Joe Biden has left little doubt that he is running for president because he has already told us. “I have the most progressive record of anybody running for the—” he exclaimed during a speech in Delaware over the weekend, before stopping short. “Anybody who would run,” he corrected himself. Nevertheless, we must continue to pretend, for now, that Biden is not officially seeking the White House, despite mounting and irrefutable evidence that he is doing precisely that. Politico’s Playbook says Democratic ad-maker Mark Putnam was “SPOTTED” in Scranton, Pennsylvania, over the weekend, where he was apparently “scoping out” Biden’s childhood home (cue the Bruce Springsteen music and the “Biden 2020” title card). If that were not enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that Biden “told at least a half-dozen supporters Tuesday he intends to run for president.”
More intriguing, according to the Journal report, is that Biden enjoined those supporters to ask deep-pocketed donors to help him quickly raise several million dollars to stay competitive with Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke, both of whom blew away expectations and decisively shifted the media narrative in their favor by raising about $6 million in the first 24 hours of their campaigns. If he’s going to establish himself as the frontrunner to beat—as literally every Democratic primary poll suggests he is—then it would help if he could raise frontrunner-status money, too.
Indeed, the 24-hour fundraising haul has quickly become a marker for the viability of 2020 presidential candidates hoping to stand out in an increasingly crowded field. In Sanders’s case, the combination of a massive haul and a small average donation was seen as proof that he retains his massive grassroots base from 2016. In O’Rourke’s case, leaping to the front of the fundraising pack helped quiet the criticism that his candidacy is only skin-deep, or that his popularity may be fleeting. So far, no other candidates have come close to matching both men, with Kamala Harris in a distant third with a $1.5 million first-day haul from 38,000 donors, Amy Klobuchar, Jay Inslee, and John Hickenlooper reaching the million-dollar mark in a few days, and other campaigns declining to disclose their performance in the “money primary.”
There are reasons to doubt that Biden can outperform Sanders and O’Rourke. His age, voting record, and centrist reputation have raised the hackles of the progressive base, and his Hamlet-on-the-Potomac act has invited scorn on Twitter. (“Wonder if establishment donors are getting tired of Biden's dithering,” suggested writer Nathan Bernhardt.) O’Rourke and Sanders also have a distinct advantage over Biden: massive digital fundraising infrastructures, built out over previous campaigns, that allow them to quickly raise record-breaking amounts of money in short bursts. (The Bernie campaign famously rallied hundreds of thousands of supporters to donate small-dollar amounts on a repeated basis, allowing them to marshal millions of dollars in a single night, while O’Rourke, building off that strategy, shattered Senate midterm fundraising records with a $38 million haul in a single quarter.)
But of course, Biden is also massively popular with Democrats, despite the cynical mood among media elites and Twitter activists. In more than two dozen polls catalogued at RealClearPolitics, Biden has come out on top in every single one, leading by an average of 6 points over his closest competition. After all, as a recent poll showed, a plurality of Democratic voters describe themselves as “Obama Democrats.” And Biden, as Obama’s vice president, is perhaps the closest link to that halcyon time for Democrats craving a return to sanity and stability.
Biden appears to be cultivating that image, too. At the Munich Security Conference in February, Biden was roundly applauded while implicitly criticizing the Trump administration. Now, as Biden prepares to launch himself into the 2020 contest, Politico is out with a report describing how all those world leaders came up to Biden to tell him how much they needed him to restabilize the world. Here, there, and everywhere are the fingerprints of Biden’s team, building him up as Obama’s true heir. “We have a lot of candidates and unfortunately very few of them have any real depth or experience working in foreign policy issues,” one former Biden adviser told Politico.
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