The 2020 Election

From My Substack- Biden and Harris Didn’t “Fail” Because Voters Felt They Were Too Moderate

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

My new newsletter on Substack will be a less frequent, more big picture items type of outlet. You can subscribe at “The Dark Side of the Dawn.” This is the first piece.

Do you remember 2020? It’s ok if you don’t, it really was a long time ago, and it was not a pleasant time for anyone. But if you can get just a little further back, to 2019, you might remember the Democratic Primary race for President of the United States. There was literally more than 20 candidates running, and they held debates where literally all of these people participated in one form or another. Moderators asked them to raise their hands if they agreed with statements like “defund the police,” or if they pledged to implement “the Green New Deal,” or if they would enact reparations for descendants of former slaves, and all kinds of different stuff. For the most part, everyone on stage raised their hands. Candidates who had spent years carefully building their public persona were suddenly racing each other to show they were further left, more “woke” I guess is how some people would put it. The one who basically refused to raise his hand for most of this stuff was Joe Biden, the former Vice-President of the United States and guy who progressives like Larry Krasner called dumb, while others said he was out of touch, and others yet questioned his mental fitness. Hell, he was called racist for working with Dixiecrats in the 1970’s, with the obvious moment everyone remembers being his confrontation with Kamala Harris during an early debate. One by one though, all of those candidates dropped out, rejected by a primary electorate of Democrats who gave Joe Biden the cleanest and clearest primary victory for President since 2004. Progressive heroes like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, supposed young up and comers like Julian Castro and Cory Booker, and moderate stalwarts like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg all had varying levels of success, but Biden had either knocked them out of the race or sealed off their pathway to the nomination by the end of Super Tuesday. The Democratic Primary voters picked the older than hell moderate guy. Then the older than hell moderate guy picked the “cop” prosecutor lady from California as his running mate and guess what? They’re the only Democratic ticket out of three that managed to beat Donald Trump in a Presidential race.

There’s an uncomfortable truth for progressives and “establishment” Democrats alike about this period after Barack Obama’s Presidency, a period dominated by in all aspects of American life by Donald Trump. Donald Trump did better with many core Democratic leaning demographic groups than Mitt Romney or John McCain literally from the beginning in 2016. Trump has improved his standing in each subsequent election (albeit, not always by a lot) as a percentage of the vote with African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Trump has received more votes in each of his successive elections than the previous election, and he has received a higher percentage of the vote in each election than he did in the last. You don’t have to like it, but the truth is that MAGA has appeal to a lot more people than Democrats want to believe, and many of the truths Democrats held as gospel about demographics and the future of the country after 2008 and 2012 were simply not true, or at least are not true anymore. The country did not reject the personal failings, the crass language, the confrontational, bullyish style of Trump. They didn’t care that he trampled norms, or that he’s nasty, or that he even broke the law. There was something appealing about what he put forward, and that appeal actually cuts across demographic lines. In fact, Democrats in 2024 did not really have a particular “white voters” problem- Kamala Harris even won college educated white men, a first for a Democrat since the days of Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter.

He did lose once though, and that once was to Biden/Harris. To hear the DC group think though, by 2024 Trump would have defeated them in a rematch, and he did end up defeating Harris. There is an arm of the Democratic Party that Biden defeated in 2020 who wants to fill in the blanks about why. They want to blame Gaza, they wanted to blame student loan forgiveness being struck down at one point, and they basically want to point the future of the party in the direction of the populist left. They point at rather small data points like Dearborn, MI (where Gaza probably did make the difference) to back up their point. They point to victories by progressives in deep blue municipal elections, without point out that their candidates didn’t really do that great, relative to what a Democrat should do. They point to unrest amongst younger voters with Biden and Harris, without pointing out what a tiny share of the electorate that really was, compared to the whole. They’ve created a case for a party that embraces big government liberalism, abandons traditional central points of American foreign policy dating back to the end of the Second World War, and more closely resembles something like Corbyn’s British Labour Party or a European Social Democratic Party in policy and rhetoric. Some of them make the case quite compellingly. The problem is their case is fiction.

Saying that Harris lost because of Biden being old, or that she was too moderate, or any of the go-to’s of terminally online leftists and radicalized coffee shop folks is comforting. It’s false. The truth is that while voters knew about Trump’s first term, his part in January 6th, his alleged crimes, his role in overturning Roe v. Wade, and really everything about Trump, they viewed Harris as more extreme (while this links to a Fox article, the polling was from the New York Times). Post-election surveys showed an electorate that thought Harris and the Democrats had their priorities wrong and took far left positions, even in cases where she didn’t. In fact, Harris was literally caught up in a bad brand. She was too generic Democrat, in part because of her own failed 2020 campaign, and she simply couldn’t overcome that.

To the extent Joe Biden did hurt her, I think it’s been overblown that it was because he stayed in the race too long. The truth is that most voters picked Biden in 2020 because he wasn’t like the generic Democrats that they imagined, something that was born out in Biden winning and House Democrats actually losing seats from their 2018 majority. I think this portion of “The Liberal Patriot’s” critique of Biden and Harris actually hits pretty close to home with my experience on the campaign:

Finally, Harris’s refusal to distance herself from President Biden likely complicated her efforts to fashion herself as a moderate. Though Biden ran to the center of the 2020 Democratic primary field, he made a conscious decision at the beginning of his presidency to swing left. He demonstrated this early on by hiring staffers who had worked for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in an effort to ingratiate himself with the party’s progressive faction. Meanwhile, he shunned moderates like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, veterans of the Obama White House.

This was also evident in how he governed. Biden made a concerted effort to push policy ideas that thrilled the progressive wing of the party, such as the COVID stimulus package early in his administration, which has since been linked to the subsequently higher rate of inflation. He also acquiesced to their demands on a liberalized asylum policy and student debt forgiveness, neither of which went over well with the public. Biden additionally took controversial actions related to race and social justice. One of his first acts as president was signing several executive orders related to advancing “equity,” one of which called for “an ­ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

Perhaps all this is why in the early part of summer, just before Biden dropped out, polls showed that more voters saw him as “ideologically extreme” than said the same about Trump—and why Harris’s insistence on embracing him during the campaign may have hurt her. Indeed, Blueprint’s polling found that among the other reasons voters chose not to support her was that they viewed her as too closely tied to Biden.

I’m a huge Joe Biden fan and proud alum of his 2020 campaign- hell I was a delegate for him in 2020. He campaigned as the most moderate Democratic candidate in the primary field, but that guy never governed. Right around the time he had basically secured the nomination and Covid hit and shut down our headquarters, the campaign underwent a leadership shift that brought with it an influx of staff from Beto, Warren, Sanders, and others. Many Hillary alums who hadn’t been on the team were brought in as well. During the long “work from home”/”virtual campaign” period, many of these folks took fairly important roles. That continued right on into the administration. Biden, like Hillary before him, sought to bring progressive Democrats into his fold for the general election by promising to be the new LBJ and promising bold action. Was it unifying to Democrats and sounded good in 2020? Sure, I guess. Over time though, the Biden that governed seemed a lot more similar to an AOC than a Blue Dog Democrat, and people weren’t really excited about that outside of the party faithful. That was even more true as inflation hit in 2021 and 2022, and the administration had made a conscious effort to prioritize employment an wage numbers over holding down inflation. Basically, they started to tune him out then. 

Look, I’m of the opinion that it was the kiss of death to try and appease Bernie Sanders in 2016, but that’s long over with. The truth is that 2026 will be about the Trump Administration, and Democrats should be able to win that election if they can talk coherently and plainly about health care premiums, continuing rising inflation, housing, and kitchen tables issues. Literally don’t mix this stuff up with activist speak, talk prices and affordability, and we’re good. In the longer run, like say 2028 though, I’m not as sure right now. Sure, the public hates ICE and the Trump Administration’s actions on immigration. Will they vote against it if we go back to Biden’s more liberal policies on asylum and immigration though? I doubt it. If we’re able to get out of our own way and admit that Barack Obama’s orderly, humane, and due process driven deportation policies that deported a shit ton of people here illegally actually did work pretty well, we might be able to win the issue. I’m not sure though. We have mini-Mamdani candidates and people trying to run as clones of John Fetterman in 2022 popping up all over the place. This isn’t sustainable. Even if it doesn’t kill us in 2026, and realistically it shouldn’t, it’s poison for 2028.

It’s fairly easy after your rejected to recoil and take the position that you weren’t true to your values. That doesn’t mean it’s true. Democrats get a minimum of 48% in literally every Presidential election, dating back as far as 1996, and while there’s meaningful divides in that electorate, the reality is that a large majority of those votes are not terminally online activists. That’s even more true for the voters who are not consistent Democratic voters. Those extra voters that pushed Biden and Obama up over 50% are not closet liberals waiting for a Bolshevik Revolution, they really don’t want to hear about the virtues of Hamas, giving taxpayer funded gender re-assignment surgeries to prisoners, confiscating guns, taxing churches, making all cars electric, or open borders. I’m not saying liberals are right or wrong on those subjects (I have some nuanced views of what is actually right there), I’m saying the voters who voted Obama/Trump/Biden/Trump (or didn’t show up in Trump’s wins) don’t love the Democratic Party, and would prefer we not cater to our activists. We can ignore them, that’s certainly an option, but that option probably doesn’t go well.

I Waited a Long #*^%ing Time For This.

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment
My contribution to the convention…

It was an August evening 18 years ago that I came back to my dorm from cross-country practice and saw a flier on my door advertising internships with the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign for future Governor Ed Rendell and Congressional nominee Ed O’Brien. Motivated by my anti-war, pro-union, pro-environmental views of the day, I called the number the next day, and was on board within the week. I did not know at the time that my sports career, which had been ongoing since I was five, was days away from being ended by mono, or that I’d still be doing campaigns 18 years later (which was definitely not my intention at the time). In hindsight though, the transition makes sense and meant the world for me, as politics both replaced my competitive needs, and made me grow in ways I did not suspect it would at the time.

To be clear, 18 years later I could (and plan to) write a book about all the ways I think our political process sucks, and is broken. I often find myself feeling contempt for every part of the system, even as I would say without a second thought that this same broken system has made me a better person, and taught me to empathize with people I would not have had much in common with them. Politics is complicated though, so it’s fitting for me that I’m standing here all these years later observing that my own relationship to it is extremely complicated too. Ultimately though, it has been rewarding.

I can’t say I’ve ever had a bigger reward than the one I’ll celebrate this week: national Delegate. Thanks to the Biden campaign selecting me, about 300 people signing my petition, Joe Biden winning PA-7, and slightly over 50,000 people voting for me, I have the honor of a lifetime this week. Yes, it’s a weird year and convention, and I would be lying if I didn’t express my disappointment with not being in Milwaukee this week, but don’t mistake that for me being disappointed in the moment. I’ve spent my entire career working with a chip on my shoulder, that I’ve been passed over or underestimated by people in this industry for varying reasons. This week I can quietly and proudly tell myself I’m good enough, and for the nominee, no less. This is first line in your obituary type of shit here.

Without question, the best night of the campaign.

To be honest, I kind of thought this moment in my political life would happen four years ago, for Secretary Clinton and her campaign. I was an alum of her 2008 campaign, the convention was in my adoptive city of Philadelphia, I was raising money for her campaign and “Ready for Hillary” very early on, and I had friends and allies in close enough contact to them that I was pretty sure my call was coming. I received only small offers early on though and got passed over to be any kind of delegate for Hillary. It was personally and professionally very disappointing, and left me questioning many of my decisions. I got that my fairly extreme lack of diversity (white, straight, Catholic, male, geographically outside of the big cities) was a drawback, but why did it seem like I had nothing to offer a candidate that I admired like none other? The disappointment made me look in other directions, but ultimately I did stick with Hillary, and after the 2016 convention, they suddenly needed me to parachute into Northeast North Carolina to fix a messed up region for them, for which the honor will forever be mine. I made great friends there, and our hard work as a team gave the Tar Heel State a Governor and Attorney General that have improved so many lives. Ultimately though, even that experience left me and so many others feeling empty when Hillary came up short. It was devastating.

The last three years have been a whirlwind, and the experience has changed me politically like it has for so many of you. That all came to a head just two days before Thanksgiving, when I text an old friend who was Vice-President Biden’s head guy in Iowa after reading about him in an article. It would take until nearly Christmas, and I very nearly went in another direction, but I was offered to come to Omaha, Nebraska and join the Biden team as the out-of-state organizer there, and I accepted. I left the day after Christmas, ultimately spending 40 nights in the Midwest, fighting for Joe in Iowa. My role expanded to handling paid canvassing in Southwest Iowa and working with endorsers to fill our precinct captain team out, and it’s fair to say I was kept busy. I would not change it for the world though. Friends of mine, from Senator Casey’s political director to friends from past campaigns, and even people I met on twitter or knew from back home in Easton came out to volunteer for us. The personal highlight of all highlights was when my first major political boss, Senator Chris Dodd came to campaign with us over the last weekend in Council Bluffs (and his caucus day “good luck” call was awesome too). The whole experience was amazing, and during that time period I was informed that I had been selected to be a delegate (with a gigantic assist from Senator Casey’s political director, again). Honestly, even seeing that things weren’t looking great, I had prepared myself for a tough caucus night, and likely being laid off the day after. I got the tough caucus night, and handled it as best I could. Then I got the shocking call that I was being re-assigned to Philadelphia. For the next month, I don’t know if I was only lucky, somewhat good, or some combination, but I could not miss. I woke up every morning on Broad Street of my favorite city in the world, got my Friday night cheesesteaks, got visits from old, close friends I hadn’t seen in years, and oh yeah- things got better. To be honest, I have no idea how I got assigned to digital organizing, it was literally something I had never done in my career (maybe the only thing), but the success was there. My biggest two wins were Oklahoma and Tennessee on Super Tuesday, but the wins continued to just pile up in states I was organizing in- Massachusetts, Idaho, Wyoming, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, and Delaware- all states I either organized in on the digital team, or later on the Mid-Atlantic “Pod.” Obviously Covid-19 struck about a month after I arrived in Philadelphia, the primaries came to a conclusion earlier than expected, and I was re-assigned eventually full time to Pennsylvania, but there was so much winning- and that was a great feeling. None of that was better than being elected to the convention on June 2nd though, so here we are.

From an identity standpoint, obviously Joe Biden is the best fit to me politically that I’ve probably ever had. It’s a lot more complicated than that though. In 2007 I passed on an interview with his campaign, which was offered to me just two days after I had accepted an offer from Senator Dodd. In 2015, I had the contract in hand to go to New Hampshire for the Draft Biden movement, and ultimately life events gave me second thoughts that kept me with Hillary. Even now, I can’t say this campaign has gone according to script. I also can’t say the similarities I share with Biden are what actually even draws me to him either- his Pennsylvania roots, his Catholicism, his “working class” politics- none of that gets me. I think it’s just how real of a person Joe is. He’s achieved great things, but his life has been far from perfect. He’s suffered personal loss. He’s made damaging gaffes. The “smart” people have consistently dismissed his politics and some even have called him dumb. This is part of what I love about Joe- he’s smarter than the “know it all” types, because he can relate to normal people, he keeps a broad, open tent, and he lets his opponents keep their dignity (which is why they’re opponents and not enemies). When this is over, and it’s 1/20/21 and I’m telling you “I told you so,” remember this is why- the country desperately wants to have a normal human being be it’s leader, someone that can wind down the permanent culture wars we’ve been fighting since Newt Gingrich decided to make all politics as nasty and personal as he could. Joe Biden is genuine, he is decent, and he is a bigger man than the rest of Washington, and I’m only so thrilled that he and I both hung around the business long enough that I could say yes to his campaign, finally.

The first convention I was at, in 2004- a State Senator from Illinois.

Tomorrow will begin my third convention I have attended, my first as a delegate. My father and I drove up to Boston for the first two days of the 2004 Convention, and met this former State Senator from Illinois that you may have heard of named Barack Obama on Boston Harbor, speaking at a League of Conservation voters event the morning of his far more famous convention speech. In 2016 I spent the Philadelphia Convention outside of the hall as well, instead attending the parties and happy hours where you meet everyone. I would be an unequivocal liar if I said I’m not disappointed that I’m in Easton and not Milwaukee right now. There is zero doubt that I would have done anything possible to have the full delegate experience. Unfortunately life dictated otherwise though, so we’re going to do our best to enjoy the moment. I’ll attend the Pennsylvania delegation’s events, watch all the speeches, and attend the Labor caucus meetings (and any other caucus meetings I belong at). I voted for Joe Biden, our platform, and to continue under the post 2016 unity rules. Hopefully we delegates will get to register our support for Senator Harris with some form of vote, for history’s sake. I’m going to treat this convention seriously, because I waited a long f**king time for this. 18 years to be exact. And while no one is owed the opportunity to do what I get to do here, I earned it as much as anyone. I survived all that time, and the 9th position on the ballot in a low information race, for this. So yeah, I’m spiking the football just a bit.

Like our nominee I’ve got plenty of flaws, but also like him I’ve tried to not forget where I came from. I’m really proud to take part in this process and nominate a President we can really be proud of as a person again. I’m fortunate to be here, and fortunate to work for this man, and be a delegate. I remind myself that my immigrant great-grandfather walked across a railroad bridge from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to work in a cement factory with a bunch of other immigrants, then did it again the next day. I get to work for the 46th President of the United States, and represent the Democratic voters of Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District to vote for him at the Democratic National Convention. I’m thankful for the moment.