There’s a split among Democrats on #MeToo and more. Joe Biden might have picked the losing side.
Joe Biden is betting on the past.
The former vice president, who formally announced his candidacy on Thursday but has been a frontrunner in the polls for months, recently called himself an “Obama-Biden Democrat,” evoking a repeat of 2008. His supporters have long held that he can connect with the white working-class voters who switched from Barack Obama to Donald Trumpin 2016.
And when he responded, earlier this month, to allegations that he touched women inappropriately, he cast himself as a man innocently following the mores of an earlier era.
“Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted,” he said. “The boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset.”
To some, statements like that — along with his lack of an actual apology — signal a man out of touch with the #MeToo movement and America today. But Biden is betting that there’s another, bigger group out there — a group that thinks #MeToo goes a little too far, and maybe norms have changed a little too fast.
Where he once strived to embrace positions taken by his more progressive rivals, Biden now seems to be playing to divisions in the Democratic Party over #MeToo and other social issues. Those divisions are real — as of 2017, a significant percentage of Democrats were closer to Republicans on issues like racial discrimination, LGBTQ rights, and sexism.
But in 2020, playing to those Democrats may not be a winning strategy. Recent polling shows that Democrats are becoming more supportive of #MeToo, not less. And a growing number of voters want to see more women and people of color running for office.
“It’s not a good time for an older, white establishment man to be running, especially one for whom #MeToo boundaries may be unclear,” said Tresa Undem, a cofounder of the research firm PerryUndem, which has conducted recent polling on elections and #MeToo.
Put another way, there may be a culture war going on within the Democratic Party. But Biden may not have chosen the winning side.
To some degree, Joe Biden’s political career has been about evolution. He went from an opponent of school integration in the 1970s to a critic of systemic racism in 2019, as Vox’s Matt Yglesias pointed out. In 1982, he voted for a constitutional amendment to let states overturn Roe v. Wade, but his spokesperson now casts him as a defender of the landmark abortion decision. During the 2008 primary contest, he sparked criticism when he called Barack Obama “the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”; he later apologized and became Obama’s running mate.
Biden also presided over the 1991 hearings at which Anita Hill testified that then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, but he has tried to distance himself from the outcome of those hearings, most recently saying, “I wish I could have done something” to give Hill “the hearing she deserved.”
It can seem like Biden is forever playing catch-up, eventually arriving at positions more socially progressive politicians staked out long before him. But in recent comments, there’s been another dynamic at work.
“I’m an Obama-Biden Democrat, man, and I’m proud of it,” he told reporters earlier this month. He argued that Democrats don’t need to be socialists to be progressive and seemed to voice skepticism about candidates to the left of him: “Show me the really, left, left winger who beat a Republican” in 2018, he said.
Also in early April, he tweeted a video statement in response to allegations that he had touched multiple women in ways that made them uncomfortable.
Social norms are changing. I understand that, and I’ve heard what these women are saying. Politics to me has always been about making connections, but I will be more mindful about respecting personal space in the future.
