In October 1984, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware was invited to speak at a conservative Baptist church near Wilmington to campaign for his third term.
Biden was not a favorite of social conservatives and was in hostile territory politically. But as the incumbent, he was given his first speaking slot, which he used to hold court uninterrupted for nearly an hour. Biden's Republican opponent barely managed to introduce himself before the time for the event arrived, but not a word was spoken to the dozens of other candidates attending the forum. .
This episode is from “Only in Delaware,'' a political history of Delaware by longtime Wilmington journalist Celia Cohen, which describes how Mr. Biden easily defeated challengers not only in his campaign but throughout the Senate. It shows that they were able to defeat us by a landslide. career. His incumbency gives him a surprising advantage.
In three decades, Biden has never faced a serious threat to his administration. His Republican opponents were underfunded, unknown, inexperienced, or some combination of the three. None of them received more than 41 percent of votes against him.
His re-election battle against former President Donald J. Trump, his 13th overall bid for federal office, is the exact opposite of the travel-heavy, messy and close races of his past Senate races. It is becoming. His rivals are forcing him to earn his first top ticket and make a convincing case for a return.
Prior to the 2020 presidential campaign, in-person events were downplayed during the general election due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Biden has previously spoken harshly and negatively about his record in office and character on television. The advertisement was never broadcast. Congressional Television and Radio Advertising Archives at the Carl Albert Center for Congressional Studies and Research at the University of Oklahoma. None of his Senate rivals attacked him on television, and he finished his last two presidential campaigns before opponents started attacking him.
Republicans running against Biden in Delaware say he is a strong incumbent who is widely liked and far faster in debates and candidate debates than today's presidents. did. Biden has ramped up his travel schedule in recent weeks with a flurry of carefully controlled visits to battleground states, leaving the 81-year-old president to maintain his pace while avoiding the verbal stumbles that often plague him. would be expected. Appearing in public.
Just last week, Mr. Biden had a crowd chanting “Four more years!” at an endorsement event. And although he added a “pause” that was apparently written on his teleprompter, the episode drew much ridicule in conservative news media and a quiet slap in the face among Democrats. .
Biden is very well known in Delaware and had many sources of sympathy from voters in his early days in office after a tragic accident that killed his first wife and daughter, so he should. There were no rivals to file such ongoing lawsuits. Not to be re-elected. For years, bumper stickers advertising his re-election simply read “Joe,” while opponents were defeated with a number of forgotten slogans.
“I don't think I've ever broken a sweat since I became the incumbent,” said Republican Jane Brady, who lost to Biden by 27 points in 1990.
The only negative ad against Biden ran between 1978 and 2008, according to University of Oklahoma archives, and it remains the ad his campaign is most likely to use. The 30-second spot notes that President Ronald Reagan endorsed Biden's Republican candidate John Burris in 1984, while Biden supported unpopular Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale. reminded viewers.
The ad says Mr. Biden disagrees with Mr. Reagan 58 percent of the time and is not entirely aligned with the Republican president. “You have a choice,” the narrator exclaims. “It’s either a Reagan vs. Burris team, a Mondale vs. Biden team, or no team at all.”
Biden won by 20 points.
Mr. Burris, now a 78-year-old retiree, said it would be cost-prohibitive for Mr. Biden to become as famous as he was already among voters. So he tried to get under Biden's skin in order to expose his temper and “create a bad Joe” that would damage the image of a sympathetic Biden. Biden, he said, didn't take the bait.
“We saw President Trump have no qualms about going to the most despicable levels possible to get results, and yet Joe went to that level with great reluctance,” Burris said. Told. “The whole scene right now is not representative of what he was used to.”
When Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, when Democrats won overwhelmingly in Delaware, he ousted Sen. Caleb Boggs, a two-term Republican and former governor of Delaware who had served as governor for 30 years. Mr. Biden's radio ad coyly hinted that Mr. Boggs was a heroin supporter and said he fell into a generation that worried about Joseph Stalin. The ad ended with an upbeat slogan: “Joe Biden: He understands what's happening today.”
Once elected, Mr. Biden and his early opponents sought to adhere to the “Delaware Way.” This was an informal political code that mandated clubby civility and had the effect of blurring the differences between the two parties. Biden's sons and Burris' son-in-law attended school together. In the years after the election, the two played golf together, and as vice president, Biden welcomed Burris and his granddaughter to the White House.
By the 1990s, that dynamic began to slowly shift, but Biden's opponents in the Senate still lacked the resources to mount a negative campaign against him. In his 1990 campaign, Mr. Brady tried to capitalize on the plagiarism scandal that doomed Mr. Biden's 1988 presidential bid. But without the money to amplify this embarrassing story on television, Mr. Brady's campaign spliced 11 minutes of network news footage recounting the story onto 40,000 VHS tapes and added them to Delaware's voter rolls. It was mailed to the address listed.
The episode prompted protests from the Biden campaign and news networks. NBC filed a formal complaint alleging copyright infringement. However, few people actually saw the stitched footage. Mr. Brady's campaign's voter rolls are filled with old addresses, and campaign volunteers can roll up VHS tapes from a bin at the Wilmington Post Office and distribute them at parades and other local campaign stops. He said he did so.
“I wasn't raising a lot of money and no one expected me to win,” Brady said. “It was a very tough experience.”
Biden's opponent in 1996 and 2002 was Ray Clatworthy, an entrepreneur who owned a restaurant and a local Christian radio station. In a 1996 televised debate, Mr. Clatworthy accused Mr. Biden of raising taxes while voting for his own pay increase, and said that in his election year he “cast himself as a conservative.” “He is trying to make it look like he is.”
Mr. Biden spoke quickly and precisely, without falling into the verbal dead ends that characterize many presidential speeches 28 years later.
Biden criticized Clatworthy for his anti-abortion stance after accusing him of flipping the 1988 presidential election to support abortion rights. After trying to place blame, he clearly expressed his views on the issue.
“My position has been consistent from the beginning,” Biden said of his stance on abortion. “I believe the government should amend the constitution and stop providing public funding.”
Mr. Clatworthy and his family were not as enthusiastic about Mr. Biden as some of his former rivals. When Clatworthy passed away in 2021, his family described his political career in a paid memorial: “As a patriot, he ran for the Senate in Delaware twice against a gentleman whose name we have lost.”
Mr. Trump, 77, is the rare president to seek reelection for a second term but lose, and he faces many political vulnerabilities, including a criminal case and his role in overriding the constitutional right to abortion. Since the New York trial began, Biden has spent most of his days in court as needed, while also making stops in battleground states to campaign.
Biden's 2024 campaign aides said his 2020 victory over Trump, who spared little in attacking Biden, was proof enough that Biden could run a successful modern campaign. .
“After defeating more than 20 primary candidates, Joe Biden won more votes than any other candidate in our nation's history and won more votes than any sitting president in the last century,” campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said in a statement. He became the third person to do so.” “This November, he will defeat Trump and his opponents again.”
Before Trump, the last Republican to try to remove Biden from office was Christine O'Donnell. By 2008, she was already running for the Senate, and two years later she began appearing in television commercials, which skyrocketed her political profile. In the ensuing Senate race, she quickly made her infamous “I'm not a witch” declaration.
O'Donnell, who moved to Florida to attend law school, said in a rare interview that he overcame the hurdles his 2008 campaign faced. She said the Delaware Republican Party opposes her brand of conservative politics. Biden, who is running for vice president, declined to debate her, leaving her to stand opposite her surrogate at a candidate forum. She believes there was some form of voter fraud in the state's most populous county that cost her her vote. (There is no evidence for this.)
“In 2008, the Republican Party was actually campaigning against me. They were trying to work with Joe Biden to undermine my efforts,” she said. “Voter fraud aside, this is unfortunate because the people of Delaware are pretty conservative. A free and fair election could turn the state deep red.”
Ms O'Donnell said she plans to present this evidence in an eight-part podcast scheduled to be released this summer.
kitty bennett Contributed to research.