There’s a reason Nikki Haley continues to win votes in Republican primaries even though she has dropped out of the race. It’s the same reason college-educated middle- and upper-middle-class voters are rallying to Biden and to Democrats generally.
Some of these upscale voters, of course, are urban and suburban liberals and have long voted Democratic. But almost all of them are temperamentally moderate, value functioning institutions and recoil from leaders who would overturn our constitutional arrangements to aggrandize their power.
Wherever these voters stand on tax cuts or regulation, they understand that Donald Trump is the true radical in this contest. He has said he would be a dictator (only for a day, he insists), has mobilized a violent crowd to overturn the 2020 election, has attacked the judiciary and has threatened to use prosecutorial power to punish political opponents.
Even at the level of economic self-interest, some well-off conservatives might lay aside their concerns that Biden wants to raise their taxes, preferring stable governance to the chaos a new Trump term would portend. The stock market’s bullish performance under Biden might push some of them in this direction.
The opening Biden has with pro-institution conservatives was underscored by an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll published Wednesday. It found that on a variety of institutional questions, Democrats were united while Republicans were divided, providing Biden with many wedges to drive into the GOP coalition.
Republicans, for example, split on whether the country needed a leader willing to break rules to get back on track (56 percent agreed, 43 percent disagreed), on permitting religion to play a role in government policy (40 percent agreed, 58 percent disagree), on granting immunity to a president who committed crimes while in office (34 percent agreed, 63 percent disagreed), and on recognizing Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election (38 percent agreed, 61 percent disagreed).
Democrats, by contrast, were far more united against rule-breaking, against religion in government policy and against granting a president immunity. Unsurprisingly, nearly all saw Biden as the legitimate election winner.
But Biden can’t win simply by making a conservative case for himself, not only because he needs progressive voters to turn out in large numbers but also because he has to show how he responded to the economic discontent that Trump’s 2016 victory brought home.
The Biden paradox is that he is simultaneously an institutional conservative and the most economically progressive president since Ronald Reagan gave us “trickle-down” or “supply-side” economics.
A revealing symposium in the journal Democracy (with which I have a long association) details how much Biden has pushed the policy envelope. He has stressed the importance of government investment as a key to economic growth. He pursued regulatory changes to empower workers, cut drug prices, end “junk fees” and protect the environment. He embarked on a tougher approach to antitrust law to enhance competition. And he favors higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations to expand access to child care, health coverage and other forms of social insurance.
As Tim Wu, a Columbia University Law professor who served on Biden’s National Economic Council, argued in a New York Times op-ed, the president’s strategy should be seen as “unconventionally bold and far-reaching” — an attempt “to replace today’s toxic form of capitalism with an earlier, fairer model of free enterprise.”
Biden’s challenge here is twofold. Many progressives, particularly younger ones, find it hard to see the 81-year-old president as an avatar of change. Biden has a lot of work to do to show them how much reform he has ushered in — and how much more he is proposing. But the institutional conservatives whose votes he also needs — particularly those in the corporate world — prefer quiet to boldness and the status quo to transformation. The more Biden tries to bring home the first group, the more anxiety he sows in the second.
This tightrope may be easier to walk in practice than in theory. Taking on corporations is hardly bad politics. That Marist poll found that 89 percent of Democrats saw corporate greed as a major cause of inflation — but so did 57 percent of Republicans.
Biden is also getting a lot of help from Trump, whose wild and often hate-filled daily pronouncements will continue to shake many Tory souls. An AP/NORC poll late last month was revealing: While 43 percent were “extremely” or “very”fearful about a second Trump administration, only 31 percent harbored such fears of a new Biden administration.
Biden’s vocation in this campaign is to show that “safe” can go hand-in-hand with “progressive.” When it comes to making this argument, some of the knocks on Biden — that he doesn’t provoke “excitement” and maybe even his age — could prove to be his major assets.
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