[ad_1]
A school of thought said that former Vice President Joe Biden would start sinking into the polls as soon as he announced his Democratic nomination for the presidency. The first day of Biden, he thought, would be his best day.
In fact, the opposite has happened. Since he's officially running on April 25, Biden has jumped in the polls. On the day of the announcement, Biden was 6.3 points ahead of Senator Bernie Sanders' second place in the average RealClearPolitics polls. Today, this advance is 23.5 points. It's a big change.
Polls do not tell us who will win an election in a few months. But they tell us what's going on right now. And at this point, Democratic voters, who are sometimes supposed to move left and are eager to transform the United States with a "Green New Deal", a "Medicare for All" and unconditional taxes on the rich, are square. responds to a resolutely more centric call.
This call from Biden is a promise not to fundamentally reshape American society, but to restore things as they were. And "the way they were" means before President Trump.
Clearly, Democratic voters want to replace a Republican president with a Democratic president. But they are particularly dismayed by Trump – and some, pushed by a more and more strident press coverage, seem to have almost circled him.
But for some center-left Democrats, the solution to Trump's problem – namely that Trump is president – might not be the "Green New Deal" or the "Medicare for All". It is about restoring the pre-2017 order in American politics. And Biden, Vice President of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017, is the physical embodiment of this old order.
That's what Biden promises. Almost every day, he repeats a version of his main campaign commitment: "I want to restore the soul of this country".
Biden's unexpected choice for Charlottesville, Virginia, given that the theme of his announcement was a way of saying that something went wrong in the United States and that he wants to go back to the pre-Trump past. Addressing a real or imagined moral crisis is a way for an opposition candidate to run against a sitting president whose mandate has led to solid economic growth, low unemployment, and low wages. higher.
How long will Biden advance? Who knows? It is simply impossible to say how the democratic race will run. In the last two Republican nomination contests, we attended a race in 2012, during which several candidates alternated holding their heads before Mitt Romney finally won. In the other, in 2016, we saw Trump lead a large group practically all the time. Now, with an even greater democratic field, racial dynamics are not yet clear.
Moreover, for Biden in particular, there will always be the question of age. Biden will be 78 years old on the day of the 2021 inauguration. It is the same age that Trump would leave, had he left his post, he was to serve eight years. But Biden would only begin his presidency at the age of 80. It is a totally unexplored territory in American history. (By the way, another candidate, Sanders, is even older.)
Even if Democrats want to restore the old order, they might decide that a younger candidate should do the job.
They might also want a candidate without Biden's record to fizzle out in the presidential campaigns. In his first presidential race, in 1988, Biden had retired in the midst of a plagiarism scandal before no votes were cast. In his second run, in 2008, he left after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses. Thus, he ran twice and never even managed to get to the New Hampshire primary.
Now, however, Biden is ahead of the field. Democrats know how old he is, they know he's lost in the past and they still love him.
It is true that elections always focus on the future, not on the past. This is often the case. But what if it's not this time? The 2016 election, won by a man with another promise of restoration, did not hold many political truisms: "Make America Great Again".
Now many Democrats seem happy to support a candidate who is committed to bringing him back a few years. Again, this may change, but for now, it shows how many Democrats aspire to return to an era prior to Trump.
[ad_2]
Source link