Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
Though he usually shows up at the top of polls of potential Democratic contenders for the 2020 presidential nomination, Joe Biden’s likely bid for the Oval Office leaves many party insiders surprisingly unimpressed, McClatchy revealed in a new report on Monday.
The news service interviewed 31 insiders from the Democratic Party for the story and found significantly less enthusiasm than one might expect:
“Among political professionals, there are deep concerns because we know the history,” said a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly about a party elder. “We have reason to be skeptical of the hype.”
“We heard it with Hillary, and we saw it happened,” the source added. “And there’s a lot of reason to think he would wind up a significantly weaker candidate than Hillary.”
Many of these strategists say that if Biden did win the nomination, they don’t think he would have a better chance of defeating Donald Trump than other top-tier contenders such as Kamala Harris or Kirsten Gillibrand — disputing the claim from many Biden supporters that he represents the safe choice in an election when rank-and-file voters are desperate to win back the White House.
But if there’s anything that 2016 taught us, it’s that political insiders, who long expected Jeb Bush to soar to the GOP nomination and who failed to see Sen. Bernie Sanders’ ascendancy coming, can easily get predictions drastically wrong.
IMAGE: Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago, June 6, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young
