In October 1984, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware was invited to speak at a conservative Baptist church near Wilmington as he campaigned for a third term.
Biden, hardly a favorite of social conservatives, was in hostile political territory. But as the incumbent, he was given the first space to speak – and he used it to keep the courtroom uninterrupted for nearly an hour. Biden’s Republican opponent barely managed to introduce himself before the event ended, while the dozens of other candidates present at the forum never said a word.
The episode, from “Only in Delaware,” a political history of Delaware written by Celia Cohen, a longtime Wilmington journalist, illustrates the ease with which Biden was able to sweep aside opponents — not just in that race, but in his entire Senate. career. The assignment gave him an impressive advantage.
In 30 years, Biden has never encountered a serious threat to his office. His Republican opponents were underfunded, little known, inexperienced, or some combination of the three. None of them received more than 41% of the votes against him.
His re-election fight against former President Donald J. Trump — his 13th run for federal office in all — is turning out to be the opposite of his long-running Senate campaigns: travel-intensive, unpleasant. and fierce. A rival is, for the first time, with him at the top of the ticket, forcing him to present convincing arguments for his return.
Before his 2020 presidential campaign, which in the general election saw few in-person events because of the coronavirus pandemic, Biden never had a harshly negative ad about his record in office or his character broadcast against him on television, according to the archive of Congressional radio and television advertisements at the University of Oklahoma’s Carl Albert Congressional Studies and Research Center. None of his Senate rivals attacked him on TV, and he ended his two previous presidential campaigns before opponents began attacking him.
Republicans who ran against Biden in Delaware described him as a strong incumbent, widely liked and much quicker during debates and candidate forums than the president they see today. Biden has stepped up his travel schedule with a flurry of carefully managed visits to battleground states in recent weeks, and the 81-year-old president is expected to keep up the momentum, avoiding the kind of verbal missteps that often dog his public appearances.
Last week, Biden led the crowd at an endorsement event to chant, “Four more years!” and then added “pause,” as it appeared to be written on his teleprompter, an episode that provoked much mockery in conservative media and forehead slaps among Democrats.
In Delaware, Biden was so well known and, in his first years in office, had so much sympathy from voters after the tragic accident that killed his first wife and daughter, that no rival ever made a sustained case that he should not be reelected. For years, bumper stickers promoting his reelection said simply “Joe,” while his opponents lost with a series of long-forgotten slogans.
“I don’t think he ever broke a sweat when he came into office,” said Jane Brady, a Republican who lost to Biden by 27 points in 1990.
The only negative ad that ran against Biden between 1978 and 2008, according to the University of Oklahoma archive, is the one his campaign would likely adopt today. This 30-second ad reminded viewers that President Ronald Reagan supported John Burris, Biden’s 1984 Republican challenger, while Biden supported the unpopular Democratic presidential candidate, Walter Mondale.
Biden, the ad claimed, opposed Reagan 58% of the time – not exactly in line with the Republican president. “You have a choice,” intoned the narrator. “The Reagan-Burris team, the Mondale-Biden team, or no team.”
Biden won by 20 points.
Now a 78-year-old retiree, Burris said it was prohibitive for him to become as well-known to voters as Biden already was. So he tried to anger Biden to expose his temper and “create a Bad Joe” who would undermine Biden’s likable image. When counting, Biden did not take the bait.
“While Trump has absolutely no qualms about going to the most basic level possible to try to get a result, I saw Joe going into this very reluctantly,” Burris said. “The whole scene right now is not emblematic of what he’s used to doing.”
When Biden first won election to the Senate in 1972, in a year when Democrats won sweeping victories in Delaware, he ousted Senator Caleb Boggs, a two-term Republican and former governor who had been in office in Delaware for 30 years. years. Biden’s radio ads coyly suggested that Boggs was pro-heroin and said he was trapped in a generation preoccupied with Joseph Stalin. The ads ended with an upbeat slogan – “Joe Biden: He Understands What’s Happening Today.”
Once elected, Biden and his early opponents sought to respect the “Delaware Way,” an informal political code that demanded a clubhouse politeness that had the effect of blurring differences between the two parties. Mr. Biden’s children and Mr. Burris’s stepson went to school together. For years after the campaign, the two men played golf together, and as vice president, Biden took Burris and his granddaughter to the White House.
In the 1990s, this dynamic slowly began to change, although Biden’s Senate opponents did not yet have the resources to mount a negative campaign against him. Brady, in his 1990 campaign, sought to capitalize on the plagiarism scandal that doomed Biden’s 1988 presidential bid. But without money to amplify the embarrassing story on television, Brady’s campaign spliced together 11 minutes of network news footage telling the story on 40,000 VHS tapes and sent them to addresses on Delaware’s voter rolls.
The episode sparked protests from the Biden campaign and news networks. NBC filed a formal protest alleging copyright infringement. But few people actually saw the spliced footage. Brady’s campaign had a voter list full of outdated addresses, and she said campaign volunteers ended up fishing VHS tapes out of Wilmington post office trash bins so they could distribute them at parades and other local campaign stops.
“I wasn’t raising a lot of money and no one thought I could win,” Brady said. “It was a very tough experience.”
Biden’s opponent in 1996 and 2002 was Ray Clatworthy, a businessman who owned restaurants and local Christian radio stations. During a televised debate in 1996, Clatworthy accused Biden of raising taxes while voting to raise his own salary and accused him of “trying to portray himself as a conservative” in an election year.
Biden spoke quickly and precisely, without entering into the verbal dead ends endemic to many of his presidential speeches 28 years later.
Biden sought to define Clatworthy on his anti-abortion stance and then made a clear statement of his own views on the issue after Clatworthy accused him of changing direction to endorse abortion rights in his 1988 presidential campaign.
“My position has been consistent from the beginning,” Biden said of his stance on abortion. “I believe the government should stay out of it – no constitutional amendment, no public funding.”
Clatworthy and his family were less passionate about Biden than some of his other former rivals. When Clatworthy died in 2021, his family described his political career this way in a paid obituary: “As a patriot, he ran twice for the United States Senate in Delaware against a gentleman whose name we do not know.”
Trump, 77, is a rare president to be defeated while seeking a second term and has a number of political vulnerabilities, including criminal prosecutions and his role in nullifying the constitutional right to abortion. He has spent most of the days since the start of his New York trial in court, as is required, while Biden campaigned, making stops in swing states.
Biden’s 2024 campaign advisers said his 2020 victory over Trump, who spared little expense in attacking him, is evidence enough that he can run a successful, modern campaign.
“After defeating more than 20 candidates in the primaries, Joe Biden won more votes than any other candidate in our country’s history and became only the third person to defeat a sitting president in the last century,” said Lauren Hitt, Port -voice of the campaign. “This November, he will beat Trump and the naysayers again.”
The last Republican before Trump to try to remove Biden from office was Christine O’Donnell, who in 2008 had already run for Senate once and would achieve political fame two years later when she began a TV ad for a subsequent Senate run with the instantly infamous proclamation, “I am not a witch.”
In a rare interview, O’Donnell, who moved to Florida to attend law school, recounted the obstacles his 2008 campaign faced. She said the Delaware Republican Party opposed her brand of conservative politics. Biden, who was running for vice president, refused to debate her, so she was left to appear alongside her surrogates at candidate forums. She believes some voter fraud cost her votes in the state’s most populous county. (There is no evidence of this.)
“In 2008, Republicans were actually campaigning against me. They were working with Joe Biden to undermine my efforts,” she said. “It’s a shame, because voter fraud aside, people are pretty conservative in Delaware. You could turn this state red with free and fair elections.”
Ms O’Donnell said she planned to present her evidence of this in an eight-part podcast which she hopes to launch this summer.
Kitty Bennett contributed to research.
