Joe Biden is the Democratic favorite of 2020, despite his age, race and record.

The very first months of the race for the Democratic candidacy have been far from predictable. Kamala Harris reached the top of the hierarchy overnight. Bernie Sanders revealed that he had spent the last four years building an ATM. Amy Klobuchar taught us that you can eat a salad with a comb. And just last week, Sherrod Brown proved that it was actually possible for a politician to resist the sound of the glossy press cover siren trying to get him into the race.

The only major constant: the imminent presence of Joe Biden, who has been more or less teasing a presidential race since the day after the 2016 elections. Biden should face many obstacles if he starts the race – his age and his recordman in mind – but it is far from certain that these are chop breakers suggested by some experts and prognosticators.

To be clear, I do not think Biden should win the Democratic nomination; I'm just afraid he's doing it. Despite a record that looks retrospectively conservative, a troubling worldview in the present and an identity that does little for the future, Biden seems to be too well known, appreciated and connected to be rejected. .

Let's start with the polls. Mr. Biden has been at the helm of almost every hypothetical domain of almost every major investigation since polling day 2016, despite the usual caveats about polls. Polls can not predict the future, but they can tell us a lot about the present – and the present looks good for Uncle Joe. It is just under 30% of the RealClearPolitics moving average, about 10 points of a crowded field in which everyone, with the exception of Sanders and Harris, remains stuck at one digit. What is more telling than the importance of Biden is the consistency of his support, which has not weakened, even though a host of credible and convincing contenders have come to the nation in turn.

The common chorus at this distant point of the first nominations is that survey performance is largely driven by name recognition, which is true. But the last time I checked, name recognition is a prerequisite for electoral success, especially in a highly populated area. Any candidate would like to be in Biden's place, which allows him to be considered as a press coverage and help him overcome his lack of small donor network. And more important than to be known is to be wellloveand no one on the field is more loved than Uncle Joe, even when you consider his national profile. According to the latest data from Morning Consult, which have been on the ground every day since early January, 79% of Democrats have a favorable opinion of the former group, against only 11% of Democrats. This is largely why Biden was also the most common answer when Sanders, Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Beto O'Rourke fans were asked to pick their second choice.

Many commentators think that these good feelings will not last if and when Biden intervenes officially. He is, in his own words, a "blunder machine", and it is easy to see him find a way to slip both feet into his. the mouth shortly after launching a campaign. He will face serious questions about a host of his previous positions that seem downright conservative by today's standards: he opposed school integration in the 1970s, he was a trafficker of the drug and hawk of incarceration in the 1980s, he mismanaged the hearings of Anita Hill and contributed to the success of Clinton's crime bill in the 1990s, and he was an ardent supporter of the war in Iraq in the 2000s.

Biden is not just an old white guy on paper; he is an old white guy who acts like a.

Biden should take into account a lot of things, a lot of which is related to race, but I'm not sure he will be forced to do it significantly. Take his opposition to bus transportation in the 1970s, which the Washington Post pointed out last week by collecting some of the comments the first-year Senator made in support of his position today. Biden then stated that he had "not" bought the concept "which, to make up for centuries of racism," now must give the Black a run-in, or even hold the White to the race". "I feel responsible for the current situation, the sins of my generation. And I will be damned if I feel responsible for paying for what happened 300 years ago. He went on to say that the school integration plan proposed by his opponents was "the most racist concept you can propose".

Today, these comments are not just to the right of Harris and Elizabeth Warren, they are to the right of David Brooks. Nevertheless, I can imagine that many Democratic voters, especially white voters, are giving half attention to one of the newspapers and are not bewildered by what Biden said at the time or even by what he will say tomorrow, but rather by the wider uncomfortable dialogue about race. as a legitimate debate on Biden's past positions and its end, on the other side of the cycle of outrage, as an insinuation that he is racist. This will be unthinkable for many Democrats who watched Biden enthusiastically serve the nation's first black president and heard President Barack Obama declare after eight years that Biden was "the best vice president America has ever had." never known. famous black man in America vouching for him, and he already enjoys strong support from black leaders of the first nominating states, such as South Carolina. And while this does not stop him from clumsily speaking about identity issues, anyone who watched last week's debate in the House on an anti-hate resolution knows he has a lot of company in this regard with the Democratic Party today.

Yes, Biden is an old white guy at a time when his party has shown a growing preference for candidates with lived experience other than that. If you look at each of these three attributes separately, it is unclear whether they are a liability. Age may be a legitimate concern, but it is not a concern of most Democrats at the moment; about half of them support either Biden, 76, or Sanders, 77. Biden is white, but nearly two-thirds of Democratic voters are too. the party includes about twice as many white voters without a university degree as black voters of all levels of education. Being a man in 2020 will probably not be the electoral advantage of the past, but it would be foolish to assume the refreshing success of the 2018 mid-term candidates, who will supplant all the elections that took place before it.

Although Biden will seem completely out of place in the next Democratic Party, he is at home in the current situation. a.

Biden is not just an old white guy on paper; he is an old white guy who actions like a. He loves to become nostalgic of the bipartisan era, seemingly unable to understand that his friends at the time were segregationists such as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, or that Congress was so dominated by men on his arrival to Washington it would take another two decades before women had their own Senate floor toilets. But let's not pretend that the whole Democratic Party has woken up – or even wants to be. About half of the party members identify themselves as "conservative" or "moderate". While these terms mean different things to different people, polls suggest that large parts of the party believe that the barriers that keep women from moving forward are "largely" and that blacks who "do not" can not go ahead these days "are mainly responsible for their own state. In addition, many liberal Democrats will give Biden the benefit of the doubt, because, in addition to his time with Obama, he also campaigned for the woman who tried to become the first female president of the country.

Biden's moderate record is at odds with where the popular left is pushing the party. But as much as Biden will seem completely out of place in the next edition of the Democratic Party, the former president is quite comfortable in the present. Unlike her main rivals, Biden does not support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal or Sanders' Medicare-for-all plan, but the idea is not yet democratic orthodoxy. Personalities such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi regard both institutions as unrealistic and the support of the party's base begins to fade as the conversation turns into cost. With other moderates such as Brown, Deval Patrick and Michael Bloomberg deciding not to be running for president, Biden will largely have the central route for himself. Pragmatism does not make the most compelling speeches, but Hillary Clinton has managed to apply for the Democratic nomination. Biden could easily do the same thing.

In campaigns, the perceptions of a candidate matter more than the reality of a candidate. And Biden's perception is that he was a happy warrior under Obama and that he had special ties to the kind of working-class whites who helped Trump's inclusion in the White House. Biden thinks he's so perfect to defeat Trump that he is adamant that he can not only triumph in 2020, but that he would have done so in 2016. The conversation about "eligibility" at this stage is best stupid and at worst, because it can easily become a substitute for which candidates resemble our former presidents, who, with one exception, were all white men. But the Democrats are unusually focused on victory in 2020, and Biden may have the easiest story to sell: he's watching the game and, what's more, was on the ballot the last two times the Democrats have won the White House. Biden can say that his election would bring back the time before Trump's victory in 2016. For many Democrats, that will be enough.