Has Joe Biden Lost His Ability to Unite Democrats?

By this time next week this will be official: Joe Biden is making his third race for the presidency (earlier runs were in 1988 and 2008). In conventional terms, he begins his campaign as the front-runner, or at worst the co-front-runner with fellow mid-septuagenarian Bernie Sanders. He has led in 36 of the 37 polls included in RealClearPolitics’ compilation of 2020 Democratic-nomination-contest surveys. He also leads in all the publicly available polls of Iowa, and even leads in Kamala Harris’s California.

But the big question haunting his candidacy now is whether he’s lost a precious political resource he had not so very long ago: the ability to unite his party across ideological and demographic lines. Precisely because of his age and long party service, concluding with his two terms as vice-president under the very popular (among Democratic voters, anyway) Barack Obama, Biden went into the cycle as a sort of intraparty Coalition of National Salvation option who could serve as a bridge between the Clinton-Obama era of Democratic politics and the presumably more progressive future. Indeed, talk in Biden’s camp about a possible one-term presidency seemed to promote this sense that Uncle Joe wouldn’t undermine the winds of change in the party but was instead an emergency candidate for the emergency conditions of the Trump era.