Most Of The Biden Speculation Is Malarkey
10:52 AM AUG 28, 2015 A FIVETHIRTYEIGHT CHAT
Another day, another batch of mostly redundant and anonymously sourced stories about whether Vice President Joe Biden will run for president. Some of those stories, however, are getting ridiculous. So FiveThirtyEight’s politics writers met in Slack to pick over the latest Biden coverage, our own assumptions and the state of the 2016 Democratic primary. This is an edited transcript of the conversation.
micah (Micah Cohen, senior editor): So, the will he/won’t he speculation about Joe Biden hasn’t slowed down, but do either of you buy the argument that a Biden run could actually help Hillary Clinton?
hjenten-heynawl (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I don’t think it would be particularly helpful to Clinton. Forget about all the BS about whether Clinton runs better when she’s in trouble. Personally, I never got that. If she were so good at running when she was in trouble, then why did she lose in 2008?
Rather, why would Biden run? Sure, he’s in his 70s and this is his last shot, but he also has a family to take care of. He’d likely only run if he concludes he has a better than nominal chance of winning. And that conclusion would be quite different from what the current metrics, such as endorsements, suggest. Biden may have an insight on the invisible primary that isn’t visible to the rest of us.
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The irony is that the media has exaggerated all sorts of threats to Clinton, who remains in good shape for the nomination. But then you have the one thing that would be a tangibly bad sign for her campaign — the vice president of the United States running for the nomination against her! — and there are lots of “smart takes” about how it could help Clinton.
hjenten-heynawl: What we’ve argued this entire time is that Sen. Bernie Sanders has a weakness among the party actors (i.e., he doesn’t have any endorsements), and that he has no longtime connections to the Democratic Party (remember, he’s not a Democrat). Biden, on the other hand, has been in major federal office in Washington since 1973. He’s someone who could conceivably reach out to all members of the party. He’s already polling better among African-Americans than Sanders, for instance.
micah: Let’s break this down a little: Both of you seem to think Biden entering the race is inherently bad for Clinton — he’d be the most serious competition for the nomination she’s faced. But would there be a couple side benefits, like that by giving the media a horse race to cover, there would be less focus on Clinton’s scandals?
natesilver: Well, first of all, it’s not just that Biden would be a more formidable competitor to Clinton than Sanders. I don’t know that Biden would be all that great a candidate, in fact. But Biden running would signal that concern about Clinton among Democratic Party elites had gone from the bedwetting stage to something more serious.
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