Fantasy Booking the 2016 Democratic Primary with Joe Biden

This is not another dead-ender “Bernie would have won” argument (he would have, damnit), but a reconsideration of the past in light of some pretty pertinent facts in this current moment. Joe Biden is defiantly staying in a presidential race most of the Democratic Party wants him to leave because the last time these assholes told him to drop out, they were wrong and doomed us all to a Trump presidency. It really makes you wonder what may have been had Biden ignored them and chose to run in 2016.

Beau Biden’s death may wind up being one of the most consequential political events of the 21st century, given the lessons learned from the failure of 2016. Trump breached the Midwest firewall as he ran up the score with white folks, while Hillary Clinton, perpetually fossilized in 1994, assumed she did not need to campaign up there as everyone surely must have already agreed with what she said about all her opponents and skeptics being a deplorable band of idiots. Biden surely would have fared better had he chose to run.

Hillary Clinton opened 2016 beating Bernie Sanders roughly 55% to 35%, so let’s assume that 20% of Hillary voters would break off for Biden and 10% of Bernie voters would follow had he ran. That leaves the opening battlefield in this hypothetical scenario constituted as such:

Clinton: 35%

Biden: 30%

Bernie: 25%

Undecided/other: 10%

Not to be a game theory guy, but I do have a degree in political science and did game theory long before all the Russiagate psychos on the internet ruined it forever, but simply thinking about the incentives and personalities here I think leads us down a fairly obvious path. Biden has always understood that politics is a team sport, which is part of why he resents the celebrity-driven style of power practiced by the Clintons and Obamas.

Joe Biden famously likes to dive head-first into in-person politics and leave ideological squabbles at the door in favor of making a deal. With him in it, the 2016 Democratic primary takes on a whole new dynamic. I think it’s likely he would have started courting Bernie voters to open the year (especially since Biden and Bernie share some similar voter demographics) and then gently escalated attacks on Sanders with the “electability” argument that was thrown at him nonstop from 2016 to 2020.

Between the 2008 and 2016 primaries, Hillary Clinton and the rank DNC establishment proved they could only ever run one kind of campaign, a sneering coronation that favored condescension over inclusion. Even in the rosiest three-way-race scenario, it’s hard to see how many Bernie voters would ever move over to the establishment, which means that Joe would have had an opportunity to absorb them into his coalition and command a majority of voters in the primary, while Hillary’s main path to a majority lied in taking voters from a grieving man.

On Earth 2 where 2016 Biden was able to harbor 2024 Biden’s white-hot resentment for the Democratic establishment and push through a campaign, everyone likely would have treated him with kid gloves while reminding folks how sorry they were for the tragic loss of his eldest son. I honestly don’t see any way Biden wouldn’t have won the 2016 Democratic primary going away, and then I’m convinced he would have mopped the floor with 2016 Trump. It’s hard to envision now when, as Bernie Sanders just told The New Yorker in an interview defending Biden, that “sometimes he doesn’t put three sentences together,” but prime Joe Biden would have likely taken a coherent fight to Trump without extending it to his supporters like Clinton did.

Maybe that would be it for our Trump problem. Maybe he would have pivoted towards another reality show had he lost in 2016. Probably not, but it’s a nice thought!

So in a way, this is kind of a sad and desperate Bernie would have won fantasy column, in that I think the likeliest outcome of a 2016 Democratic primary with Joe Biden would have been a comfortable Biden victory while adopting some token Bernie policies…that he hopefully would not have dropped in the general because then this whole theory goes to shit and he probably would have lost to Trump too had he betrayed that key coalition like that.

But given the timing of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s likely any incumbent Democrat would have lost in 2020 and we could very well be in the midst of a Trump administration with the exact same “I alone can fix it” Joe Biden problem the party has right now. Any lefty policies Biden adopted would likely be blamed for his loss and the calamity of the pandemic. We could have a Democratic Party shifted much further right than we do right now instead of one creating a power vacuum and providing a tantalizing window of opportunity for real lefty policy. Common political wisdom is that we are living in the worst political scenario, but it’s possible we might be in the best one.