WASHINGTON — Soon after a young Joe Biden stunned Delaware by toppling one of its political giants with a scrappy, outsider Senate campaign, he was already planning a quick exit from Washington.
Biden was too grief-stricken for the job. His wife and infant daughter were killed in a car crash just weeks after he won the election. His boys were still in a hospital. He wanted to quit before being sworn in.
Yet Biden would experience a phenomenon inside the Senate that kept him coming back: Nearly five decades later, it would serve as the foundation of his presidential run.
Ideological adversaries showed him unrelenting empathy and became lifelong friends. They dragged him to the clubby Senate gym and set a place for him at cozy weekly dinners. They helped launch Biden into the kind of across-the-aisle working relationships that became a hallmark of his career.
In recent years, that affinity for the center nearly toppled Biden. In 2008, when he launched his second run at the party's nomination — his first came in 1988 — voters quickly cast him aside in favor of a man almost three decades younger, Barack Obama. Earlier in this campaign cycle, his rivals in the party primaries branded his approach anachronistic and naive.
He was derided as a 77-year-old throwback, a clueless Beltway insider and two-time presidential campaign loser.
But Biden placed a bet that the years of patient consensus building, the lessons he learned from his many missteps, and the personal tragedies that shaped his signature empathy would appeal to millions of voters exhausted by four years of partisan warring and White House chaos.
In particular, he and his advisers believed his centrist style would allow him to win back voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the three "blue wall" states that Trump had won in 2016 that became a singular focus of Biden's campaign.
Now that he's won, he's betting again — this time that his approach will allow him to pull the nation together after the crisis-riddled Trump era.
Biden calls that approach the "Delaware Way" — a brand of consensus-oriented politics that has guided lawmakers from a tiny state where moderation dominates politics. It is the path he will pursue as he tries to push the nation in a new direction despite likely opposition from Republicans, who may hold control of the Senate.
Biden's many years in that institution — and his eight years of working with it as vice president — offer a glimpse of how he will go about the task.
On climate change, for example, Biden prefers to frame the policy debate around the jobs that can be generated by new investments in areas such as solar power. Democrats say he's likely to push for large-scale infrastructure repair that would aim to greatly increase the U.S. supply of renewable energy. On healthcare, he has pushed for a public option that would give Americans an additional choice and has resisted "Medicare for All" proposals that would eliminate employer-provided insurance.
Even if Democrats do manage to win a Senate majority, he's not likely to embrace progressive ideas such as expanding the Supreme Court.
Pete Buttigieg, a former Democratic primary rival who is half Biden's age and had argued for a generational change in political leadership, says that the evolving crises of 2020 have now made Biden more than ever the man of the moment.
"Not only did the need for consensus building grow even more urgent ... so did the need for consoling, for healing, for those instincts that are so exquisitely part of what makes Joe Biden who he is," Buttigieg said in an interview. "The fact that he's been through so much in terms of the Senate and the process of the vice presidency also makes this more his moment than any of us could have guessed."
