Member-only story
Five reasons Biden isn’t electable
Joe Biden’s entire sales pitch is that he’s the guy best suited to take on Donald Trump. But pull on any loose thread and the case for Biden falls apart. He’s taken to calling himself an Obama-Biden Democrat—and once an “Obiden-Bama Democrat”—tapping into Democrats’ nostalgia for the status quo ante Trump.
But Biden can’t even recreate the losing Clinton coalition much less the one that brought Obama to power. If nominated, he’ll lose to Trump for all the same reasons she did and then some.
Poor fundraising
Pre-nomination fundraising predicted the winner of nearly two out of three presidential contests from 1976 to present. According to the Campaign Finance Institute, seven out of 11 contests were won by the candidate who had raised the most before their parties’ convention.
As of Feb. 21, the most recent benchmark, Biden had only raised $69 million. By the same point Bernie Sanders had generated nearly double. In February alone, Bernie rustled up a record $46.5 million, handily blowing away Biden’s best haul to date. By the time of the convention in 2008, Barack Obama had raised $323 million, which would be nearly $400 million adjusted for inflation.
In addition to being a hard measure of a campaign’s material resources, fundraising signifies confidence in the candidate…