Why choosing Joe Biden was a masterstroke for the Democrats

A Trump supporter reacts after Pennsylvania is called for Biden 

Credit: REUTERS/Bing Guan 

Above all that was found in the Rust Belt. Mr Trump became president because he flipped three solidly Democratic states red in 2016: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

These states were once the booming industrial heartland of America but with globalisation many of their factories had long since closed and turned to rust — hence the region’s nickname.

Mr Trump’s message of scrapping or renegotiating trade deals that had allowed jobs to flow overseas, tariff countries “ripping off” America and fight for “forgotten” citizens connected.

Blue collar Democrats ticked a Republican box and handed Mr Trump the White House. The easiest path for Democrats to kick Mr Trump out of office in 2020 was to win back these three states.

Even if the US president held all his others, that would push him below the 270 electoral college votes mark and out of office. In the 2020 election, that appears to be exactly what Mr Biden has done.

He beat Mr Trump in Wisconsin and Michigan. The race was razor-tight in Pennsylvania yet he held a small but substantial lead on Saturday morning.

People celebrate Joe Biden's victory at Times Square in New York, Donald Trump's hometown 

Credit: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/Afp/AFP via Getty Images

Once all the votes are counted, Mr Biden likely will have exceeded those expectations.

He will, it appears, have flipped Arizona and has a chance of just winning Georgia, two long-time Republican states. But these are bonuses.

The critical question is whether any other of the primary candidates would have fared better? We do not know and never will.

But there are reasons to believe Mr Biden suited that task best of winning back the Rust Belt. Bernie Sanders, the left-wing senator from Vermont who came second in the Democratic primaries, believed his calls for “political revolution” would have connected with working class Trump voters. 

Perhaps they would have. But what is clearer is that his self-proclaimed democratic socialism would have made Mr Trump’s ‘radical socialists’ attacks easier to land.

Joe and Jill Biden greeting Pope John Paul II in 1980

Credit: AP Photo/Sen. Biden's office

Senators Elizabeth Warren, who pledged a wealth tax, and Kamala Harris, who had positioned herself as a progressive as she sought the nomination, faced similar challenges.

Others lacked experience in top political jobs — no disqualifier, as Mr Trump proved, but a complicating factor — or were less well known, meaning voters’ perception of them would be more easily skewed by the president’s brutal but effective attacks.  

‘Middle Class Joe’, with his roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a campaign based on the need to restore decency to America rather than overhaul its economic and social structures, was not a “radical” politician — however many times Mr Trump said it.

Looking back perhaps the clearest sign of all came in 2019. Mr Trump, eyeing a field of potential rivals, tried so hard to undercut one candidate that he became the third president in the history of the United States to be impeached. That person was Joe Biden.