Critics Say Biden Is Out of Touch, But His Unity Message Works on Voters

“I know some of the really smart folks say Democrats don’t want to hear about unity. They say Democrats are so angry that the angrier a candidate can be, the better chance he or she has to win the Democratic nomination,” he said, warming up the crowd. “Well, I don’t believe it. I really don’t.”

For Biden, 76, arguing any differently would be disingenuous: His almost 50-year record of friendships with Republicans won’t allow it. In the face of criticism from within his own party, which watched for eight years as he and President Barack Obama courted Republicans, for the most part fruitlessly, the former vice president is betting his campaign on the hope that voters have a little optimism left.

“I’ve got to think there’s at least some decent people still there” among the Republicans in Congress, said Harvey Finkel, 61, of Allentown, Pa. “They’ll be with their own party most of the time, but when they have somebody like Joe Biden that can reach out and knows how to work that kind of thing, I just think they’ve got to get tired of not getting anything done. I mean, we are.”

Biden, who took the stage wearing a blazer and aviator sunglasses but shed them before he spoke, took credit for cajoling three Senate Republicans to support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, and on the campaign trail he’s mentioned getting GOP support for cancer research money just days before Trump took office. But he pointed to the Affordable Care Act, which passed without a single Republican vote, as an example of something worth doing without the other party. “I know how to go toe-to-toe with the GOP,” he said. “But it doesn’t have to be, and it can’t be that way on every issue.”

Other candidates for the Democratic nomination are pushing big policy goals such as “Medicare for All” and the Green New Deal that would all but certainly die in Congress.

“We’re at a very important place in the road here. We need a healer-in-chief, a restorer-in-chief, a uniter-in-chief,” said Debra Puzio, 61, of Media, Pa., who sat on metal bleachers under the shade of a big tree. “I think they go a little far in their progressive views,” said Puzio’s friend Debra Kohn, 62, of Elkins Park, Pa., speaking of Biden’s competition. “I think some of their policies are not doable. They’re just goals.”

So far at least, polls suggest that it’s not just Biden rallygoers who agree with him. He’s maintained—and in some cases expanded—his lead in every major state and national poll of primary voters.

“The only way to tame the beast that is the divisiveness in the nation right now is to reach across the aisle and collaborate with those we don’t agree with,” said Noelle Mouhtarim, 22, a high school teacher from Dover, Del. She’s supported her former senator since he ran for president in 2008. “He’s the one who can do it. He can and has to spread love, acceptance, and collaboration.”

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