The prospect that a sitting vice-president would refuse to run for president of the United States defies most brands of modern political logic.
It defies the logic of personal duty that causes someone to spend 40 years of his life in elected office, in an effort to fulfill a public charge.
It defies the logic of personal ambition that grows stronger with proximity to the biggest job in the world.
It defies what little logic there is left to prognostication, given that one in four voters want the current vice-president to stay in the White House – and that he nips at every runaway lead Hillary Clinton has ever had, whenever his name comes up in a poll.
And the prospect of an election without the US’s beloved No2 certainly defies the logic of any media revenue model, which contemplates in this case a fight to the political death between two Washington friends, and sees a bonanza.
How can Joe Biden not join the 2016 race for the presidency?
A look back at his previous White House campaigns – and the weaknesses Biden demonstrated as a candidate then – suggests significant hazards he may face, should he move forward this time.
The will-he-or-won’t-he speculation is expected to end in a decision that leaves preparation time for the first Democratic debate next month. But pollsters, party operatives and confidantes agreed: the best set-up for a Biden moment would be a Clinton implosion – and it might be near.
“There just wasn’t a place for him in the race” against Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008, said Robert Shrum, the Democratic consultant who worked on the failed campaigns of John Kerry and Al Gore. “In every presidential race, if you’re going to succeed, you’ve got to have a place. This time, he has a place.”
’88, ’08 and right now
Biden’s first presidential run, in 1988, ended ignominiously. The 44-year-old senator caved after a series of minor controversies, including his use of a line by the British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock without attribution.
With little time to campaign and try to clean up the mess, due to overseeing as chair of the Senate judiciary committee the controversial nomination process of Robert Bork to the US supreme court, Biden decided to drop out.
“He was on a trajectory to win,” said Iowa state senator Tony Bisignano, a longtime Biden supporter who recalled the Delaware senator had “one of the best organizations I’ve ever seen – full of young, talented recruits who were really neophytes but had lots of talent”.
One of Biden’s operatives in 1988 was a young David Plouffe, who would become Obama’s campaign manager in 2008. Before Biden joined the winning ticket that year, his own second presidential run ended just as badly, culminating in a fifth-place finish in first-in-the-nation Iowa.
The second loss, however, turned out to be prelude to a renaissance. As vice-president, Biden has become a household name and maintained an almost 75% favorability rating among Democrats. No politician is so free with his affections or so beloved among his colleagues.
Seven years in the national spotlight has brought Biden back to the threshold of a question that he has answered in the affirmative twice before. This time, months of seeming inactivity on the campaign front as well as the death of his eldest son Beau in May have removed the vice-president from the daily conversation of who is up and who is down.
But the Biden camp has recently made moves that would, in any other year, look unmistakeable.
His supporters are hiring paid staff in about a dozen key primary states, Reuters reported at the end of last week. And on Saturday night, Biden’s official Twitter account sent a message:
"It’s within our reach. We can change the world. We really can. You can." —VP Biden #GlobalCitizen pic.twitter.com/NBKiN3i60s
— Vice President Biden (@VP) September 27, 2015
It was a quote from a politician onstage at a benefit concert featuring Beyoncé, but it sounded a lot like “yes we can” 2.0. By morning, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found the invisible candidate shaking up the race once more:
NBC/WSJ poll on natl Dem race Hillary 42% Sanders 35% Biden 17% W/o Biden Hillary 53% Sanders 38%
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) September 27, 2015
The case against Biden
One huge reason Biden might stay out in 2016, of course, is not tied to ghosts of campaigns past.
It is that the Democrats already have a strong presidential candidate in Clinton. While it is true that Clinton’s favorability rating is languishing among all voters, her favorability among Democrats is as robust as Biden’s, at nearly 75%.
In a theoretical match-up including Biden, Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders and others like former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, Clinton displays a prohibitive advantage over Biden among women and non-white Democratic voters.
A CNN/ORC poll of registered Democrats conducted in mid-September found Clinton up 29 points on Biden among women and up 31 points among non-white voters. In both cases, Sanders was further back.
Clinton’s relatively strong performance among women, should it hold, is particularly important, given that a 55%-plus majority of voters in Democratic primaries and caucuses are expected to be women.
“It’s not a surprise that Clinton does well with women voters, and that’s a great part of her early advantage in the primary because the primary electorate is so overwhelmingly female,” said Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster.
“I don’t think that that means that the door is closed for Biden. I think he can make a case with both men and women voters,” she said, “but he hasn’t campaigned yet.”
If Biden did jump in, and stole voters exclusively from Clinton, he could catch up with her among Democratic sub-groups. Some surveys suggest, however, that Biden would harvest equally from all the Democratic candidates.
What is the case for Biden over HRC? Youth?❌ Gender?❌ Broad party support?❌ Lefty cred?❌ Money?❌ Superior campaigner?❌ Makes no sense.
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) August 2, 2015
The No1 worst thing that Biden could do for his poll numbers in the presidential race, in fact, might be to jump into the race.
“It tends to be the case that people long for something, for people who are on the sidelines,” said Dante Scala, associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. “We have seen Biden try for the presidency before and fail, and in fact not come particularly close.”
“Could this be his moment? Maybe.”
The Clinton implosion scenario
To many mainstream Democrats, Biden remains at most an emergency candidate in the event of a Clinton implosion. These party heavyweights would prefer not to nominate Sanders, a not-so-secret socialist.
For people wondering whether her campaign will come apart, Clinton has kept up the suspense. The FBI is investigating her email habits – the government just uncovered two tranches of correspondence that she failed to turn over – and she is scheduled to testify before Congress next month about her emails and about the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya.
Timothy Hagle, an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa, said the Clinton campaign was not currently in code red, but it might still get there.
“We’re trying to find the cusp, I would say,” said Hagle. “We’re not really quite there yet, and that’s why Biden is maybe waiting, to see how things pan out.”
The clock is ticking, meanwhile, with voting in Iowa to begin in about four months and the first debate just over two weeks away.
“The chief difficulty now is to try to build a presidential campaign so late in the game,” Scala said.
Biden might be able to build a campaign operation relatively quickly, by drawing on the network of staff and donors attached to the Obama White House. Many of those people and dollars are already spoken for, however, and given the extreme organizational demands of the dozens of primaries and caucuses coast-to-coast, “relatively quickly” might not be quick enough.
“A number of people have said already that it’s too late,” Hagle said. “I don’t think that’s the case. It always depends on the specific circumstances, and who it is that’s getting in. You’re talking about a sitting vice-president here.”
In any other year, the near-total name recognition and extensive White House experience that come with being vice-president would be qualities exclusive to one candidate. Not so in 2016.
“As much as he realizes that this is his last chance, he’s smart enough to realize that you just don’t enter on a whim, without clear backing from powerful Democrats,” said Scala of UNH.
“In order to become more than an in-case-of-emergency candidate, he needs to become the heir to Obama.”
In the crucial race for party endorsements and so-called “super-delegates”, Clinton has taken a prohibitive lead. But as Scala pointed out, the potentially biggest endorsement of all remains un-bestowed. If Biden runs, the White House has suggested, he might get it.
“I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of an endorsement [by Obama] in the Democratic primary,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said in late August.
“There’s not an insignificant ‘if’ in that question, and that’s what everybody is pretty interested to find out, is what decision the vice-president is going to make.”
‘I didn’t deserve to be president’
Biden is a grizzled campaign veteran, and not in an entirely good way. He has run for president in the past, but he has also played the role of a presidential candidate trying to explain what went wrong last time.
On the trail in 1988, Biden began as “young and Kennedy-esque”, Shrum said, but fell victim to sloppiness within his own campaign: “He was a very exciting candidate – on the move – and then events intervened.”
Biden repeatedly adapted lines by Britain’s Kinnock about a platform of opportunity, in each case crediting Kinnock. Then, at the end of a debate, Biden quoted the lines without mentioning Kinnock – and rival campaigns pounced, accusing him of plagiarism.
“I made a mistake. I did not, in the debate in Iowa, attribute what I said,” Biden told NPR in 2007. “And it was born out of my arrogance. I didn’t prepare for the debate. It was stupid. I didn’t deserve to be president.”
Biden’s 2008 campaign began disastrously, with an interview in which he seemed to racially condescend to Obama and disparage other African American politicians.
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden told the New York Observer. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
The comments churned as a problem for Biden all year, prompting Obama to come to his defense repeatedly, including in a December debate.
“I have absolutely no doubt about what is in his heart and the commitment that he has made to racial equality in this country,” Obama said. “So I will provide some testimony, as they say in church.”
Biden did have some memorably strong moments on the campaign trail. He was a reliably good retail campaigner, an expert at grip-and-grin photo-ops and voter drop-ins. He had a timeless debate moment with a line about the early Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, whom he called “probably the most under-qualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency”.
“Rudy Giuliani,” said Biden. “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11. I mean there’s nothing else.”
Then Obama came on strong, in a tête-à-tête with Clinton. Those two, combined with Senator John Edwards, made it difficult for Biden to emerge.
“He was in a contest with a couple of titans, and I think they took all the air out of the room,” said Bisignano, the Iowa state senator.
Despite being hit by what one Biden supporter described as “a political tsunami”, he still turned out more identified supporters in Iowa in 2008 than Kerry did in 2004 when he won the caucus.
The failure of Biden’s second campaign, however, may point to a problem that could hurt him in a third campaign. In 2008 he ran on his experience, which even then was formidable.
“Above all else that’s why I’m running for president of our great country,” he said in an announcement video. “The next president of the United States is going to have to be prepared to immediately step in and act without hesitation to end our involvement in Iraq without further destabilizing the Middle East and the rest of the world.”
Since that video was made, Biden has spent nearly a decade as the point person for US policy in Iraq. Voters are not impressed with the results, judging the Obama administration negatively on foreign policy by a 14-point margin.
This time, Biden would not be able to run on the need to fix Iraq and on being the only candidate with the experience to “immediately” step in on day one.
“We also would want to hear from Joe Biden why he wants to be president, which we don’t really know right now,” Scala said. “You can imagine parts of the message.
“But we won’t know until he says it.”
