Biden should run on a message of abundance - by Noah Smith

The presidential campaigns are heating up, and pretty soon Joe Biden will have to make the case for his reelection. Of course, he can always fall back on a negative message — Donald Trump is an agent of chaos, and every day seems to bring new reminders of that fact. But Americans don’t enjoy voting for the lesser of two evils — they will want to hear why Biden is actively good. This can be tricky; I’ve seen cases where a candidate chose the wrong message. Most notably, I remember Al Gore in 2000 trying to pivot to a sort of left-populist message of “the people vs. the powerful”. It was a very odd choice for a candidate who had just been Vice President for eight years of prosperity. First of all, with average Americans doing better economically than they had ever done before, why would they be in the mood to introduce disruptive class conflict into the equation? It seems like a “stay the course” type of message, like what George H.W. Bush had used in 1988, would have been smarter. And s

The presidential campaigns are heating up, and pretty soon Joe Biden will have to make the case for his reelection. Of course, he can always fall back on a negative message — Donald Trump is an agent of chaos, and every day seems to bring new reminders of that fact. But Americans don’t enjoy voting for the lesser of two evils — they will want to hear why Biden is actively good. This can be tricky; I’ve seen cases where a candidate chose the wrong message. Most notably, I remember Al Gore in 2000 trying to pivot to a sort of left-populist message of “the people vs. the powerful”. It was a very