The end of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign brings with it the end of a long political career that almost never came about in the first place. As is our tradition at Daily Kos Elections, we’re taking a look at Biden’s rapid and surprising rise in Delaware politics that began in the early 1970s, when he went up against a pair of Republican incumbents whom almost everyone else thought were unbeatable.
The First State was far from the Democratic bastion it is now back in 1970 when Biden, then a 27-year-old attorney, first sought a seat on the New Castle County Council. Richard Nixon had in fact narrowly taken Delaware’s three electoral votes two years earlier by beating Democrat Hubert Humphrey 45-42; the balance went to George Wallace, the longtime segregationist who was campaigning on a third-party ticket.
Democrats were in worse shape further down the ballot. Republicans held both of Delaware’s U.S. Senate seats and its lone House district, and the 1968 elections had left them in control of the governorship and with large majorities in both chambers of the legislature. And Democrats didn’t seem to be in any position to make gains in the foreseeable future.
“There was a party, but it was not what you’d call a party,” Henry Topel, who held the unenviable role of serving as party chairman, would tell Jules Witcover decades later for his book “Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption.” “It was a token.”
It was during this bleak time that John Daniello, a member of the Democratic minority on the New Castle County Council, sought to recruit Biden to run against a Republican colleague, as he would recount to Witcover.
Daniello was waging an uphill campaign for the state’s open U.S. House seat against Republican state Rep. Pete du Pont, whose family had founded the eponymous chemical giant (Witcover explained that the du Ponts “largely controlled” the Democratic Party, too), and a mutual acquaintance argued that Biden would be an asset to the ticket.
According to Daniello, though, the young attorney initially showed little appetite for a long-shot bid to unseat Republican Councilman Lawrence Messick.
“He was interested in foreign affairs and history and really had no interest in ‘local politics,'” Daniello remembered. “I think he used that terminology.” Daniello, though, made the case that if Biden were to have a future in federal politics, he had to “start somewhere.” And should Biden win, he’d still be able to practice law: As Daniello pointed out, because the County Council gathered at night across the street from Biden’s law firm, he’d have time to hold two jobs.
But still, other members of Biden’s family were considerably more excited about the idea than the would-be candidate. His wife, Neilia, wanted him to challenge Messick, and his sister, Valerie, agreed to lead his nascent effort at a time when women rarely ran campaigns. Biden’s brothers, Frank and Jimmy, also played a key role in organizing the effort.
While he was eventually persuaded to run, though, few gave Biden much chance at victory in a constituency that William Golin, who was then a teenage volunteer for the campaign, would describe in a 2020 piece for Delaware Online as “a microcosm of American middle-class suburbia.”
But while the local Democratic Party couldn’t match the GOP in resources, Valerie Biden’s reputation as a popular high school teacher―as well as the candidate’s own youth―gave Biden access to a large army of young volunteers. The Wilmington Evening Journal’s Jane Harriman favorably described these supporters’ reactions to Biden as “often one squeak above the equal of a Beatlemaniac.”
At least one member of the Biden family thought he’d be bigger than the recently disbanded Fab Four. Golin writes that when he asked Valerie Biden if her brother could win, she replied, “Are you kidding? He’s going to be president someday!”
Biden proved to be a charismatic politician and strategic operator. As Witcover noted, he focused on a spike in crime to argue that the current county government had displayed a “deplorable lack of leadership.” He also highlighted that some towns in his district had to pay considerably more for trash collection than other areas, a practice he pledged to put an end to.
The first-time candidate wound up proving the naysayers wrong and beating the odds. While 1970 was another rough year for Delaware Democrats, including Daniello, Biden scored an upset 55-43 victory against Messick even though Republicans retained control of the County Council. (The two former rivals later became friends; Messick met then-Vice President Biden at the White House in 2016 shortly before his death.)
It didn’t take long, though, for Biden to display an early predilection for the type of ill-considered statements and verbal miscues that would become an unwanted trademark during his five decades on the national stage.
Just one week after his victory, he told Harriman that, while Neilia had played a vital role in his win, he now wanted her to remain at home to “mold my children.” He continued, “I’m not a ‘keep ’em barefoot and pregnant’ man but I am all for keeping them pregnant until I have a little girl … the only good thing in the world is kids.”
That same article, which also featured Biden musing that his “friends on the far left” could “justify to me the murder of a white deaf mute for a nickel by five colored guys,” nonetheless featured Harriman’s musing that Biden could be “Delaware’s JFK.” And according to Daniello, Biden was already planning to do what the late Massachusetts Democrat had done two decades earlier: take on―and beat―a popular GOP senator.
That senator was Caleb Boggs, a former congressman and governor who was one of the most popular politicians in Delaware. But Boggs, a liberal Republican who would be 63 on Election Day, didn’t want to run against Biden―or anyone else. Longtime Boggs aide William Hildenbrand would tell the United States Senate Historical Office in 1985 that his boss (who was often referred to as “Cale”), had already decided several years earlier that his current term would be his last.
That was not welcome news for Nixon, though, who badly wanted to avoid a potentially nasty primary between du Pont and Wilmington Mayor Harry Haskell. Republican leaders also feared that, without the popular Boggs on the ticket, Gov. Russell Peterson wouldn’t be able to win reelection, despite the GOP’s dominance in the state.
To avoid this scenario, Nixon convened a meeting in 1971 at the Delaware home of financier John Rollins, who had served as lieutenant governor under Boggs in the 1950s. Participants included Boggs, du Pont, Sen. Bill Roth (who was the state’s other senator), and Kansas Sen. Bob Dole. Nixon ultimately managed to convince the reluctant Boggs to seek a third term the next year, a move that seemed to secure the GOP’s hold on his Senate seat.
But while Boggs’ decision deterred well-known Democrats from running, one freshman member of the New Castle County Council sensed an opening. Biden was the intended victim of a new Republican gerrymander, though it’s unlikely he was eager for a long career in county government.
“I’d rather negotiate the toughest foreign policy treaty with any country than have to be involved with a county land-use issue,” a longtime friend remembered Biden saying, according to Witcover.
His Senate campaign, however, got off to a rough start a year ahead of Election Day when Biden referred to himself as a “candidate” but went on to say he was only “90% sure” he would run. That mistake earned him a headline in the Morning Journal that read, “Biden to [oops] MAY try Senate.” But the Democrat, who was far from the last office-seeker to confuse people about his plans, proved to be an effective campaigner once he made it clear he was indeed in the race.
Biden, as Slate’s Jim Newell wrote in a must-read 2019 piece about his first Senate race, once again made use of his youth and charisma, as well as the strong organization skills of his family members, to overcome his minimal name recognition and meager resources. Neilia, who won voters over at coffee gatherings and the chicken festival in rural Sussex County, was a particularly strong surrogate.
The 29-year-old Biden, who would only become eligible to serve in the upper chamber after Election Day, contrasted his age with Boggs’ in ads declaring, “To Cale Boggs, an unfair tax was the 1948 poll tax. To Joe Biden, an unfair tax is the 1972 income tax.” Another went, “Cale Boggs’ generation dreamed of conquering polio. Joe Biden’s generation dreams of conquering heroin.”
Biden also emphasized his opposition to the Vietnam War, an issue that appealed especially to young voters in the first-year election where, thanks to the ratification of the 26th Amendment, 18-year-olds could vote.
However, the councilman was careful not to align too closely with Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, a liberal who was waging a doomed bid against Nixon.
“I’m not as liberal as most people think,” said Biden. He sought to demonstrate his distance from the top of the ticket by saying that, while he opposed racial segregation, he viewed busing merely as a “phony issue which allows the white liberals to sit in suburbia, confident that they are not going to have to live next to a black.”
Not everyone respected his strategy. “Democrats who know insist that Biden is more Conservative than Delaware’s senior senator,” wrote columnist Eleanor Shaw. “That means that in November you can either vote for the oldest young Democrat or the youngest old Republican.”
With the stretch run approaching, both campaigns agreed that Boggs held a formidable lead, though Biden was the first to recognize that it might not hold. Roger Harrison, a member of Biden’s staff, told reporter Stephanie Akin for her 2019 piece in Roll Call that an August survey from Pat Caddell, who was just starting a long career as a pollster, showed that only about a third of voters had heard of Biden. However, they took comfort in the news that 90% of respondents who were familiar with the candidate had a favorable view of him.
As Biden campaigned aggressively to get his name out, Hildenbrand, the Boggs aide, would remember that his boss’ “heart wasn’t in it.” He explained, “In July of the election year, he did not have one billboard up in that state.”
Hildenbrand said that Democrats used the incumbent’s lack of enthusiasm to argue that Boggs would simply resign after winning so that Peterson, the governor, could appoint Haskell, the Wilmington mayor, in his stead. Donald Kirtley, who managed Boggs’ reelection effort, told Akin that, while Boggs had done plenty of in-person campaigning, he was reluctant to “spend big money on something like” radio ads.
It was only well after Labor Day that the senator commissioned a poll that showed just how ineffective his strategy had been. Kirtley summed up the grim trendlines.
“Whereas back in August or July, we were ahead 62 to 18 [percent], something like that,” the campaign manager said, “Joe had come up really rapidly in the two months leading to about the middle of October.”
With a close race finally at hand, national groups from both parties at last directed money to the state. Boggs, meanwhile, planned to go negative with an advertisement in the Wilmington News Journal featuring an image of the moon. “The only thing Biden hasn’t promised you,” read a caption. However, a newspaper driver strike just before Election Day undermined the attack’s reach.
Biden also benefited from a public stumble by Boggs at a debate, an exchange that Richard Ben Cramer recounted in his classic book on presidential candidates, “What It Takes.”
The two “were face-to-face on stage, and some wise-ass asked a trick question about a treaty—the General Amnesty Treaty, or some such arcana,” he wrote. “Boggs was confused. He stumbled around. Poor old guy looked terrible!”
Biden, by contrast, knew all about the treaty but recognized that, in Cramer’s words, “If the beloved sixty-three-year-old did not know what the general amnesty treaty was, well, there was only one thing for a twenty-nine-year-old to say: ‘Aw, I don’t know that one either.'” Biden, writes Cramer, understood at that moment that “he had him. It was destiny.”
Biden went on to pull off an upset for the ages, unseating Boggs in a 50-49 squeaker even as Nixon was carrying Delaware in a 60-39 rout as part of his 49-state landslide. (Peterson, the governor who was supposed to benefit from Boggs’ decision to put off his retirement, lost reelection 51-48 to Democrat Sherman Tribbitt.) Hildenbrand ruefully remembered that the president “never did one thing to help” his Boggs, though Kirtley insisted Nixon had urged the senator to film footage of the two at the White House.
But while the New York Times took notice of the Democrat who was poised to become the youngest person ever elected to the Senate, Biden almost didn’t take office following a tragedy that would mark him for the rest of his life: the death of his wife Neilia and their infant daughter, Naomi, in a car accident that left their sons, Beau and Hunter, badly injured.
Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, however, urged a grief-stricken Biden to remain in the Senate for at least six months, and he even arranged for him to be sworn in at the hospital where his sons were recovering. Biden also received some comforting words from Nixon, who said of Neilia, “[S]he was there when you won a great victory, and you enjoyed it together. And now, I’m sure that she’ll be watching you from now on.”
Biden did indeed join the Senate in 1973 for what would be the start of a singular career. During his first term, the senator would marry Jill Jacobs, who was present at Biden’s victory party for his first upset win.
It would take another 48 years and two failed presidential bids before he could realize his sister’s vision for him, but Biden became a proven vote-getter in a state that was still decades away from becoming solidly Democratic. He won each of his six reelection campaigns by double digits, and he was the only Democrat to win a Senate race in Delaware between 1954 and 2000, when Tom Carper ousted Bill Roth. To this day, Biden holds the distinction of being his state’s longest-serving senator.
Correction: This piece misidentified the Democrat who was elected governor of Delaware in 1972. It was Sherman Tribbitt, not Sherman Cooper.
