Analysis: The lesson of 2016 — and 2012 and 2004 and 2000 and 1996 and beyond — is that candidates like Joe Biden don’t win the White House. Except sometimes they do.
Since the moment he declared he was once again running for president—in fact since well before then—Joe Biden has floated near or at the top of the public opinion polls. He’s the vice president of a very popular previous Democratic president. He’s an experienced hand at a time when America is being buffeted by the costs of inexperience—a theme he returned to repeatedly during the latest Democratic debate.
Four years before Hillary Clinton was defeated, the Republicans trotted out the reliable, central-casting Mitt Romney to lose to President Barack Obama, a campaign that seemed to rhyme with the time the Dems unenthusiastically fell in line for John Kerry against President George W. Bush in 2004. Keep going back, and you see candidates like these over and over,Al Gore, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Gerald Ford, Hubert Humphrey and even Richard Nixon, in his first run, in 1960.
Harry Truman came into 1948 so unpopular that many Democrats looked hard for an alternative . Sure, Truman was an incumbent president, but he wasn’t elected to the office and had to prove he could win a presidential campaign. Few believed him when he declared, in a post-midnight acceptance speech, that “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that!” But, as America and The Chicago Tribune learned, he did.
Nixon in 1960 effectively tied JFK in the popular vote; Humphrey in 1968 lost by less than a percentage point; Ford would have won in 1976 with the shift of a few thousand votes in Mississippi and Ohio; Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and lost by 537 votes out of 6 million in Florida. Hillary Clinton wasn’t a former vice president, but as the “her turn” nominee last time and the heir to the legacies of two different Democratic administrations, she won a 2.6 million popular-vote plurality.
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