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What would have happened if Joe Biden had run? - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/03/what-would-have-happened-if-joe-biden-had-run/?tid=sm_tw_pp&wprss=rss_the-fix

What would have happened if Joe Biden had run?

Joe Biden speaks after touring the Port of New Orleans to commemorate the
seventh anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in New
Orleans, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

It's the first thought that enters Vice President Biden's head every
morning, the moment his bedroom windows at One Observatory Circle grow
light from the sun. "What if," Joe Biden thinks.

"What if I had run?"

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination was never supposed to
be as close as it ended up. Last spring, Hillary Clinton led her possible
opponents by a country mile; by July, 12 months ago, she still led Bernie
Sanders by nearly 50 points. But over the summer and into the fall, her
lead narrowed, and by the time Biden announced that he wouldn't run in late
October, Clinton's lead over Sanders had been as small as 13 points
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_democratic_presidential_nomination-3824.html>.
Then Biden made his announcement and, as expected
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/13/expect-a-boost-for-hillary-clinton-if-and-when-joe-biden-bows-out/>,
Clinton saw most of the benefit. Why? Because Clinton and Biden shared
similar bases of support: Those without college degrees, those earning
lower incomes and, most importantly, non-white voters.

Once Biden declined to run, it was fair to assume that was it. For her
clear path to the nomination, Biden was now offering Clinton a ride.

But then Sanders kept closing.

As voting began, thanks in part to Clinton's decision not to take the
gloves off against Sanders in a number of contests, Sanders caught up. By
April, the two were nearly tied nationally. It was too late
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/16/bye-bye-bernie-the-democratic-race-is-all-but-over/>
for Sanders to catch Clinton in delegates, but it showed that there was
still a big appetite for a non-Clinton in the contest.

So: What if? What if Biden had stayed in? What if voting in Iowa and New
Hampshire kicked off with Biden joining Clinton and Sanders on the ballot?

Fundamentally, this question is impossible to answer. So much changes and
evolves over the course of a campaign that it's hard to simply imagine a
realistic counterfactual that incorporates every possible scenario. Joe
Biden has an unfortunate habit of saying things he's not supposed to say,
for example, like when he made
<http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/> condescending and
racially loaded comments about Barack Obama early in the 2008 primary
cycle. You can't account for things like that.

But if Biden had stayed in and not shot himself in the foot, there would
clearly have been a shift to the dynamics -- especially in one important
way: Clinton's margins of victory (if not her victory itself
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/09/black-voters-gave-hillary-clinton-a-big-win-but-she-would-probably-have-won-anyway/>)
were due to her massive advantage with black voters. That's a voting bloc
with which Biden also did well. So: What if?

We can try to answer that question by looking at how polling last fall
looked with and without Biden in the race. The Post and ABC News polled in
September and October, and we can look at the results of those two polls
through two lenses: How support broke down among all three candidates and
how it broke down if we reallocate Biden's support to voters' second
choices. What's interesting about these two polls is that they reflect two
very different moments in the race. The September poll was a particularly
bad one for Clinton, putting her at just over 40 percent -- one of her
lowest levels of support of the campaign. By October, she'd rebounded
somewhat.

In that September poll, Clinton earned the support of 42 percent of the
Democrats and Democratic leaners that were surveyed. Take Biden out,
though, and her support jumped to 56 percent. Which means that Biden not
being in the race gave Clinton a 14-point boost -- and that one-third, 33
percent, of her support in a one-on-one contest with Sanders came from
people who would otherwise have backed Biden. For Sanders, the numbers were
24 percent with Biden and 28 percent without -- so 17 percent of his
one-on-one support came from Biden.

We can do a similar calculation for all of the demographic groups with
large enough sample sizes to be significant. And we can do it for both
September and October, to get a sense of how much support Clinton got
thanks to possible Biden backers during a bad month and how much she got
during a good month.

Let's now assume that those figures didn't change much. One of the things
we know is that margins of support from demographic groups remained fairly
consistent
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/12/the-remarkable-consistency-of-the-democratic-primary-electorate/>
for Clinton and Sanders even as Sanders gained. As he improved, he improved
across the board, but the gap between male and female and between white and
non-white didn't change much.

So let's assume that the percentage of support Biden drew from Clinton and
Sanders was also somewhat consistent. This is not necessarily a fair
assumption, any more than it was fair to assume that Sanders was D.O.A.
once Biden dropped out. But it allows us to revamp the field in light of
the best data we do have, from September and October.

Exit polling conducted in primary and caucus states gives us a sense of how
demographic groups voted over the course of the Democratic nominating
process. We can use exit poll figures to approximate the breakdown of
delegates won by each candidate, thanks to the Democrats' relatively simply
proportional distribution process. There are gaps and flaws in this
(including that not every state is included in exit polling), but it at
least serves to approximate how the candidates would have done against one
another.

How? By taking the support Clinton and Sanders got in exit polling by
gender, race and partisanship -- the three categories that overlap well
with our poll data -- and taking out those chunks that would otherwise have
gone to Biden. So if we're basing this estimate on the figures from the
September poll, one-third of Clinton's statewide support would be sliced
off and put in the Biden pile, along with 17 percent of Sanders's.

We can do that calculation in each demographic category; that is, how many
delegates Clinton, Sanders and Biden would have gotten if the polling for
whites and non-whites was our guide, or how many each would have gotten if
we used the polling for gender. Then, we can do the calculation using the
polling from September and October, giving Biden bigger and smaller slices
of Clinton's totals, respectively. Doing so gives us two theoretical
outcomes for the Democratic primary (with the actual exit-poll-based
results for the sake of comparison).

If Biden had only pulled as much from Clinton and Sanders as he did in
October, Clinton would still have won a plurality of the pledged delegates
at stake. But if Biden had pulled from the two candidates at the rate he
did in September, the contest would would have been much closer.

It's critical to note that the exit poll figures here don't include a
number of large states in which exit polls weren't conducted. They don't
include Washington, for example, which Sanders won by a wide margin. They
also don't include New Jersey, Arizona or California, won by Clinton and
which offered a lot of combined delegates. If Clinton and Sanders ended up
that close in states with exit polling, once we include Biden, it's hard to
know who might have come out on top. It wouldn't have been Biden, if these
numbers hold, but it might not have been Clinton.

That's based on September polling, of course. Those September numbers
didn't even last until October, so it's unfair to assume they would somehow
have stuck around until May. Maybe Biden would have surged past Clinton.
Maybe Sanders and Biden would have allied. Maybe Biden would have undercut
Sanders's support with young people. None of this is captured in our rough
calculation. All we can say is that *if* Biden pulled from Clinton and
Sanders as he did in September and *if* nothing else had changed, then
*maybe* Clinton wouldn't have won a majority of pledged delegates.

We can put that another way: The answer to the what-if question that no
doubt plagues Biden is: Who knows?


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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