PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — At a New Hampshire Young Democrats fundraiser on Friday night, former Vice President Joe Biden highlighted his early career as one defined by insurgent opposition to the Southern Democrats that controlled his home state of Delaware in the late 1960s.
"I got engaged with a group of young Democrats to change the Democratic Party in Delaware from a Southern Democratic Party to a mainstream Democratic Party," Biden said.
The former Vice President told the crowd of young people, union firefighters and party officials that he got into politics because of the nine-month occupation of Wilmington, Delaware by the National Guard after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. "The problem at the time was we had a Southern Democratic governor," he said, a reference to then-Delaware Governor Charles Terry, the law-and-order Democrat who directed the lengthy occupation.
The comments, delivered at the beginning of the keynote speech, followed a month of scrutiny over Biden's remarks on two segregationist senators. At a New York City fundraiser on June 19, Biden reflected fondly on his working relationship with Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland and Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge in the 1970s.
After New Jersey Senator Cory Booker called on him to apologize and California Senator Kamala Harris criticized his remarks as "hurtful" at the first Democratic debates, Biden expressed regret in South Carolina on July 6.
While Biden did not return to his 36 years in the Senate on Friday, he sought to change the narrative around his record on race and his relationship with Southern Democrats by redirecting attention to the earliest days of his five-decade career in politics, when he led two grassroots campaigns that reshaped the Democratic Party in his state.
The message also echoed a major theme of the night — the power of young people to flip seats from red to blue at the local level. Biden described how his 1970 campaign for county council in New Castle County mobilized young people to knock off an incumbent Republican. "They started calling it 'the kiddie campaign' to make fun of it. But we won. And we won in a district that no Democrat had ever won," he said.
Two years later, Biden followed the same blueprint in his first campaign for Senate. He said that "20,000 volunteers, mostly high school students" worked for him in the lead-up to the 1972 election, the first after the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen years old. Biden won that Senate election by 3,100 votes and once again credited young people. "You have more influence on how your parents vote than they have on you," he said.
Yet Biden was far from the favorite candidate of some young people at the event. Pamela Baker, 32, of Nashua, New Hampshire said that she "almost didn't come because he was the candidate" and fellow Nashua resident Adriana Lopera, 31, said that she "will not vote for Biden" in the primary. Both agreed that "there are much more interesting candidates."
After a speech earlier in the afternoon in Dover, New Hampshire, Biden was confronted by a dozen activists with the New Hampshire Youth Movement and Movimiento Cosecha, a national immigrant rights groups, over his role in the 3 million deportations under the Obama administration.
Other young people remained open to Biden. Zach Norver, 21, of Bedford, New Hampshire said he "really favored Bernie" in the 2016 primary, but is undecided for the 2020 contest. After the speech, Norver praised Biden's remarks on "getting involved" and "why being active in politics is important."
Nathaniel Hunt, 19, of Rochester, New Hampshire found his message to young people "extremely motivating." But Hunt and his older brother, Jonah Hunt, 21, also valued "the fact that he was so strong about his support for others" and his "commitment to break his neck to support whatever candidate" wins the Democratic nomination.
"That's why I promise you, if I'm your nominee or not, whoever the nominee is, I'm going to break my neck to make sure they get elected president," Biden said after inveighing against President Donald Trump's response to the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally, his equivocation on Russian election interference, his "love letters" for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and his family separation policy at the border.
"We all know if we give this guy four more years, it's going to forever change the character of this country," he said.
This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.
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