The 2016 Question

This post touches only tangentially on the Big Thing, so I’d appreciate if we could avoid relitigating the Big Thing in this thread…

It’s relatively well-known that one of the biggest objections that Biden’s inner circle has to the effort to push him out involves bitterness over how 2016 played out. The NYT has some detail on this thinking:

But privately, people close to him said he was furious at what he saw as a concerted effort to push him aside in favor of the other candidate. It was a precursor to the kind of pressure he is now under from fellow Democrats.

Then, like now, his friends made the case that he would lose — to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, and later to Mr. Trump. David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s top political adviser at the time, sat down with Mr. Biden and showed him polling, The Atlantic reported. “Do you really want it to end in a hotel room in Des Moines, coming in third to Bernie Sanders?” (Eight years earlier, Mr. Biden had finished fifth in the Iowa caucuses and dropped out of the race.)…

The president has rarely let that anger show over the years since, but once Mr. Trump was in the White House, Mr. Biden was more open about his feeling of regret, and his belief that he could have won in 2016.

“I regret that I am not president because I think there is so much opportunity,” Mr. Biden told Oprah Winfrey in an interview toward the end of 2017. Pressed on whether he thought he would have won the nomination had he run, Mr. Biden said yes, though he also said he was confident at the time that Mrs. Clinton was qualified.

“So I didn’t feel like I was leaving the field and because I left the field that there wasn’t anybody who could, you know, run the country,” he said. “I didn’t feel that way.”

I don’t at all begrudge Biden his bitterness about 2016, especially given how the November election turned out. My question is this: Did Biden have a plausible theory of victory for the Democratic primary? If Biden makes it through the primary I don’t have any trouble seeing him defeat Trump, as it was a close election in any case and Biden probably had some advantages over Clinton. I wouldn’t treat that as a categorical; Clinton had strengths and Biden had weaknesses and anything can happen on the campaign trail, but obviously knowing what we know now I’d be eager to take a second shot with Biden.

But the primary? It is tough for me to see how Biden could have defeated both Clinton and Sanders. Without indulging in the kind of conspiracist thinking that has become common in these circles, there’s no question that Clinton was extremely well-prepared for the primary, having secured the support of a vast swath of the Democratic hierarchy in the years before the election. Biden is no slouch but I don’t see how he beats Clinton in the Establishment Lane, especially given the high likelihood that Obama would have sat the race out. Biden 2016 is stronger than Biden 2008 but Clinton 2016 isn’t notably weaker than Clinton 2008 and we saw how that played out.

So… how much of Sanders support could Biden have chipped off? Sanders’ support came from two lanes, really. The first is ideological (folks wanting a genuine alternative to Clintonism) and the second anti-establishment (I’d lump folks with genuine loathing of the Democratic establishment alongside people who just hated Clinton in this lane). I don’t think Joe Biden 2016 gets much purchase in the ideological lane. He probably gets some in the anti-establishment lane, but given that he was the sitting Vice President it would’ve been hard for him to make the case that he was an alternative to the establishment.

So it’s hard for me to dissent from Obama’s prediction that Biden would have placed third not just in Iowa, but in many of the other primary states. I’m not sure whether he hurts Clinton or Sanders more; he takes establishment voters (and Black voters) from the former and anti-establishment voters from the latter, but I don’t see how he builds a coalition big enough to push himself even into second place, much less the nomination.

Am I missing something? When does Biden win his first primary? I can see maybe 2nd place in South Carolina but the Midwest and Atlantic Seaboard states where we might expect Biden to outperform Clinton are pretty late in the process. I can see an argument that a race between three candidates who think that this is their last realistic shot could have gone deep into the calendar, and maybe even to a contested convention, but that still seems pretty iffy terrain upon which to rest a major, long-term primary effort.

To be sure, I don’t begrudge Biden his bitterness over what happened in 2016. But I also don’t see that he gave up a unique opportunity to win the election, because I don’t see a path for him to make it through the primaries.