Early last Thursday, after a day spent close to home, in Delaware, Joe Biden flew to Broward County, Florida, to begin the campaign’s final swing. Two hundred and one cars arrived for a rally in a parking lot on the Broward College campus, where police checked attendees’ invitations and performed a security screen under bright-white tents. Shortly before the event was to begin, about fifty Donald Trump supporters arrived on foot, waving enormous flags (“Trump 2020: No More Bullshit,” read one) and signs asking where Hunter Biden was. At one point, the group held an informal survey to find the largest American flag present, and then turned and pledged allegiance to it. One man had a megaphone. (The Trump movement, which sometimes refers to itself as a silent majority, is more obviously a loud minority.) “How many of you think Joe Biden wears that mask anywhere but in front of the cameras?” he asked. “The mask isn’t for the élite class. The mask is for people like you.” Had you been on the campus of Broward right then, you would have taken in the bombast and the huge flags and guessed that the rally was for the President.
Manuel Oliver, a Venezuelan-American whose son Joaquin was killed in the Parkland school shooting, introduced Biden by remembering meeting him after the massacre. “He told us to find purpose in life,” Oliver said. “That was probably the best advice that I could get from a leader.” Biden, who wore aviators and a blue shirt open at the neck, sounded confident about the last days of the race. Most of his sentences ended with an exclamation point: “If Florida goes blue, it’s over!” One impediment to that has been Biden’s limited support among Latino voters in South Florida, many of whom are Cuban or Venezuelan. For them, Biden inserted a new appeal into his stump speech: “President Trump can’t advance democracy and human rights for the Cuban people or the Venezuelan people, for that matter, when he has embraced so many autocrats around the world—starting with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un of North Korea.” When I left a short time later, the Trump contingent was still there. “Pedophile!” one woman called after me, presumably thinking that I had been attending as a Biden supporter. “China-lover!” After the event, Biden made an unannounced stop at an outdoor campaign center in Fort Lauderdale, and then headed to the airport, where a plane waited to take him to Tampa. Four days of campaign events left, to try to conjure a majority, two hundred and one cars at a time.
President Trump has been grumbling that Biden has scarcely campaigned, which is true; the flip side of that is that Biden is a seventy-seven-year-old man at the end of an arduous year, and at the events he has held he has looked fresh and has rarely flagged. There just haven’t been many people. Since Biden started in-person campaigning again, at the end of August, the indoor events have generally been staged for audiences of a few dozen, sitting in white chairs placed in circles of white tape on the floor, good visuals for TV but a sterile scene. The outdoor events lately have been “drive-in,” as at Broward College: a couple of hundred people parking in front of the stage and honking in response to exciting statements. Are the honks laughs, applause, something else? Biden’s figured it out by now, but it still unsettles some prominent surrogates, who find themselves doing something that only crazy people normally do: making complicated political points over the sounds of traffic. “You got that horn honking good!” Barack Obama said, during a drive-in rally in Miami. Rules set by the Biden campaign, in deference to the pandemic, have most reporters stay outside the events, waiting, while a few designated poolers enter and observe for the group. There is little mingling. Biden himself—arriving, leaving, waving, most often exceptionally well wrapped in tailored blue suits and oversized black masks—has seemed more elusive than usual. On October 27th, a pool report from a Georgia airport by Politico’s Christopher Cadelago read, “Biden paused for a moment, looking toward the press, but seemed to decide against coming over and instead walked onto the plane.”
The health of a normal Presidential candidacy has all kinds of spikes and dips, so that its fortunes roughly reflect the readings of a monitor on a heart patient: strong, erratic, flatlining. This campaign has had one major event, the pandemic, which redefined two well-known candidates and their pitches. Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who runs the group Republican Voters Against Trump, has been conducting focus groups across swing states with women who voted for Trump in 2016, with a focus on central Pennsylvania. Longwell said that, when she asked these voters last year how they thought the country was doing, she got responses that were ambivalent and a bit abstract. “They were much more, like, ‘Well, it’s not good that we’re so divided,’ and they would use the term ‘powder keg,’ and, ‘Trump is a jerk, but things are going fine, he doesn’t get enough credit for the good things,’ ” Longwell said. “That’s not the way they talk anymore.”
Once the pandemic began, Longwell said, the voters’ view of the situation darkened: instead of “powder keg,” the Pennsylvania women used the term “shitshow.” Perhaps more meaningfully, they no longer talked about the news as an abstraction. “They talk about their personal pain,” Longwell said. “They talk about losing a parent while the pandemic was on, and not being able to see them. They talk about being in remission from cancer and feeling scared to go to the store because people don’t wear masks. They talk about not being able to see their grandchildren, or, if they have younger kids, about the kids not being able to see their grandparents. There are people talking about health problems that had to be put on hold. There’s just a tremendous amount of personal pain. Their small business has been shut down. Somebody in their family has been furloughed. They’re scared and anxious about the future.” Longwell believed that these experiences had shaped the way that the women talked about Biden, who before the pandemic they might have described merely as a moderate. Now they saw him as “a person who is basically the perfect distillation of someone who is kind and empathetic at a moment when people feel very broken and don’t want the chaos.” Longwell said, “There’s a line in one of his ads where he says, ‘I’m not going to get everything right.’ That was something everybody pointed to, like, ‘God, it’d be so nice if somebody just said they didn’t know everything all the time.’ ”
That distillation, of a moderate Democrat into a more intimate figure, a grief-counsellor-in-chief, has been the most important work of the Biden campaign. Political consultants often talk in terms of corporate brands, perhaps because they do a lot of work for them. “Trump is like Nike,” a leading Republican consultant told me not long ago. He meant an impressive, attention-grabbing, but distant figure. “Joe is Home Depot—he’s the friendly guy in the orange apron.”
Throughout his campaign, Biden has mostly talked about Trump. But, when he does talk about himself, he emphasizes his personal story and its effect on his politics: about the death of his first wife and infant daughter in a car accident, in 1972, and of his son Beau from brain cancer, in 2015, and about his own feeling that suffering is widespread and that politics begins in empathy. Just before the first Presidential debate, at a speech in Manitowoc, Wisconsin (indoors, white chairs in white circles on the floor), Biden drew the contrast with Trump by describing the President at his rallies. “He safely keeps his distance,” Biden said. “He’s willing to let everybody else in the crowd risk their life, but not him.” Biden has been far more observant of pandemic restrictions, but he has also always worked to close the distance between himself and others. Too much for some: early in his campaign, seven women reported that Biden had made them uncomfortable while kissing them, hugging them, or touching their heads, backs, thighs, or shoulders. But, with many Americans dying alone, Biden, as a tactile politician, can also lay claim to empathy and warmth. One political consultant pointed out to me how much hugging there is in Biden’s ads, and, indeed, in a recent sixty-second ad (narrated by Brad Pitt and broadcast during the World Series) I counted sixteen times at which Biden was shown touching someone (hands, shoulders, full-on hugs), as men, women, and children reached out for him.
The last major speech of Biden’s Presidential campaign—the last note he struck that was mostly about him, and not just about Trump—came last Tuesday in Warm Springs, Georgia, where Franklin D. Roosevelt went to recuperate from polio and later built his Little White House. Biden’s historical touchstone has long been not Roosevelt but Kennedy, an Irish-Catholic Democrat like Biden. (The kid from Scranton celebrates Thanksgiving with his family each year on Nantucket—not Hyannisport exactly, but just a ferry ride away.) As Eric Rauchway, a distinguished professor of history at the University of California at Davis and a leading Roosevelt scholar, noted, it was intriguing to see Biden, a moderate, return to Roosevelt and the New Deal, which had for a long time been considered too radical for the Party to dwell on. “It probably tells you something about how the Democratic Party’s changing,” Rauchway said. It made sense, too, that Biden would seek an association with Roosevelt, because of the unifying campaign he has tried to run. “The New Deal is literally the only time in American history where you have the kind of unifying expression of patriotism that isn’t martial,” Rauchway said. “Everything else is about war.”
But in Warm Springs Biden seemed less interested in F.D.R.’s political story than in the intimate one—of suffering and resilience, and particularly of the polio-rehabilitation facility that Roosevelt established there, in 1927. Daniel Holland, a psychologist who specializes in disability rights, has described it as a place where “people with disabilities were not identified as ‘medical patients’ to be ‘treated’ but as residents and leaders of a community in which they represented the status quo and in which they could pursue normal lives.” In his campaign speech, Biden said, “F.D.R. came looking for a cure, but it was the lessons he learned here that he used to lift a nation. Humility, empathy, courage, optimism. This place represented a way forward. A way of restoration, of resilience, of healing.”
There is something willful about the late phase of the Biden campaign: the insistence that “we know Joe,” as many of his surrogates have put it; that what we want is unity; that the phrase “better angels” has some purchase not just on our moral life but on our political one. As Rauchway pointed out, the deeper truth is that American politics, at least in peacetime, has been less often defined by unity than by division. The conservative strategist Stuart Stevens, once the Romney campaign’s guiding hand and now a dedicated opponent of Trump and of the Republican Party, told me just before the event in Warm Springs that he thought the Biden campaign had been expertly run. “Look, Biden’s run for President twice before and he hasn’t been very good at it,” Stevens said. “I think what’s happening here is what’s happened before, which is that someone who hasn’t been good in a different moment is good in this moment.” This moment is about suffering, and Biden is a steady figure with experience of grief. Biden’s campaign has provided some fleeting moments of unity (against the pandemic, against Trump) in an era of division. Can that last through the election? Can it last beyond? Stevens said, “If this is a referendum on the soul of America, he wins.”
