KEENE, N.H. — A snapshot of the Biden coalition emerged from conversations with voters in New Hampshire as former Vice President Joe Biden hosted a health care town hall at Dartmouth College on Friday afternoon and delivered his stump speech on the quad at Keene State College on Saturday morning before several hundred supporters.
Biden, who began the summer with an uneven debate performance on June 27 when California Senator Kamala Harris questioned his record on race, finished the season where he started: atop the polls as the clear front-runner. Despite a series of minor gaffes and verbal miscues that continued over the weekend, his support remains the broadest in the field, with key constituencies behind the former Vice President for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to his perceived electability in a general election matchup with President Donald Trump.
"Joe's the middle-class candidate as you can tell by the crowd," said Ron Bart of Peterborough, New Hampshire after listening to Biden at Keene State. Bart, who is deciding between the former Vice President and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, said that he was "really impressed by his commitment to civility," something that he said she lacked.
Monalisa Dupiton, a Massachusetts resident and Biden supporter who traveled across the state line for the event in Keene, said that she was a Democrat and voted twice for former President Barack Obama. An immigrant and a person of color, Dupiton said she was familiar with Biden from the Obama administration and approved of his job performance under the first black president. "I know him," she said. "I know how much he can do."
Two senior citizens seated in the last row at the Dartmouth town hall defended Biden from the charges leveled by Harris at the first debates and said that they saw the 76-year-old as one of their own. "We weren't born enlightened in our younger life," said Cathleen Gerwig, a Biden supporter from New London, New Hampshire. "We had to learn it. I'm very comfortable with someone who has walked the same road." Liz Bucklin of Lebanon, New Hampshire added, "If you never made a mistake in your life, I don't think you'd be a good candidate."
Others powerfully testified to his impact on their personal lives as a politician who has been shaped by grief, loss and hardship. Keene State student Jack Kelleher emerged from the scrum around Biden after the speech with a wide-eyed smile across his face. He said Biden asked for his phone number when he told the former Vice President that they had something in common. "I'm someone who's had a stutter most of my life," he said. "Joe Biden, he had a stutter when he was young. He's an inspiration to me."
His brother and fellow Keene State student Peter Kelleher said that they also had a history of cancer in their family and appreciated Biden's longtime efforts to find a cure for the disease. The former Vice President lost his son Beau Biden to brain cancer in 2015 and has made medical research a cornerstone of his health care plan in 2020.
And finally, some attributed their support for Biden to his perceived electability, an argument that former Second Lady Jill Biden made in Manchester, New Hampshire last week. Even then, they usually referenced his fiery speaking style or his moderate positions rather than his head-to-head poll numbers or his Electoral College math. "I think you have to fight Trump with an aggressive posture, not necessarily reasoning," said Bill Ferriter, a retired doctor from Florida who was visiting his old home in the Upper Valley.
His wife Diane Ferriter added that Biden was the only candidate "established" and "not extreme" enough to bring the country — as well as her own family — together. "The extreme isn't going to work," she said. She credited his support for a public option rather than Medicare for All.
While ideological moderates, self-described members of the middle class, people of color and senior citizens appeared to form the backbone of the Biden coalition, just as informative from the conversations were those who did not like the former Vice President.
Bliss Austin-Spencer, a mother from Cambridge, Massachusetts who attended with two of her teenage kids, said she was "shocked" by Biden's performance at Dartmouth. She called him "disconnected" and "tone-deaf" on women's issues for several remarks in the final minutes of his question-and-answer session, one of which expressed sympathy for a Marine who confessed to a grisly rape and murder. "I'm just shocked and I thought I knew Joe Biden, but I don't," she said. "I saw a rambling old man."
The media coverage of the town hall in particular picked up on the same narrative, as a New York Times report led with two of the "unusual rhetorical detours" the former Vice President took as his seventy-minute appearance drew to a close. After recalling the assassinations of his two political heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, in 1968, Biden looked at younger voters in the audience and speculated "imagine what would have happened if, God forbid, Barack Obama had been assassinated." He also told the crowd that he was "such a big supporter of the [Equal Rights Amendment] in 1972" that his detractors said "he's probably gay."
Yet most of his supporters seemed not to notice as Biden laid out his health care plan in detail for twenty minutes from behind the podium and then answered questions from the audience for another fifty, something he did not do during his last trip to New Hampshire on July 12-13. As he eased into the question-and-answer session, Biden started to walk up and down the long aisles in the second-floor room at Dartmouth to get closer to his voters.
"He has so far exceeded my expectations," Ferriter, the retired doctor, said excitedly midway through the town hall.
Biden started with the personal acknowledgement that "I've spent a lot of time in the hospital myself" — his two sons recovered for weeks in the hospital after the 1972 car accident that killed his wife and daughter and his son Beau Biden later battled brain cancer for two years. He thanked the local nurse who introduced him. "Doctors let you live, but nurses make you want to live," he said. "They know how to give you hope."
He called for more nurses nationwide, particularly for mental health, before stepping back and beginning with a guiding principle of his campaign. "I am really very, very concerned about the state of the nation," he said. "At the same time, I am absolutely frustrated that we have the ability in our hands to fundamentally change things and make the United States such a better place than it is today."
The effort to convince moderates that he would not support pie-in-the-sky policies and liberals that he would actually achieve forward-looking change continued throughout his discussion of health care. He described the issue as "an area of important difference between the candidates," which required "level-setting and being honest with the American people."
His plan centered around the Affordable Care Act, which he said provided 100 million Americans with protections for preexisting conditions. "I told President Obama that it was a big deal or something to that affect," he said to laughter from the crowd. Yet he wanted to "finish the job" with a public option within Obamacare, a proposal that he said would cost "a lot of money" at $740 billion over ten years but still one-thirtieth of the $30 billion estimated for a single-payer system.
In the same vein, he pledged to lift the cap of government subsidies towards private insurance under Obamacare to 400 percent of the federal poverty line and to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices before he pivoted to a whole different area that no other Democratic candidate has spent significant time talking about: medical research.
"We're on the cusp of so many significant breakthroughs in cancer — right here at the Cotton Cancer Center — diabetes, Alzheimer's, so many diseases that impact on our families," he said. He recalled the role of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), founded in 1958, in the development of the Internet, GPS-based navigation and self-driving vehicles over the last sixty years and called for the creation of a new advanced research projects agency for health.
The former Vice President who led the "cancer moonshot" initiative in the last years of the Obama administration gave several examples of projects that his agency could launch in the first six months of his administration, including the development of next generation of MRI machines, brain-controlled robotic prostheses and clinical trials for alternative treatments to the most expensive drugs.
The proposal stuck out for several of the undecided voters in attendance, both at Dartmouth and the next day at Keene State. Bart, a retired military technician, found the idea particularly intriguing and Kelleher, who mentioned the history of cancer in his family, also approved.
During the question-and-answer session in Hanover, New Hampshire, Biden covered a range of additional health care issues. He committed to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2025, reduce Parkinson's drug pricing and incentivize medical students to serve in rural hospitals with free tuition.
He could have wrapped up then around forty minutes into the town hall, satisfied by one of his most informative, focused and inspiring public appearances of the campaign. The room of 300-400 seats was packed and an overflow room held another couple hundred after a long line snaked around the outside of the building an hour before he arrived. A long row of media cameras in the back captured photos and videos of him in the middle of the audience, strolling up and down the aisles and looking voters in the eye.
But he continued on and answered questions on climate change and education before the "unusual rhetorical detours" that the Times reported and the "tone-deaf" comments that shocked voters like Austin-Spencer. He did not take questions the following day in Keene, New Hampshire, which was billed as a community event rather than a town hall, but he did spend almost a half hour shaking hands and taking pictures with voters after his speech.
The two events captivated audiences and floored voters one way or the other, as Biden went off on a roller coaster of stream-of-consciousness stories not unlike his hypothetical general election opponent. "That was unreal," said Ferriter when Biden finally concluded his remarks at Dartmouth. The retired doctor and Florida resident wanted "an aggressive posture, not necessarily reasoning" to take down Trump.
A Massachusetts native who attended the Keene State event and planned to vote for Biden, Linda Schechterle, called the former Vice President the "opposite" of Trump because of "who he is." She said that Biden was "clearly a good man with a good heart, a good soul."
As Democrats and independents across the country have recoiled from the President over the past three years, the question of whether Biden, a 76-year-old with a history of rhetorical gaffes and periodic lapses in sensitivity, is too much like Trump or the perfect foil for Trump will decide the primary more than any other.
In his own way, Biden left the crowd at Dartmouth with that message to a roar of laughter and applause from supporters both old and young. "'I am the savior!'" Biden mimicked in a low voice the latest tweet from Trump before cutting himself off and turning to the crowd. "I mean, come on man? Anyway, good night folks."
This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.
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