was, we could hope the Biden administration might find a way to fast track a few key projects and get pictures of those ribbon-cutting ceremonies on front pages in plenty of time for the election. 

But the problem runs deeper than that.

HUBRIS AND CRY

Which brings us back to the New York piece. 

I encourage you to read the whole thing if you have the time.

It suggests that Biden and his aides have become well aware in recent months that the relationship they imagined between material conditions and political standing had collapsed—they’re just not sure what to do about it. 

“There is no alignment over how exactly to address the malaise,” DeBenedetti writes, “not least because of the increasing suspicion that something is simply broken in the way public opinion usually tracks the economy.”

No argument there, it is a thorny problem, and all the Democrats DeBenedetti spoke with about it seem to have different ideas about how to address it. It’s a sign that, on some level level, the party’s braintrust knows there’s a big problem here. 

What alarms me, given those challenges, is the astringent combination of touchiness and hubris his aides serve up in response to even gentle criticisms of or questions about their strategic approach.

When the Biden campaign briefed a group of Obama campaign alums earlier this year, “they couldn’t shake the feeling that for a sophisticated crowd, what they were hearing — the high-level outline of the Biden plan — felt obvious. Another thought the Bidenites were starting to come across as “absurdly defensive”.... While commentators and many strategists are aghast at Biden’s polling slide and desperate to see a course correction, the president’s aides at the White House and at reelection headquarters give every indication that they consider the election very much under control.”

Everything’s going according to plan except the part where Rust Belt jobs were like magic beans that would sprout and allow Biden to climb out from the doldrums. If you were wrong about that, where does the blase´ confidence come from? 

REFRESH AND BLOOD

Now about my concerns. 

They aren’t existential, all-is-lost concerns. If anything, the picture has brightened over the past couple weeks. 

They’re more about the revealed character of the campaign itself: Is the re-elect staffed and run by people who would level with Biden and Harris if they believed things were headed in a bad direction? Is Biden himself open to that kind of vital feedback?

He does seem to recognize that the above-the-fray approach wasn’t working. Just this week, he launched spirited, frontal attacks on Trump. Biden now refers to Trump as “the guy who thinks we’re polluting the blood of America,” and called it “self-evident” that Trump “supported an insurrection.”

There have also been signs, even since New York published this piece, that malaise is fading. 

But 11 months is a great deal of unwritten history.

We don’t know if the economy will remain strong, or consumer confidence will continue to increase. We don’t know whether Trump will stand trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election, let alone how he’ll fare or conduct himself in court. All we know is that Black Swan events have become monthly occurrences in the Trump era, so the campaign will have to be nimble. It can’t settle on a flight path and turn on autopilot. 

Yet the Biden campaign’s questionable confidence is rooted in the belief that Trump securing the nomination will upend the campaign and make it theirs to lose. I have assumed this myself, and it does feel right. But the idea that job growth was the skeleton key to political popularity also felt right. And as a short man once said, facts don’t care about your feelings. As much as can happen over the course of a year, it’s not enough time for the campaign to charge ahead for months on end with another underwhelming strategy.  

For instance: Trump cleaning up on Super Tuesday may remind voters of all the things they hate about him. But it can’t on its own change the way voters have come to feel about Biden after all these years of unanswered attacks. 

That’s going to be quite hard, and if I worked in the campaign, I wouldn’t be insouciant about it. How do you get people to reassess their view of you once they’ve decided you’re a joke or a failure? Once they’ve marinated in that view for months? The Democratic voters who’ve turned on Biden are wrong to think that about him, and it’s unfair that they do, but it’s a reality Biden is going to have to grapple with. Democrats should’ve been dealing with it all along.