Official White House Photo by David Lienemann
The biggest problem for advocates of a Joe Biden presidential bid is this: How does he differentiate himself in any meaningful way from Hillary Clinton? Both are firmly rooted in their party’s establishment, are at their heart political pragmatists rather than ideologues, and are close to the same age.
New polling from Quinnipiac University in the swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania provides a clue as to where Biden might be able to draw a sharp — and winning — contrast with Clinton: on honesty.
Clinton’s problems with the electorate on questions of whether she is honest and trustworthy have been well-documented. And the Q poll suggests they aren’t getting better. Clinton has the worst ratings of any of the candidates tested on the question. In Florida, 35 percent of respondents said she is honest and trustworthy, and that was her high-water mark! In Pennsylvania, 34 percent said the same, while in Ohio it was 33 percent.
Biden’s, by contrast, were the highest of any pol tested by Quinnipiac. In Florida, a stunning 71 percent said Biden was honest and trustworthy — double Clinton’s numbers on this question — and even 63 percent of Republicans agreed. Just 19 percent of Floridians said those words don’t apply to Biden.
As our own Philip Bump noted, Biden is almost certainly at his high-water mark in polling at the moment. There’s intense interest in whether he will run for president, and that attention has largely focused on the death of his eldest son in May and cast the vice president as a deeply sympathetic figure. That would almost certainly change somewhat — or maybe more than somewhat — if he ran for president.
That said, I do think that the massive gap on the “honest and trustworthy” question provides an opening for Biden to differentiate himself from Clinton if he ran. Like it or not, the perception of Clinton (and the Clintons more broadly) is that they are always pushing the limits and forever calculating what position to take through the lens of politics. (Worth noting: In politics, calculating a position to make it the best politics possible could well just be a survival instinct.) And again, for better or worse, Biden is widely viewed as being deeply authentic — as close to a real person as you can get in a politician who has risen to his level.
Click here to read more about Joe Biden’s secret weapon if he decide to run for president.
