Watching the Biden campaign is like watching history repeating itself. Consciously or unconsciously, he's using the same strategies that Hillary Clinton used and making the same mistakes.
First a couple of little things - everyone knew that Hillary was going to run in 2016 but she kept insisting that she was still making up her mind and teasing the press for weeks before announcing with a video. Biden did the same thing. He was the last major candidate to announce and he did it with a video.
After dropping the announcement video, both candidates vanished for a while, preferring small, controlled events to large, spontaneous ones. Biden just skipped a big event in Iowa that the other 19 candidates attended. Binden's excuse was that he wanted to attend a grad-daughter's graduation. While that's noble of him, it also leads into the important similarity with Clinton...
Neither one took the primaries seriously enough. Hillary was the front-runner in 2008. The race was hers to lose. She assumed that she'd have the nomination seed up by Super Tuesday and didn't keep any cash reserves on hand in case the campaign lasted longer than that. In contrast, Obama planned a 50-state campaign from the beginning and seized the nomination from under her nose.
In 2016 Hillary again assumed that both the nomination and the presidency were hers. She was surprised by the strength of Bernie Sanders then surprised again by Donald Trump.
Biden seems to assume that he only needs to show up to secure the nomination. He sees himself above the fray and is trying to start his campaign against President Trump. That's a mistake. After a strong start, he's dropped in the polls. He's going to have to work for the nomination, especially since the party reduced the role of the super-delegates in enforcing party orthodoxy.
Hillary counted on the Obama coalition to turn out for her and made no effort to woo swing-voters. Her plan was to suppress Trump voters by on-stop negative advertising while appealing to the Obama coalition as his rightful successor. This was unlikely to happen. Obama was a special case. Blacks turned out for him in record numbers because he was black. Immigrants and their recent decedents saw Obama as one of them because of his African father and foreign up-bringing. Obama was a youthful candidate running on a blank slate of hope and change. Groups across the political spectrum from Progressives to Libertarians were convinced that Obama was really one of them.
Hillary failed to motivate a lot of Obama voters. She saw herself as a pioneer because of her gender but many voters simply saw an old, rich, white woman and stayed home. Trump was able to appeal to working-class voters who felt left behind by Obama and ignored by Clinton.
Biden will have a worse time trying to motivate the Obama Coalition. As a rich, old, white guy who has been in politics since before most of the electorate was born, he has nothing exciting to offer. He does have a history of working class appeal but that was with a different generation. His last Senate run was 2002 and his 2008 Presidential run folded in 2007.
Biden ha an additional problem that Hillary didn't have. He'll have to run against an incumbent. In 2016, Trump was a complete unknown. Given that he is from New York and has switched parties a few times, the best conservatives could hope for was a RHINO. Instead his administration has been the most conservative since Ronald Reagan. Voters seldom if ever turn out an incumbent president during good economic times. Trump is not the madman, ready to launch a nuclear war that some painted him as. Neither is he the totalitarian that many claimed. It's impossible to define a sitting president the way you can a candidate so there's one more tool denied to Biden.
There is one final similarity between the two - voters like the idea of them better than the candidate. Hillary always polled highest when she was out of public sight. The more she was seen the lower her poll numbers. It's too early to say for sure but Biden seems to be suffering from the same problem.
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