The First Ever Ettingermentum Mailbag
Why we needed a left-wing primary challenger, looking back at 2016 Joe Biden, revealing the lore behind my name, explaining John Fetterman, and more.
Hugh Hawkins asks: “If 2016 had been Biden v Trump, would Biden have won, and if so how big would the margin be? What would happen in 2018 and 2020?”
To answer the first part of your question, you only need to ask Joe Biden himself. Less than three months after Trump’s inauguration in 2016, he joined the post-election discourse with a bang by bluntly declaring that he would have beaten Trump if he ran in 2016. Given how many within the party at the time were still holding to the childish fantasy that Hillary Clinton did no wrong, this declaration was amusingly blunt. It was also absolutely right. Even as someone who believes that Bernie Sanders would have easily won that year, I still find it hard to think of a better matchup against Trump that year than 2016 Joe Biden. He fit the moment. He understood the moment. He was more than prepared for the moment. The question isn’t if he would have won, but how much he would have won by. And the answer is that he would have won quite a lot.
To see why this is the case, you have to understand the main reason why the 2016 election went the way it did. It wasn’t decided based on ideology, or position papers, or even culture warring. It rested on one simple thing, the thing that has defined Donald Trump’s political career from the second he stepped on that escalator to the current moment: favorability, favorability, favorability. Ever since Trump entered politics, he has been one of the most hated national figures in the country. He has not enjoyed a single day of actual popularity. The only times when he has ever had a shot at winning has been when Democrats have run candidates as equally as unpopular as him, as they did with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and are doing with Joe Biden now. The Joe Biden of 2016 would have been an entirely different beast. He wouldn’t have just avoided the negative effects of Clinton’s unpopularity, but he would have made the question an outright asset with his best-in-the-nation favorable numbers. That, by itself, would have been ballgame. Add in the lack of any last-second scandals courtesy of James Comey and Wikileaks in October, and the sky really is the limit as to how much he could have won by.
Still, even this may not even give 2016 Biden his due. While Biden’s pre-existing popularity that year would have been a tremendous asset, I don’t want to give off the impression that he would have just skated on by off of nebulous good feelings without actually meeting the moment. In addition to his other strengths, Biden was also remarkably clear-sighted about the nature of the race that was unfolding that year. Unlike Clinton, he didn’t dismiss the rise of Bernie Sanders as petulant and illegitimate. He saw what it represented and went out of his way to praise Sanders for his authenticity and focus on the issues. He made a prescient warning about Clinton’s lack of credibility to many voters—one she would have been wise to heed. Contrary to the decidedly centrist role he played in the 2020 primaries, a Biden 2016 bid would have been set to occupy a middle lane in between Bernie and Hillary. This would have undoubtedly been more compelling to people than whatever Clinton tried to do, especially if reporting that he would have preferred Elizabeth Warren as his running mate if accurate. Absent some Hunter Biden controversies, it’s very hard to think of any places where he would have struggled at all against Trump. A popular vote victory near or exceeding double digits would have been very much in the cards.
As for the second part of your question—how a Biden presidency would have gone—speculation is a little more difficult, but I’ll try my best. First things first, Democrats would have been near-certain to win the Senate with him leading the ticket, so he’d start his term by finally assembling a moderate-to-liberal Supreme Court majority. Past this point, the real x-factor is how the House went in 2016. If Democrats failed to take the chamber, which could have very well happened even with a large Biden victory, it’s unlikely that Biden’s first term would have been all that different from Obama’s presidency after the 2010 midterms. Republicans would be able to obstruct his domestic agenda at will, so most of his attention would have ended up going to court appointments and foreign policy. Perhaps a third consecutive Democratic victory may have led them to consider being more productive to look better to voters, but make no mistake: they still would have held the keys to the car.
If Democrats won the House, though, things could have actually gotten real. The filibuster rules would have meant that, just like in his first term in real life, Biden’s ambitions would be limited to fiscal policies, with big social reforms being off the table. But we also know from Biden’s first term in real life that there’s quite a lot you can do with just fiscal policies. With no COVID (yet) and no Trump victory causing Democrats to re-evaluate their priorities, it’s certain that any proto-BBB plan for 2017 would have certainly been smaller than the bills Biden passed in our timeline. Something the size of the original BBB bill, or even the IRA, would not have been in the cards. Still, a big spending bill of any kind would have been excellent policy. The conditions of the economy in the 2010s—low interest rates coupled with low aggregate demand—were absolutely perfect for something like an infrastructure bill. That something like that was never passed was a big reason why it was such a lost decade economically. Biden-style spending could have rectified that, boosting the economy right as it was about to enter the famous goldilocks period it did under Trump. The post-recession recovery, although horrifically delayed, would have been finally completed during Biden’s first term.
As for electoral politics under Biden, there’s a big difference in forecasting a 2018 under him and a 2020 under him. The former race is hard to map out. Given the state of the economy at the time, it’s pretty likely that Biden would have been popular by election day. Whether that would give his party a boost is a bit hard to tell. Biden has never been the kind of figure to absolutely dominate politics, so it’s likely that a 2018 under him would revolve more around a general sense of party fatigue and the need for checks and balances than his performance. How far the GOP would have gone with that is anyone’s guess. Maybe a Trump loss would have led the party’s establishment to reassert itself and clean up their brand to be more competitive than the party we’ve known since 2016. Maybe the party would have fallen into an outright civil war that guaranteed Democratic dominance. In any case, I doubt that 2018 would have been a truly massive wave for them even in the best-case scenario for the party. The public discontent that fueled their waves in 2010 and 2014 just wouldn’t have been there. They’d probably pick up some seats, but it wouldn’t be any kind of epochal sea change.
Now, as for 2020, that one’s easy. As long as COVID happens, Biden would have been overwhelmingly likely to win in a walk for the second time in a row. The reason for this is simple. Absent Trump, nearly every single national leader on the planet saw a political boost from their COVID response. Since Biden is not Trump, he would have seen a similar boost, and it would have carried him to an easy victory. That’s basically it. It wouldn’t have really mattered what the GOP did or how he actually handled the crisis. Because the election would have come at an opportune time, he would have swept, giving his party four consecutive victories for the first time since the 1940s. It’s hard to say what his second term would have been like, but I’d venture to guess that, in general, things would be a bit better than they are now.
It’s strange. Right now, Biden is an incumbent president who has made a big mark on history. But when thinking over this, it’s hard to shake the feeling that he missed his moment.
Edward Haggerty asks: “If Trump wins, do you see democracy as being Joever? Not that our democracy is perfect to begin with, but how much worse would you see it getting?”
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