Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

But perhaps more than any other presidential front-runner in modern history, he begins his bid confronting deep skepticism from friend and foe alike that he can capture his party’s nomination.

Here are five questions looming over Biden’s candidacy, the answers to which could determine whether he becomes America’s 46th president or concludes his career by losing his third bid for the White House.

— How will he handle the onslaught?

Most casual voters, even in the primary, know Biden as President Barack Obama’s vice president. But he was a senator from Delaware for 36 years before he entered the West Wing, and his record from a decidedly earlier day in Democratic politics is where his rivals for the nomination will focus their fire. He opposed busing to integrate schools, wrote a hard-line criminal justice bill and supported the Iraq War.

Most immediately, Biden will have to decide how to respond to new critical comments by Anita Hill, the law professor who in 1991 accused Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Biden recently called her, according to an aide, to express regrets that he did not do more for her when he presided over her appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But she told The New York Times that the call left her deeply unsatisfied, and that she did not consider it an apology. She said she is not convinced that Biden truly accepts the harm he caused her and other women.

It remains unclear what his broader strategy will be for handling scrutiny from the press and bombardments from his Democratic opponents along with a legion of left-wing critics who want to defeat his candidacy and ward off any return to a more moderate brand of liberalism.

Biden’s supporters hope Obama offers him something of a halo. Many in Biden’s orbit hope that rather than litigate every criticism about his Senate record, he restrains himself and focuses on his partnership with the country’s first black president.

— Can he stay above the fray?

The message from Biden’s announcement video was urgent and unmistakable: President Donald Trump’s tenure amounts to a national emergency, and defeating him is essential to America’s survival. Framing the campaign this way does not just make 2020 a referendum on the president, it also offers Biden a rationale for why Democrats should put forward a septuagenarian in the winter of his political life. This is not, he is arguing, yet another nomination clash in one more presidential campaign.

But so far, it has sure seemed that way. Even the candidates who believe that Trump should be impeached are not eager to discuss the president or why he should be removed from office. The race has mostly focused on their policy ideas, biographies and how to accommodate a party drifting left. Before Biden’s announcement, the campaign was animated this week by a debate over whether prisoners should be allowed to vote.

Many Democratic strategists believe that Biden should resist tangling with his intraparty rivals and avoid the temptation to prove that he is just as progressive as they are. “Don’t let the agenda stray from the argument that he can deliver us from Trump,” said Paul Begala, the former Bill Clinton adviser.

But when Biden appears before reporters and voters upon arriving in Iowa next week, that may prove easier said than done. Never known for his discipline, the former vice president is entering a media environment unlike that in his first two presidential campaigns; now his every misstep will immediately pinball across the internet. And he is stepping into a race filled with candidates who could lift their profiles by baiting the front-runner into a back-and-forth that would quickly erase memories of Biden’s high-minded call to arms.

— What’s an ‘Obama-Biden Democrat’?

Biden this month played down his party’s leftward turn, pointing out the success of moderates in last year’s midterm elections and telling reporters he was a proud “Obama-Biden Democrat.” But less clear is what exactly that means in 2019.

Biden has not sketched out any vision on health care, criminal justice, education or the environment. He has said he has the most progressive record of any candidate, but then amended that to indicate he was alluding to his stances on social issues like LGBT rights.

Biden may be too tenuous a front-runner to alienate any of his party’s core constituencies, but he could risk just as much by portraying himself as anything besides a mainstream liberal. He faces few more important tasks than finding that balance: reflecting the party for what it is today without attempting a cringe-inducing reinvention of what he likes to call his “brand.”

— Does he have ideas for the future?

Biden’s announcement video was about one big promise to voters: He would eject Trump from office and lead a country that they could be proud of. Asked by a reporter outside a pizzeria in Wilmington, Delaware, on Thursday afternoon about his message for the rest of the world, he said “America is coming back” and said his administration would be “ethical, straight, telling the truth.”

But the traditional American values Biden extolled may only go so far in inspiring voters, both in a primary and a general election. Some of his Democratic competitors already have well-developed signature proposals that have helped to define their candidacies, like Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All Act, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plan to forgive student loans and Sen. Cory Booker’s “baby bonds” program. Biden has nothing comparable, at least so far.

Biden may start to fill in this blank space Monday, when he is to visit a Pittsburgh union hall and speak about the middle class and the economy. But it is unclear whether he will be inclined to develop sweeping policy plans, or whether he will stay close to his roots as a moderate who favors political compromise and incremental change.

The risk to Biden, if he takes too long to define his vision for the future, is that he might come to be seen mainly as a figure of nostalgia — a candidate of the past.

— Can he raise money, without being defined by it?

So far, the most important fundraising in the Democratic race has happened online. And several of the most prominent candidates, including Sanders and Warren, are fundraising almost exclusively that way.

Biden’s approach will be different, and far more reliant on the largess of the wealthiest benefactors of the Democratic Party. His aides have already spent more than a week encouraging donors to send $2,800 checks — the maximum sum allowed — to his primary-campaign-in-waiting, and a Comcast executive who oversees the company’s lobbying division was hosting a major fundraiser for Biden in Philadelphia on Thursday night.

The financial challenges for Biden are twofold. He must raise an immense amount of money rapidly, without the benefit of a robust online fundraising machine of the kind some of his rivals possess. And Biden must raise that amount without stoking suspicions among Democratic primary voters that he is compromised by his dependency on big money.

The latter danger — that “Middle-Class Joe,” as he styles himself, could come to be seen as a candidate of rich people and corporations — may be especially vexing to Biden because his record on banking and corporate regulation has already drawn sharp criticism from the left. Yet, without having spent years cultivating an online donor base, and lacking the novelty factor that has helped other candidates soak the internet, Biden appears to see little alternative to seeking out the biggest checks possible.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/politics/joe-biden-president-2020.html" id="779f28ec-d582-3d72-a973-815d129bb9d7">The New York Times</a>.

WILMINGTON, Del. — Former Vice President Joe Biden’s entry Thursday into the sprawling Democratic primary has immediately reshaped the race, giving definition to a contest that has been defined mostly by uncertainty. Biden offers voters a household name, nearly a half-century of political experience and the implied promise of restoring the country to a less polarized, pre-Trump era.

5 Questions That Will Determine if Joe Biden Can Succeed

That approach carried risks. Biden missed the chance to recruit top-level aides, including former Obama advisers, women and people of color, because he had not formalized his campaign. He left urgent questions about his political vulnerabilities lingering, and he has not deployed researchers to review his vast record, because he has not hired any.

Still, the former vice president persisted with his unrushed strategy — until this past week, when it appeared to backfire in striking fashion.

Biden has faced accusations from multiple women who came forward to complain that his penchant for close physical contact made them feel uneasy. Rival Democrats demanded that he account for his treatment of the women, and President Donald Trump lobbed taunts that offered a preview of how he might attack Biden in a 2020 general election.

It was a multiday crisis that seemed entirely foreseeable, given that Biden’s physical touching occurred over many years, often in public. But despite almost five decades in the political arena, Biden, 76, did not have an agile, fully staffed campaign in place to confront it.

He issued three statements and one online video attempting to explain his conduct, only to joke about the issue in a speech to a union conference Friday. Afterward, he gave an ambivalent response to reporters who asked if he was sorry, acknowledging that he would have to change his behavior but apologizing only for the fact that he “didn’t understand more” about the implications of his conduct.

Biden showed no evident regret about his wait-and-wait-some-more strategy, explaining coyly that he would “give everybody else their day, then I get a shot.”

But Biden’s eventual announcement now seems fated to fall in the shadow of the recent allegations and the progressive concerns he has declined to address. Far from remaining above the fray, Biden will enter the campaign as bruised as any of the 16 other candidates already in the race.

“They’re in this never-never land right now,” said David Plouffe, the former strategist to President Barack Obama’s campaign, “because they’re being treated by the outside world like they’re in the race full speed and they’re not. That’s a really tough place to be.”

Plouffe cautioned that Biden’s initial difficulties could all mean very little should the former vice president enjoy a successful start when he formally enters the race.

Indeed, amid the week’s chaos, Biden for the first time took several swift steps toward becoming a candidate: His allies have been told to expect an announcement after Easter and the former vice president was sighted Thursday in Scranton, Pennsylvania, apparently recording a video at his childhood home there. And Biden has secured the services of Mark Putnam, a Democratic ad maker known for crafting gripping, cinematic commercials, according to people familiar with the decision. (Putnam declined to comment.)

Biden has used his time on the sideline to some advantage. Aides have put him through “murder board” sessions on his vulnerabilities and compiled documents detailing his accomplishments and weaknesses. His likely campaign manager, Greg Schultz, has organized now-weekly conference calls with future staff members.

But if the attacks from Trump and his allies illustrated that Republicans are worried about facing Biden, the controversy this past week has also shined a light on the risks Democrats would be taking in nominating him — and not just because of his recent problems.

The uneven response to the women’s accusations capped a four-month stretch in which Biden has labored to expand his core group of older, mostly white advisers; failed to defuse the political equivalent of ticking time bombs relating to race and gender that await his entry in the race; and delayed a campaign that will have considerable ground to make up organizationally, financially and technologically.

Even some of his strongest allies are growing anxious. “I’d like to see him go ahead and get engaged because the summer is going to be here before you know it, the debates are going be here before you know it,” said Sen. Doug Jones, R-Ala., who was a state chairman for Biden’s 1988 presidential bid.

The questions now looming over his campaign-in-waiting, however, are not merely ones of timing. Biden’s uncertainty over how to address his past positions and conduct, and how contrite he ought to be, captures the tension at the heart of his emerging candidacy: Can he retain the unvarnished, tell-it-like-it-is political brand that appeals to so many voters, especially older ones, while also inspiring a Democratic Party that has grown more progressive and is increasingly defined by its youthful, diverse constituencies?

He does retain obvious strengths as a potential candidate: He is still at the top of the polls, albeit not quite as high as he was at the start of the year. Democratic voters view him in overwhelmingly favorable terms, as a thoroughly qualified commander in chief and an emblem of the Obama administration. And there is also deep and lasting sympathy for Biden and his family after the death of his eldest son, Beau, from cancer in 2015.

Yet his decision to wait on announcing his candidacy has come with a cost, in part because he did not use the time to better prepare for some of the most inevitable questions about his lengthy record in politics. Without a campaign in place, Biden has also not done any polling to determine his most glaring liabilities or substantial assets.

Biden has yet to apologize to Anita Hill even though he said last month that he regrets that “he couldn’t give her the kind of hearing she deserved” — a reference that seemed to play down his powerful role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Hill testified at Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing in 1991 that Thomas had sexually harassed her.

Biden has also done little to reach out to feminist leaders before entering a campaign in which his mixed record on abortion rights is sure to be an issue. He has not contacted Ilyse Hogue, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, or Cecile Richards, the former head of Planned Parenthood, according to Democratic officials.

He has said publicly that he wants a campaign that reflects the country, but his inner circle remains largely white and male, and some of his overtures to next-generation Democratic strategists have fallen flat or petered out, several people briefed on the efforts said.

Karine Jean-Pierre, a top official with the liberal group MoveOn, met privately with Biden but elected not to pursue a campaign job. Biden advisers sought to hire Tara McGowan, a highly regarded Democratic digital strategist, and Emmy Ruiz, an operative who managed several Western states for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Neither signed on, and Ruiz now works for Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. (All three women declined to comment or did not respond to requests.)

Many Democrats also expected Larry Grisolano, another veteran of Obama’s campaigns, to take a senior role in Biden’s organization, but this year Grisolano declined.

It is not clear how strongly Biden might be able to rely on other members of Obama’s political network, many of whom have gravitated toward newer candidates like Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas. (Obama himself has been tight-lipped during his former running mate’s difficult week; a spokesman for the former president declined to comment while noting that Obama had praised Biden warmly in recent months.)

And Biden has done little self-vetting of his legislative record because he has not hired a research director. His aides have contacted at least two Democratic officials, James Singer and Helen Smith, about research jobs, but Singer went to work for Harris and Smith is planning to work on a House race.

Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008, said Biden had already sacrificed some of his political strength by waiting so long. She said Biden remained formidable, but urged him to enter the race soon and initiate a “bigger, more thoughtful conversation about how men of power interact with women with not so much power.”

“I think he can look at this as an opportunity, and I wish he would,” Solis Doyle said.

As he demonstrated on Friday with his joking references to giving hugs and his impromptu press availability, there is only so much his aides can do to contain Biden. His reliance on his own instincts has been legendary for decades, since his turbulent 1988 campaign chronicled in the classic political book “What It Takes.”

But it’s unclear whether Biden’s instincts will be enough to navigate his party’s shifting center of gravity. After declaring at a Democratic fundraising dinner in Delaware last month that he would be “the most progressive candidate” in the race, Biden clarified on Friday that he meant his positions on issues like race and LGBT rights — not, as he put it, on the question: “Are you a socialist?”

Quieting aides who sought to cut short his session with reporters, he argued that the “party has not moved” and said “the vast majority of the members of the Democratic Party are still basically liberal to moderate Democrats in the traditional sense.”

Some of Biden’s longtime friends, who winced at his boast in Delaware, urged him to campaign as the center-left Democrat he has always been.

“You can’t try to out-progressive the field, you’ve got to be who you are,” said William Daley, the moderate former White House chief of staff who lost a race for mayor of Chicago this year.

John Morgan, a prominent Florida trial lawyer who raises money for Democrats, said he believed Biden’s authenticity would still connect powerfully with voters. Biden’s “only sin,” he said, “is he loved people.”

But, Morgan added, it was past time for Biden to make a decision about the race.

“There are two ways to get in a cold pool,” he said, ”toe by toe, or take a tequila shot and do a cannonball.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/us/politics/joe-biden-2020.html" id="9bcdc0d6-a9ab-3ca1-a1f8-7bfdee09ade2">The New York Times</a>.

Biden Didn't Rush Into 2020. The Race Came to Him Anyway.

For months, former Vice President Joe Biden hewed to a tortoiselike strategy for the 2020 presidential race: Repeatedly delaying his final decision, he hoped to skirt a long stretch of campaigning as a front-runner with a target on his back.

Biden has also been privately reaching out to a range of influential Democrats, including party donors, members of Congress and allies in the early primary states, to gauge their support. A pillar of organized labor, the International Association of Fire Fighters, is prepared to support him in the Democratic primary.

And in recent weeks, Biden’s strategist, Steve Ricchetti, has called a handful of would-be candidates and their aides to signal that the former vice president is likely to enter the race and of late has been telling Democrats that he’s 95 percent committed to running, according to officials directly familiar with the discussions.

Yet while Biden is plainly further along in preparing for a White House bid than he was four years ago, when he grudgingly deferred to Hillary Clinton after months of consideration in the aftermath of his son Beau’s death, there is still one crucial element that’s outstanding: full and final consent from the former vice president himself.

This juxtaposition — an eager cadre of supporters laying the groundwork for a campaign they assure is all but certain while the would-be candidate publicly vacillates — has effectively kept the nascent Democratic race on hold.

Biden’s decision looms as perhaps the most significant unanswered question of the 2020 contest and his entry could bring shape to what has been a diffuse Democratic primary, providing voters with a clear front-runner.

As a candidate, Biden would present Democrats with a clear alternative to the hard-charging liberals who now dominate the race and test the appeal of his old-school political profile at a moment the party is hungry for fresh faces but even hungrier to win.

“I absolutely believe he’s going to run,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, who talked to Biden on the phone earlier this week. “There may still be some doubt in his mind but there’s no doubt in my mind.”

Richmond, the former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, said he believes the former vice president is the party’s “best candidate to beat Trump.”

Still, in conversations over the phone and strategy sessions in his rented Northern Virginia home that are occasionally interrupted by his German shepherds, Major and Champ, Biden has acknowledged that he is uncertain about his place in the 2020 Democratic primary. He is also uneasy about potential attacks from rivals on his family, aides and advisers say, namely his son Hunter, a lawyer and lobbyist who went through a high-profile divorce in 2017 and has struggled with substance abuse.

And in a soliloquy that was unplanned if not unexpected to Biden advisers — rarely do the garrulous former senator’s private views remain private for very long — he openly gave voice to both concerns last week.

“I don’t think he’s likely to stop at anything, whomever he runs against,” Biden said about President Donald Trump, expressing his alarm about putting his “family through what would be a very, very, very difficult campaign” without directly mentioning his younger son.

And then he mused about not wanting to pursue “a fool’s errand” in an appearance at the University of Delaware. “What I don’t want to do is take people’s time, effort and commitment without there being a clear shot that I could be the nominee,” Biden explained.

While he is leading the field, Biden is far from an overwhelming favorite and appears to have support from about a third of the Democratic electorate. Sen. Bernie Sanders is close behind him and other prominent candidates, like Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, trail them both.

Biden has spent much of this year running what amounts to the non-incumbent’s version of a Rose Garden campaign: giving high-profile paid speeches and appearing at events, both in the United States and abroad, that project him as statesmanlike.

Avoiding Iowa and New Hampshire, and the probing questions that would come in early nominating states, Biden has instead appeared in Munich, where he spoke about the trans-Atlantic alliance, and in Omaha, Nebraska, where he warned that America’s “reputation is being tarnished” abroad during an event with former Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican who was a defense secretary for President Barack Obama.

Biden has already pushed back several self-imposed deadlines for a decision, extending an end-of-2018 timeline into January and then into March. One Democrat eager to work for Biden was told to expect a launch this month, but more recently got word that April was more likely.

This dilatory approach has not prompted any softening in Biden’s support. He enjoys a halo-like admiration among many Democrats from his eight years at the side of Obama and leads in initial polls. His ability to remain the early favorite even as other candidates have declared their bids has heartened his advisers, reinforcing their view that the former vice president does not need to rush into the race.

“People underestimate the intensity of his support and how broad it is,” said John Anzalone, who will be Biden’s pollster if he runs.

The decision Tuesday by former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg not to run has, in the eyes of Biden’s inner circle, only strengthened their hand by enlarging the vacuum for a left-of-center Democratic candidate who can appeal to voters chiefly focused on defeating Trump. On Thursday, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio also removed himself from consideration, eliminating a potential challenge to Biden from a populist Democrat similarly oriented toward the Midwest.

Bloomberg’s advisers conceded this week that they had concluded Biden could have been an insurmountable obstacle, recounting with awe the results of focus groups they conducted in which Democratic voters referred unprompted, and admiringly, to Biden as “Uncle Joe.”

“We need a nominee who can speak to the whole country, who can speak to the electorate that the party has been losing, and that quite frankly includes some of my members that were once dependable Democrats,” said Harold Schaitberger, the president of the International Association of Firefighters.

Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada, a moderate Democrat elected last November, said he believed Biden would be a strong candidate. Though he stressed his neutrality in the race, Sisolak described the party’s ideal candidate in Biden-friendly terms: “A good communicator that likes people.”

“He’d be a good candidate, like a lot of the other ones," Sisolak said of Biden, with a note of warning to candidates about tacking too far to the left: “I think they’re going to have a lot more trouble being successful, frankly, in the primary too.”

Yet in multiple interviews with Democratic aides and officials, including some who plan on working for a Biden candidacy, there are boy-who-cried-wolf doubts about his intentions and deep questions about his viability in a party that is increasingly young, female and nonwhite.

There is Biden’s penchant for praising Republicans, former segregationists and right-leaning columnists. Though aides say he will never back away from his belief in bipartisanship, Biden’s insistence on telling a story that centers on his relationship with former Sen. Jesse Helms — a North Carolina Republican who never apologized for his bigotry — grates on even members of his own team, who have told him as much.

Most of all, Democrats — even those who are more ideologically aligned with Biden — harbor severe doubts that the party should put forward a nominee who would turn 78 shortly after Election Day 2020.

“The only major organization in the world that has been, and is, run by 80-year-olds is the Roman Catholic Church,” noted James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist.

There are also practical elements of setting up a campaign that Biden cannot afford to put off too much longer, including ramping up his light footprint on social media and raising money for some of the big-state primaries that come early next year.

Advisers to Biden have begun extending tentative job offers to several sought-after operatives, asking them to commit to a campaign if Biden runs. Among them are Pete Kavanaugh, who ran New Hampshire for Obama in 2012; Kenny D. Thompson, Jr., who worked for Biden’s vice-presidential office, and Cristóbal Alex, a former minority-outreach official for the Clinton campaign. (Politico first reported Alex’s likely role on Wednesday).

Prominent Democrats from the early nominating states say Biden must move soon.

“He has a lot of goodwill in this state,” said Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a longtime South Carolina lawmaker. “But if he’s going to get in he needs to get in. I think the window is closing.”

Biden has so far resisted that kind of pressure, and the former vice president has in some cases used his drawn-out period of deliberation to address potential political vulnerabilities. He has spoken repeatedly by phone with the Rev. Al Sharpton, the influential civil-rights activist who hosted Biden at a Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast, where Biden expressed remorse for backing draconian anti-crime policies in the 1990s.

Sharpton declined to comment on private conversations with Biden, but he said it seemed unlikely Biden would so actively confront liberal criticism of his record unless he was planning a campaign.

“I think he’d have a big advantage because of his name recognition and because of the imprimatur of the Obama vice presidency,” Sharpton said.

Teri Goodmann, a veteran Iowa Democrat and longtime Biden ally, said she had spoken recently with the former vice president and expected him to run. She said she planned to support Biden because his experience in international affairs made him well equipped to “put things right in the world, if that’s even possible.”

“What there is to do now is to await his decision,” Goodmann added, “and that’s what we intend to do.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/politics/biden-2020.html" id="95eb6d36-0d60-37b6-a0b6-90b38879b8b9">The New York Times</a>.

Joe Biden's 2020 Plan is Almost Complete. Democrats Are Impatient.

WASHINGTON — The pieces for a Joe Biden presidential campaign are falling into place: His nucleus of advisers has begun offering campaign positions to seasoned Democratic strategists. They are eyeing a headquarters in Delaware or nearby Philadelphia and a launch date in the beginning of April. Biden’s family is on board — his wife, Jill, enthusiastically so.

The decision Tuesday by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg not to run has, in the eyes of Biden’s inner circle, only strengthened their hand by enlarging the vacuum for a left-of-center Democratic candidate who can appeal to voters chiefly focused on defeating Trump.

“He’d be a good candidate, like a lot of the other ones,” Sisolak said of Biden, with a note of warning to candidates about tacking too far to the left: “I think they’re going to have a lot more trouble being successful, frankly, in the primary too.”

The voter, Rahul Parsa, who teaches at Iowa State University’s business school, said he told Harris at a gathering of Asian and Latino activists that she needs to think of the Democratic Party in the Midwest like a struggling retail business — and that she should seek out not just the regular customers, but those who are not loyal supporters as well.

“Kamala needs to find out why the people voted for Trump, what are their issues?” said Parsa, adding that he had one overarching demand for the burgeoning field of would-be nominees: “You need to bring some states in the Midwest.”

As the Democratic race takes flight, with one or more candidates entering the race almost every week, Parsa’s viewpoint represents one side of a long-simmering debate within the party: Should Democrats redouble their efforts to win back the industrial heartland that effectively delivered the presidency to Donald Trump, or turn their attention to more demographically promising Sun Belt states like Georgia and Arizona?

With polls indicating that electoral viability is as important to voters as any policy issue, a handful of the party’s prospects are already holding up their Midwestern credentials to make the case that they are the ones who can turn Big Ten country — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin — blue again.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota went immediately to next-door Wisconsin after declaring her candidacy earlier this month, making a hard-to-miss point about her eagerness to compete in a state Hillary Clinton never visited in the 2016 general election. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who has not officially entered the race, used his first Iowa trip to make a beeline for a county that went for former President Barack Obama by over 20 points in 2012 but fell to Trump by about the same margin four years later.

And a central premise of former Vice President Joe Biden’s potential candidacy is that the Scranton-born Democrat would be the political mason best able to reconstruct the party’s so-called Midwestern blue wall.

Yet far away from the mounting snowdrifts that line every curb here, there is a growing school of thought that Democrats should not spend so much time, money and psychic energy tailoring their message to a heavily white, rural and blue-collar part of the country when their coalition is increasingly made up of racial minorities and suburbanites. The party should still pursue voters who have drifted toward Republicans, this thinking goes, but should also place a high priority on mobilizing communities more amenable to progressive politics.

The numerical swap between the three Rust Belt states that handed Trump the White House and the most alluring trio of Sun Belt targets is nearly even: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have a combined 46 electoral votes, while North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona offer 42. And an aspirational “reach”state like Texas would offer a larger trove of electoral votes for Democrats than the combined total of Ohio and Iowa, states that have started to slip away from the party.

The dispute is not merely a tactical one — it goes to the heart of how Democrats envision themselves becoming a majority party. The question is whether that is accomplished through a focus on kitchen-table topics like health care and jobs, aimed at winning moderates and disaffected Trump voters, or by unapologetically elevating matters of race and identity, such as immigration, to mobilize young people and minorities with new fervor.

Julián Castro, the former federal housing secretary and mayor of San Antonio who is running for the Democratic nomination, said reclaiming the Midwest should be Democrats’ “top priority.” He said Trump had plainly failed voters there, “whether it’s been on trade or the loss of jobs at GM.”

But Castro also urged the party to stretch the electoral map far deeper into Republican territory, suggesting that, with the right candidate, Democrats could deal Trump a crippling blow by turning even Texas blue.

“The Sun Belt is clearly turning against him,” Castro said of the president, adding, “I do think candidates that can connect with growing, diverse states like Arizona, Texas, Florida and Georgia, it makes a big difference.”

Castro cited his own historic status to suggest he could do just that: “Among other things, I’m young, and, as a groundbreaking Latino candidate, I’m convinced that the turnout out there in the Latino community will go through the roof.”

Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who narrowly lost the governorship there last year and is considering a Senate bid next year, was even blunter. “The accelerating diversity of the new American majority demands a fresh approach to winning elections, which will yield more representative leadership and policies that serve all,” said Abrams, adding that “our electorate must be built on infrequent voters who share our values.”

But the suggestion that Democrats should de-emphasize what has long been the pre-eminent battleground in presidential politics is enough to rouse deep anger among officeholders in the Midwest.

“It drives me crazy,” said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who rolled to an easy victory last year in a state Trump narrowly won. “To put any particular part of the country into a general classification and write them off is ridiculous.”

Whitmer said she won “by going into areas most Democrats wouldn’t spend their time going.” She added, “You show up at a bowling alley.”

To other Democrats in the region, it is not just a matter of showing up. The approach to policy matters, too.

In contrast to those on the left who say the only way to win is to energize progressives with an ambitious agenda, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin said the party would do best in his state with a pragmatic candidate who recognized that dramatic policy proposals — like free college and “Medicare for all” — were aspirational goals rather than do-or-die demands.

“I think Wisconsin is very winnable,” Evers said. “But it has to be someone that speaks to the issues but also is viewed as rational.”

Asked if the Upper Midwest represented Democrats’ fastest route back to the White House, Evers, a soft-spoken former state education official, answered with a twinkle-eyed smile. “Hell yes,” he said.

To Democrats in the Midwest, the cardinal sin of the 2016 campaign was Clinton’s failure to deliver a concrete and persuasive economic message, leaving traditionally Democratic blue-collar constituencies either uninspired to vote or tempted to support Trump.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a longtime ally of Clinton’s who took office this year, said the party should be on offense across the map in 2020. But he described unlocking the Midwest as their paramount imperative, and he urged Democrats to speak in vivid terms about the changing economy and to compete even in rural, conservative-leaning areas that rarely support the party’s candidates.

“You cannot get to the White House without winning the Midwest,” Pritzker said, arguing that economic issues transcended other social divisions in much of the region. “You do have to be able to speak to people where the manufacturing base has been eroded, where the skills gap is widening, where the jobs are changing.”

But Pritzker said the 2020 Democratic ticket had to mirror the party’s complex coalition, too. “It’s hard to believe that our party, which is truly representative of the diversity of America, could ever again put forward a ticket that’s two white men, for sure, or two white people,” he said.

The more serious risk to backing away from the Midwest, Democrats here and elsewhere say, is that the party could endanger its newly won House majority and all but concede a long-term Republican majority in the Senate by not plowing top-of-the-ticket resources across the Great Lakes region.

“If you can’t make the case to — and you don’t show up for — rural voters, you’re never going to have the Senate, so you’re never going to be able to govern,” said Tom Vilsack, the former agriculture secretary and Iowa governor.

For many Democrats, there is no choice to be made. While the Midwest might be enough to win them the presidency, only sweeping victories across both regions would be enough to secure the White House and both chambers of Congress.

The stakes for Democrats may be highest in the Senate, where they face a structural disadvantage because of the outsized clout of rural conservative states. Party leaders have increasingly looked to the Sun Belt — and recruits like Abrams and Beto O’Rourke in Texas — to offset Democrats’ growing weakness in the Farm Belt and the rural West.

“One of the big lessons we learned in 2018 is that the party as a whole needs to think bigger than it traditionally has and create a larger footprint in the map,” said Dan Sena, a New Mexico-raised strategist who masterminded the Democrats’ House takeover last year by pushing the party to compete for once-forbidding seats in both Iowa and Georgia.

And of course, the Democrats aspiring to be president have the most interest in a both-paths approach.

Klobuchar may have vowed she would “not leave the Midwest behind,” but last weekend she sped to Atlanta and paid a visit to Abrams and former President Jimmy Carter. And Brown spent the weekend in the increasingly diverse, and Democratic, early nominating state of Nevada.

“We need to compete among working-class voters of all races everywhere in the country,” he said by phone Sunday as he made his way through the Las Vegas airport, arguing that his “message works everywhere.”

But Brown was just as quick to point out that no Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio, and he offered what amounts to a chilling reminder to Democrats when asked about the wisdom of downplaying the Midwest.

“I don’t want to wake up the day after the election in 2020 and win the popular vote by 4.5 million and lose the Electoral College,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/us/politics/democrats-2020-midwest-voters.html" id="da4c4247-40e1-3a1c-a45f-67942b3e21d4">The New York Times</a>.

Rust Belt, Sun Belt or Both? Democrats Seek the Best Route to the White House

DES MOINES — At the very first event of her first full day in Iowa as a presidential candidate, Sen. Kamala Harris was greeted by a Democratic voter who delivered a pointed recommendation about the best path to the White House.

With polls indicating that electoral viability is as important to voters as any policy issue, a handful of the party’s prospects are already holding up their Midwestern credentials to make the case that they are the ones who can turn Big 10 country — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin — blue again.

To succeed as a black candidate in 1989, Wilder had to patiently accommodate the one-time segregationist Democrats and the state’s Lost Cause Confederate heritage. He had to win over some of the foes who had defeated his attempt to establish a state holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He had to appear in proximity to the Confederate monuments that dot courthouse lawns and Civil War battlefields across Virginia without raising a whisper.

In the end, Wilder won by less than one-half of 1 percent of the vote — far closer than polls indicated he would. His white Democratic running mate, tellingly, won by a far greater margin. Still, as John Warner, the former Republican senator of Virginia, put it recently, “It was a monumental chapter not just in Virginia history but in American history.”

That state history on race and politics is under intense scrutiny. Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, both Democrats, are facing calls to resign for wearing blackface in separate incidents as young men. The most powerful Republican state senator, Thomas K. Norment Jr., is defending himself for his role decades ago editing a college yearbook that contained racist photos and slurs. Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, the state’s second black politician to win statewide office, is facing two allegations of sexual assault that has imperiled his job and likely extinguished his hopes to be someday be elected Virginia’s second black governor.

The revelations of not-so-long-ago racist behavior by top leaders, which turned the Capitol into a veritable soundstage for a mind-bending political thriller over the last week, are testing the state’s image as a progressive-minded, New South beacon that backed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for president.

With the political crisis showing few signs of abating — Virginia’s Democratic congressional delegation renewed calls Thursday night for Northam to resign — the major question is how willing Virginia’s leaders and voters are to punish the transgressions of a younger Northam and Herring for behavior from a less-enlightened era before Wilder’s election.

“We’re going to have to have a greater understanding all-around of what Virginia was like, and I’m not sure today’s standards should go back 30 to 40 years ago, when people were in college,” said Jerry Kilgore, a former state attorney general.

In truth, the firestorm over blackface photos is only the latest example of Virginia suffering humiliations over racism that cause pain to its residents and tarnish its well-burnished reputation. The state’s ample self-regard has suffered blow after blow, in part because of its unwillingness to fully reckon with a past that, while not as violent toward its black citizens, was no less ugly than its Deep South brethren.

In 2006, then-Sen. George F. Allen, a Republican, stumbled into the national spotlight by pointing a finger at an Indian-American Democrat videotaping his campaign appearance and referring to the tracker as “macaca,” a slur for dark-skinned Africans.

In 2017, a simmering local clash in Charlottesville over the city’s Robert E. Lee statue became a worldwide story when a white supremacist rally turned deadly. A year later, for their 2018 nominee for Senate, Republicans backed Corey Stewart, a county official who ran an even balder version of President Donald Trump’s campaign, targeting immigrants and vowing to protect Virginia’s emblems of the Confederacy. (This is to say nothing of the squalid scandal involving the last Republican governor, Robert F. McDonnell, whose term ended in disgrace after he was found to have taken more than $175,000 in loans and gifts from an access-seeking Richmond dietary supplement maker.)

But the cascade of revelations here since the racist images from Northam’s yearbook surfaced last Friday has stung Virginians because the blackface imagery demonstrates how deeply embedded white supremacy is in the state’s not-too-distant past.

Recounting Herring’s tearful confession Wednesday morning to the legislative black caucus that he had once worn blackface, longtime state Sen. L. Louise Lucas choked up for a moment as she recalled the meeting’s emotions.

“I think I would have held it together until I saw the first brother cry,” Lucas said Wednesday night, long after the gathering had broken up. “It was hard to get up from the table and walk away. He said he was sorry.”

Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia professor who has practiced and studied politics in Charlottesville since he arrived as a college student in the early 1970s, said this week should awaken the state.

“This collection of scandals proves beyond a doubt that Virginia has not progressed as far as it thought it has — and it has a past it still hasn’t come to terms with,” said Sabato.

Perhaps that is not a surprise for a state that is still littered with Confederate iconography — the new Amazon headquarters in Arlington will sit hard by Jefferson Davis Highway — and just last month celebrated Lee-Jackson Day, a state holiday. The state Capitol is filled with promotional materials trumpeting the 400th anniversary of the first representative assembly in the new world, which is what makes the General Assembly here the oldest continuous legislative body in America. But this year also marks two other milestones: the 400th anniversary of slaves being brought to Jamestown and the 60th anniversary of Prince Edward County closing its public schools to avoid integrating them.

Yet to those who are eager to see Virginia move beyond its racist past, this past week’s tribulations have obscured the real progress the state has made in recent decades.

It is hard to overstate how important race was to the segregationist Democratic machine, led by Sen. Harry F. Byrd, that controlled Virginia politics for much of the 20th century.

In his seminal 1949 book, “Southern Politics in State and Nation,” scholar V.O. Key Jr. famously called Virginia “a political museum piece” for its efforts to keep blacks and poor whites off the voter rolls.

By comparison, Key wrote, “Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy.”

In fact, the “massive resistance” to integration, which had its origins here, is what extended the political life of the so-called Byrd Organization even as Virginia swelled in the years following World War II.

“In the spring of 1954, however, a new issue appeared on the horizon which was to retrieve the fortunes of the Byrd organization,” wrote J. Harvie Wilkinson III, now a federal judge, in his book “Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics.” “The issue was school desegregation, and under the banner of ‘massive resistance’ the Byrd machine quickly refueled its sputtering engines.”

But even well after the death of the Jim Crow era, Virginia politicians had little choice but to tread gingerly on matters of race.

To earn his party’s blessing to become lieutenant governor in 1985, Wilder had to win over one of his foes, the powerful state House speaker and an old Byrd disciple A.L. Philpott. That was three years after Philpott blocked Wilder’s attempt to enact a state holiday honoring King.

Then, as a candidate for governor, Wilder campaigned aggressively across rural parts of the state, such as Philpott’s Southside, where the Confederacy was enshrined in history.

“Back then, that was pretty smart politics,” said Paul Goldman, a former chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party who was the architect of Wilder’s historic victory. (Wilder called on Northam to resign after the governor’s cringe-inducing news conference Saturday, but he has remained silent about the issues surrounding Fairfax and Herring.)

Even now, the Jim Crow era of racist behavior like blackface is hardly an ancient epoch in Virginia.

“If you’re 50 years old, when were you born? The ‘60s, the ‘70s. The state was just coming out of segregation. Your parents, everybody else, were part of it,” Goldman said.

But Wilder’s election did not fully bind up the state’s wounds, and the decades since have been met with both advancements and setbacks.

In 2006, Virginia Democrats pried the first of two Senate seats away from Republicans by nominating Jim Webb. Webb was a former Navy secretary in the Reagan administration who had written and spoken admiringly about the Confederacy’s martial valor. While attending the Shad Planking, the state’s most iconic political event and itself a vestige of the Byrd era, he gladly accepted a Confederate flag lapel sticker.

Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist who advised Webb and helped steer Sen. Mark Warner to the governorship in 2001, said that at the turn of the century there had been stronger traces of explicit racism and Confederate nostalgia in Virginia politics, especially in rural areas.

“The cultures were written in stone, in many ways, and they’re hard to break,” Jarding said. “And that includes racist activities.”

Still, images of blackface and Ku Klux Klan robes “would never have been OK,” as Goldman put it.

Virginians are still coming to grips with this latest chapter in their state’s history, with Northam determined to try to salvage his reputation and keep his job and Herring doing the same but likely having lost his own hopes of becoming governor.

Many state officials are in almost a state of shock, stunned that the ghosts they thought had been banished have returned. As she left the Capitol Wednesday beneath the etched-in-stone Jefferson quote — “The most sacred of the duties of a government to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens” — Senate clerk Susan Clarke Schaar said she had never seen a day like it in her 45 years here.

“Virginia will survive this,” said Warner, the 91-year-old former Republican senator whose hunt country accent and white-plumed appearance evokes the state he served for three decades. “But it has been a tragic few days.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/us/politics/virginia-scandal-racist-history.html" id="7d7c62ab-c743-326e-a307-9f9b331f2d54">The New York Times</a>.

Virginia's Racist History Clashes With New South Image

RICHMOND, Va. — L. Douglas Wilder, a grandson of slaves, became America’s first elected black governor 30 years ago, winning in Virginia in part by finessing the racist history of the state that is now roiling its politics once more.

That state history on race and politics is under intense scrutiny. Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, both Democrats, are facing calls to resign for wearing blackface in separate incidents as young men. The most powerful Republican state senator, Thomas K. Norment Jr., is defending himself for his role decades ago editing a college yearbook that contained racist photos and slurs. Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, the state’s second black politician to win statewide office, is facing an allegation of sexual assault that has imperiled his job.

In 2017, a simmering local clash in Charlottesville over the city’s Robert E. Lee statue became a worldwide story when a white supremacist rally turned deadly. A year later, for their 2018 nominee for Senate, Republicans backed Corey Stewart, a county official who ran an even balder version of President Donald Trump's campaign, targeting immigrants and vowing to protect Virginia’s emblems of the Confederacy. (This is to say nothing of the squalid scandal involving the last Republican governor, Robert F. McDonnell, whose term ended in disgrace after he was found to have taken more than $175,000 in loans and gifts from an access-seeking Richmond dietary supplement maker.)

To earn his party’s blessing to become lieutenant governor in 1985, Wilder had to win over one of his foes, the powerful state House speaker and an old Byrd disciple A.L. Philpott. That was three years after Philpott blocked Wilder's attempt to enact a state holiday honoring King.

“Back then, that was pretty smart politics,” said Paul Goldman, a former chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party who was the architect of Wilder's historic victory. (Wilder called on Northam to resign after the governor’s cringe-inducing news conference Saturday, but he has remained silent about the issues surrounding Fairfax and Herring.)

But Wilder's election did not fully bind up the state’s wounds, and the decades since have been met with both advancements and setbacks.

As the 2020 Democratic primary gets underway, the defining characteristic of this first stage of the race is the sheer uncertainty about who is even running. More than 30 Democrats are mulling presidential bids, but hardly any of them qualifies as an instant front-runner or a gifted, tested campaigner, and some of the biggest names could pass in the end.

Even beyond the field of specific candidates, this will be one of the most fluid nominating contests Democrats have had in recent decades. A leaderless party, they are in a moment of transition from center-left politics to a more ideologically pure brand of liberalism.

Democrats are grappling with what they stand for, what their voters expect, and what demographic groups will be most critical in winning an Electoral College majority in 2020. But most of all, they are unified by a once-unimaginable objective that only illustrates how unpredictable American politics has become: ensuring Donald Trump is just a one-term president.

— Who’s Going to Run?

It is hard to recall a recent presidential primary where, at the outset of the race, there was this much genuine mystery — not only about who would eventually emerge as the nominee, but who planned to run at all.

Warren’s announcement Monday was expected. And it will not be a surprise when Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California enter the race in the coming weeks.

But the number of would-be candidates who may ultimately stay out of the race is larger than the list of contenders who are certain to run.

There are the well-known, or at least much-buzzed-about, Democrats who are still deliberating: Former Vice President Joe Biden is the most prominent of this group, and leads the field in initial polling in Iowa. But there is also great anticipation over Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the runner-up for the Democratic nomination in 2016, and Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, whose losing Senate bid this year electrified many grassroots Democrats.

It is unclear if any of these men will enter the race — particularly Biden, who, associates say, is ambivalent about running after over three decades of presidential fits and starts.

There is also great uncertainty about lesser-known potential contenders who could be formidable — and if the Trump phenomenon proves anything, it is that making any assumptions about candidates is folly.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s formation of an exploratory committee for president Monday represents a sort of political ball drop, the beginning of a new year and new campaign that will feature an unusually large number of Democrats seeking the presidency.

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

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