P8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020
Election
more: They repudiated Mr. Trump, while
offering few other rewards to Mr. Biden’s
party. And by a popular vote margin of
four million and counting, Americans
made Mr. Biden only the third man since
the Second World War to topple a duly
elected president after just one term.
Throughout his campaign, Mr. Biden
faced persistent doubts about his politi-
cal acuity and the relevance, in the year
2020, of a set of union-hall-meets-cloak-
room political instincts developed
mainly in the previous century.
But if Mr. Biden made numerous er-
rors along the way, none of them mat-
tered more in this election than the es-
sential rightness of how he judged the
character of his party, his country and his
opponent. This account of his candidacy,
based on interviews with four dozen ad-
visers, supporters, elected officials and
friends, reveals how fully Mr. Biden’s
campaign flowed from his own world-
view and political intuition.
During the primaries, Mr. Biden re-
buffed pressure to move to the left, be-
lieving his party would embrace his
pragmatism as its best chance to beat
Mr. Trump. In the general election, Mr.
Biden made Mr. Trump’s erratic conduct
and mismanagement of the coronavirus
pandemic his overwhelming themes,
shunning countless other issues as need-
less distractions.
While some Democrats urged him to
compete in a wider array of battle-
grounds, Mr. Biden put the Great Lakes
states at the center of his electoral map,
trusting that with an appeal to the politi-
cal middle he could rebuild the so-called
Blue Wall and block Mr. Trump’s path to
a second term.
Perhaps most important, Mr. Biden
believed that no issue would figure
larger in voters’ minds than Mr. Trump’s
presence in the Oval Office. And if he
could make the election an up-or-down
vote on an out-of-control president, he
believed he could win.
On that score, he was right. As voters
sized up Mr. Biden as a potential presi-
dent, his familiar flaws and foibles — the
antiquated vocabulary and penchant for
embellishment, his nostalgic yarns
about segregationist senators and a de-
fensiveness that led him, in one case, to
challenge a voter to a push-up contest —
paled against the conduct of an incum-
bent sowing racial division, threatening
to deploy troops in American cities and
floating the idea of injecting disinfectant
as a coronavirus treatment.
Anita Dunn, one of Mr. Biden’s closest
advisers, said the campaign had been
propelled all along by the candidate him-
self, and his unwavering theme and
strategy.
“It was his campaign,” Ms. Dunn said.
“It was less consultant-driven than any
presidential campaign in modern his-
tory.”
Still, at the outset, Mr. Biden’s political
theory of the case struck even some of
his loyal allies as misguided in an era of
intense ideological polarization.
Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania
recalled a meeting he had with the for-
mer vice president in March of 2019,
shortly before Mr. Biden entered the
race. As Mr. Biden sketched out his ap-
proach, Mr. Casey, a Democrat, was not
fully convinced.
“He was walking through what be-
came his broader-based theme, about
the soul of the country,” Mr. Casey said. “I
was worried at the time that it wasn’t
hard-hitting enough.”
But Mr. Biden, he said, “was prescient
in his ability, even in the primaries when
almost nobody else was doing it, to say,
‘We have to bring the country back to-
gether.’ ”A Crisis Candidacy
Mr. Casey was not the only Democrat
skeptical of Mr. Biden’s underlying
theme. While many voters found Mr.
Trump distasteful, or worse, it is difficult
to unseat an incumbent president and
Mr. Trump had the benefit of a nation in
relative peace and steady prosperity. Mr.
Biden’s primary opponents, who argued
that a message of normalcy and steady
experience might not be enough to win,
seemed to have a point.
Then, just as Mr. Biden was seizing a
clear upper hand in the Democratic
nomination fight, the coronavirus pan-
demic struck. In a matter of days, public
campaigning froze and a mood of fear
and gloom set in across the country.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a
close ally of Mr. Biden, said it was not im-
mediately obvious that the Trump ad-
ministration would effectively forfeit the
issue of public health to Mr. Biden. The
White House, Ms. Whitmer said, “really
could have risen to the occasion.”
But as Mr. Trump dismissed the threat
of the pandemic, and railed against gov-
ernors like Ms. Whitmer for locking
down their states, Mr. Biden moved to as-
sert himself as an alternative leader. He
began to sketch his own approach to ad-
dressing the disease, and to show voters
how he might operate in Mr. Trump’s
place.
From the confines of his lakeside home
in Wilmington, Del., he received frequent
briefings about the pandemic and the
economic damage it was inflicting,
drafted policy plans and reached out to
state and city leaders to gather informa-
tion.
“He was calling to say, ‘How are things
going in Michigan? What do you need?’ ”
Ms. Whitmer said.
What Mr. Biden was not doing, to the
dismay of some in his party, was trav-
eling the country and campaigning in
person. For months, he scarcely left the
immediate vicinity of his home: At 77, he
was in an age group especially vulnera-
ble to the virus, and his advisers felt he
could undermine his own public-health
recommendations if he was seen as rac-
ing back onto the campaign trail. And
more than a few political donors and
Democratic advocacy groups second-
guessed the Biden campaign’s decision
to forgo a robust get-out-the-vote opera-
tion in the field because of safety con-
cerns.
Marc Morial, president of the National
Urban League, said Mr. Biden had
seemed at first to pay a price for his cau-
tion. Allies of the Biden campaign had
tried to nudge the former vice president
into public view, he said, paraphrasing
the plea: “People need to see you.”
But in his own conversations with the
Biden team, Mr. Morial said, they wereemphatic that Mr. Biden felt he could not
“say one thing and do another” where
public health was concerned — a judg-
ment that Mr. Morial came to share.
Mr. Biden’s first major trip outside Del-
aware was not for a traditional campaign
trip but to confront another crisis: the
national reckoning over police brutality
after the killing of George Floyd. Flying
to Houston to visit the Floyd family, Mr.
Biden sat for two hours as he listened to
the grieving family and told them that
while he had never experienced loss
quite like theirs, he knew what it meant
to lose a child and felt their pain, accord-
ing to the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was
present. When racial-justice protests
turned disorderly in Atlanta, Mr. Biden
reached out to the city’s mayor, Keisha
Lance Bottoms, to offer support and pri-
vate counsel. The former vice president,
Ms. Bottoms said, was both encouraging
and contemplative, telling her how the
spiraling demonstrations evoked, for
him, the riots in Wilmington in the late
1960s, which led to an extended occupa-
tion of the city by the National Guard.
It was a study in the personal empathy,
and the hunger to connect with otherpeople, that defined Mr. Biden as a candi-
date from the start. Throughout the race
he invoked his own family’s history of
tragedy, and never more so than in con-
fronting the immense pain and loss of the
coronavirus pandemic.
“He is able to personalize these big is-
sues,” Ms. Bottoms said. “He really does
have a sensitivity and a personal lens for
many of these challenges that we’re fac-
ing.”
Mr. Biden also recognized that his op-
ponent lacked that impulse.
While Democrats worried that Mr. Bi-
den was taking an overly passive ap-
proach to the race, Mr. Trump seemed al-
most to go out of his way to reinforce the
appeal of his challenger’s prudence:
There was Mr. Trump’s tear gas-
shrouded photo op in Lafayette Park, in-
tended as a show of strength, that came
off instead as pure brutishness. There
was his indoor rally in Tulsa, Okla.,
planned as an energetic return to the
campaign trail, that instead became a
low-energy coronavirus risk zone.
Still, as the country’s mood of emer-
gency deepened, Mr. Biden confided to
allies that he was already feeling theweight of the challenges that would lie
ahead if he won.
Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois
said she told Mr. Biden in a conversation
earlier this year that the political mo-
ment seemed to cry out for a candidate
with formidable governing experience.
According to Ms. Duckworth’s recollec-
tion, Mr. Biden responded, “Tammy, I
need people around me that understand
that, and that we need to hit the ground
running.”
Mr. Biden reacted in a similar fashion
last Monday in Cleveland, when Senator
Sherrod Brown of Ohio told Mr. Biden he
would soon have the chance to be “one of
the great presidents of my lifetime.”
“He grabbed my shoulder,” Mr. Brown
said, “pulled me in as much as you can
when you’re wearing a mask and said: ‘I
really need you to help me.’ ”
Mr. Biden also expressed pointed anxi-
ety after delivering a pair of speeches
about national unity and healing at Get-
tysburg, Pa., and Warm Springs, Ga. —
two landmarks associated with the crisis
presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and
Franklin Roosevelt.
If Mr. Biden found those backdrops po-POLICYBy the time Senator Bernie Sanders exited the race, he had reshaped his party’s agenda.
ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMESBATTLEGROUNDSTo win, Mr. Biden had to reclaim states that Mr. Trump flipped in 2016.
RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMESOUTREACHMr. Biden on a visit to the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Wilmington, Del., in June.
ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMESTHE PANDEMICMr. Biden’s campaign events showed a respect for health guidelines.
MARK MAKELA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESTHE PRESIDENT-ELECT
Concern for ‘Soul of This Country’ Fueled Victory
VICTORYJoseph R. Biden Jr. ran as a pragmatist, believing that voters would see him as the best hope for change.
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