These days, we all could use a little good news. I just watched the first of two streamed lectures by Professor David Domke of the University of Washington. The title of the two-part series is "How Joe Biden Can Win."
Domke is a professor in the Department of Communications, and until recently was the department's chair. He is also co-founder of a Seattle organization called "Common Purpose," created to promote "a just and inclusive democracy founded on the sanctity of voting." I attended a lecture series by Domke four years ago, analyzing the 2016 election as it progressed, based on his travels about the nation talking with local political figures. He is an excellent speaker, and in 2002 won the University's Distinguished Teaching Award.
The good news is the conclusion he reached at the end of today's lecture -- that while the election remains competitive, Biden is "well-positioned" to win. The four critical factors in his favor are:
1. Biden's strong position within the African-American community, a factor that has become even more critical after the past week's demonstrations. Biden is celebrated among blacks not only for his association with President Obama, but his ability and willingness to serve as vice president under an African-American president without showing any sense of white superiority.
2. His demonstrated ability to intertwine the story of his own life with the story of the American myth. That myth proclaims that we are a resilient people; that we are a good and decent people; and that, as a people, we are not naturally divided into hostile factions, but are "in this all together."
3. His success in having the center and center-left factions of the Democratic party coalesce behind him in the primaries. He thus enters the general election campaign representing moderate positions that appeal to the electorate as a whole. He does not have the Democratic candidate's usual task of pulling back from extreme positions necessarily taken during the primary campaigns in order to win the nomination.
4. The strong concern among both Democratic and independent voters about the leadership qualifications of President Trump, brought to the fore by the president's actions with respect to both the coronavirus pandemic and to the national revulsion resulting from the recent police murders.
Domke pointed out that recent polls show both candidates holding about the same support from their party members as Trump and Clinton did in 2016, with Biden doing perhaps slightly better than Ms. Clinton. But independents, who voted for Trump by a significant margin in 2016, now break for Biden 45 to 35 percent, according to a poll today by NBC.
Dr. Domke's second lecture, on Thursday, will focus specifically on the Trump leadership issue.
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