Hold your nose and vote for Joe!
That’s basically the message from Dr. Jill Biden, wife of presidential hopeful and former Vice President Joe Biden, who recently told Democrats that they might have to “swallow a little bit” in order to vote for her lackluster husband, since, like it or not, he’s the most electable candidate in the field.
“Your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, healthcare, than Joe is,” Mrs. Biden said, “but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘Okay, I personally like so-and-so better,’ but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.”
Rough stuff.
It’s a decent argument, but one you might expect to hear from a competing Democratic candidate who was bested in the primary, not a candidate’s wife, before the primary has really gotten underway, to boot.
“Yes, I know that not all of you are committed to my husband, and I respect that,” Mrs. Biden continued, “but I want you to think about your candidate, his or her electability, and who’s going to win this race.”
“If you’re looking at that, you’ve got to look at the polls,” the former Second Lady said, noting that people should ignore the “polls don’t mean anything” chants because of their consistency: “If they’re consistent, and they’re consistently saying the same thing, I think you can’t dismiss that.”
“If your goal is to beat Donald Trump, we have to get someone who can beat Donald Trump,” she added, emphasizing that Democrats need to gain on Independent and disaffected Republican voters.
WATCH:
In not so unflattering language as his wife’s, a TV ad for the former VP emphasizes that he is the best hope to beat President Trump come 2020. “We all know in our bones that this election is different. The stakes are higher. The threat is more serious. We have to beat Donald Trump. We have to beat Donald Trump, and all the polls agree — Joe Biden is the strongest Democrat to do the job,” the narrator in the ad says, as reported by Real Clear Politics.
Despite gaffe after gaffe, Biden has been the consistent frontrunner in the Democrat field. In a CNN/SSRS poll released on Tuesday, Biden’s support surged from 22% to 29% from June to August. The closest Democrat candidate to Biden is Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), with 15%; Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) lands in third with 14%.