Joe Biden faces obstacles in long-shot run against Hillary Clinton

This article is more than 4 years old

Speculation has reached fever pitch but party loyalists ponder can he win and what makes him different from the Democratic frontrunner

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Joe Biden
Clinton and Biden in 2013. As Biden ponders a challenge to Clinton, she has rolled out a string of high-profile endorsements in the early voting contests of Iowa and South Carolina. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP

As Hillary Clinton and the other Democratic presidential candidates gather in Minneapolis on Friday, one question looms over the gathering: is vice-president Joe Biden about to join them in the race?

But as speculation hits fever pitch ahead of his imminent decision, some party activists are instead beginning to ask other questions: should he run, and could he win?

For supporters of the avuncular former senator from Delaware, the answers are obvious. With Hillary Clinton in danger of losing her place as the party’s natural frontrunner amid an ongoing scandal over a private email server she used while secretary of state and doubts about her ability to connect with voters, the 72-year-old Biden – once dismissed as irredeemably gaffe-prone – has been recast as a safe pair of hands and a more authentic voice of the party’s blue collar base.

Opinion polling released by the Quinnipiac University on Thursday showed Biden outperforming Clinton against potential Republican rivals such as Jeb Bush and Donald Trump even before he has begun the long and expensive process of actually running a campaign.

The vice-president himself has preferred to frame the question not as “why run?” but as “why not?” In a leaked conference call with party leaders gathered in Minneapolis, Biden suggested his indecision was mainly down to personal reasons following the death of his son, Beau, who had urged him campaign shortly before dying of cancer.

“We’re dealing at home with ... whether or not there is the emotional fuel at this time to run,” Biden said. “If I were to announce to run, I have to be able to commit to all of you that I would be able to give it my whole heart and my whole soul, and right now, both are pretty well banged up.”

While personal goodwill toward Biden, who in 1972 also tragically lost his first wife and one-year-old daughter to a car accident, has never been greater, confirming his ability to run is not the same as explaining what he offers that the other candidates cannot.

In policy terms it is hard to see much difference between Clinton and Biden, who both served in Barack Obama’s cabinet and have a reputation as pragmatic centrists compared with the insurgent challenge from Clinton’s popular leftwing rival from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

Perhaps the clearest sign Biden understands this threat from the left came in a much-publicised meeting with Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has resisted pressure to run herself but shares the anti-establishment populism of Sanders and could prove a crucial endorsement for the vice president.

But the disillusioned Democrats currently flocking to Sanders will want hard evidence that Biden is more radical than Clinton on key issues she has so far ducked: public funding of elections, tackling Wall Street monopolies, fighting the TPP trade deal and opposing the Keystone oil pipeline.

“I think Biden will have a hard time getting a lot of populist energy if he doesn’t come out with a strong contrast to Clinton on all these issues,” says Zephyr Teachout, a New York law professor and prominent supporter of Warren.

“Democrats, whether populist, progressive, or traditional or left, all are pretty clear on these issues: TPP is bad, Keystone is bad, public funding of elections is necessary, and we have to break up big companies.”

Some on the Warren wing of the party remain hopeful Biden will prove his progressive chops if he decides to run against Clinton, particularly since the former secretary of state has herself acknowledged the need for more radical policies since entering the race.

“So far, we’ve been working this cycle to make sure that every Democratic candidate for president is endorsing big, bold ideas on Wall Street reform, campaign finance reform, debt-free college, and social security expansion - proposals that are popular with voters across the political spectrum,” says Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “If Joe Biden enters the race, we would expect to see this ‘race to the top’ among the Democratic candidates to continue.”

Yet there are also substantial practical as well as policy hurdles for a potential Biden campaign to clear before it stands a chance of winning the party nomination, especially in early-voting states where Clinton has a huge organisational head start.

In Iowa, for example, Biden would start with a base of support that one Democratic activist there described this week as “super-excited but limited”.

Many Iowa Democrats have been loyal to the vice-president since his first presidential run in 1988. They call him “Joe”, worry aloud about his family and try to combine excitement about a potential run with genuine heartfelt personal concern with how he is coping with the death of Beau.

The question is how he can leverage this base into success as a candidate. Even Biden supporters admit that his 2008 presidential campaign was an inadequate response to the type of effort that is needed to win a modern Democratic primary. Now, the bench of experienced operatives in Iowa is only more depleted as many of those who understand the intense and complex effort needed to win the caucuses have either signed with other campaigns or committed to other jobs.

The caucuses – which elect delegates to Iowa’s 99 county conventions to pick the eventual nominee – require candidates to find local organisers in hundreds of individual precincts across the sparsely-populated state. Instead, each precinct in the state is allocated a certain number of delegates to county conventions in a process of indirect election for president, which culminates in the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

This means campaigns need a presence across Iowa and attracting the support of a handful of elderly farmers in a far corner of the state can be far more valuable than an entire dorm of college students. Furthermore, caucusgoers have to commit to attend for several hours on a cold winter’s night in a process that requires two rounds of voting and laborious counting by hand.

Yet, activists emphasize there is still a window for Biden in the state. Most of Clinton’s most enthusiastic supporters in the state supported the former secretary of state in 2007 and there is a deep thirst among Iowa Democrats for a truly competitive caucus cycle.

Biden would also be able to tap in a long-running streak of suspicion towards the Clintons that animated some of the energy for Barack Obama in 2007. One veteran of Obama’s 2007 campaign told the Guardian that if Biden ran, it would energize a lot of the operatives who labored in Iowa eight years ago. He compared it to the Hollywood movie The Expendables, which featured an ensemble cast of veteran action movie stars: “Everyone would come out of retirement.”

If Biden jumps in, many in the state believe that he would also immediately take votes from Martin O’Malley’s underdog campaign, which has organized heavily across the state so far but has yet to see that work reflected in polls. While one O’Malley supporter optimistically said that a Biden candidacy would benefit the former Maryland governor because “anything that puts a chink in the armor of inevitable frontrunner” is advantageous, it is likely Biden, not O’Malley, would be the default choice of those Iowans who prefer an Irish Catholic from the mid-Atlantic to Hillary Clinton.

The vice-president’s candidacy could also shake up the race for all of the other presidential contenders because he would immediately have the latitude to flout the debate rules imposed by the Democratic National Committee. While the DNC has banned any candidate who appears in an unsanctioned debate from participating in its six official events, it’s hard to see how they can discipline Biden if he ignores it.

The rule, which is widely considered to have been pushed by the Clinton campaign to limit debates and her exposure to potential gaffes, serves as a stick to keep lesser Democratic candidates from seeking attention by holding their own forums. If they disobey, they lose out on national television exposure and the chance to debate the frontrunner.

Biden’s entry into the race changes this dynamic entirely. It’s one thing for the DNC to blackball a former Maryland governor or even self-proclaimed democratic socialist senator from Vermont – it’s altogether another thing to do so to the second most powerful person in the United States government.

The myriad disadvantages of arriving late to the race may also fade fast if Biden can convince voters (and donors) that he represents a genuinely fresh alternative to both Clinton and Sanders. The big question is whether a two-time failed nominee who has been at the heart of government for the last six years can ever really be described as fresh?