He publicly doubted Hurricane Maria’s death toll in Puerto Rico and spread conspiracy theories about it. He reportedly called Haiti a “shithole.” He balked at the idea of allowing Bahamians displaced by Hurricane Dorian into the U.S., explaining that it risked bringing in “some very bad people.”

Since taking office as president, Donald Trump has alienated what looks like a mini-United Nations of voters with deep connections to other countries, tens of thousands of whom live in the state that’s essential to his re-election — Florida.

Taken individually, these groups are just a marginal problem for a statewide candidate. But Florida is a state historically won at the margins — Trump won the state by just 1.2 percentage points in 2016.

The political turf is shifting in Florida as more and more non-white voters are added to the rolls both as a result of domestic and international migration, and natural growth. Since the last midterm election, 42 percent of the new voters who have registered are nonwhite. For the same period in the last presidential cycle, the percentage was 38.

“He’s afraid of just how badly I would beat him next November,” Biden said Wednesday in Reno, Nevada.
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Biden’s comments — intended to both refute Trump’s attacks on him and make the case that he’s the best Democrat to face the president — capped a wild day in which Trump called the impeachment probe “BULLSHIT,” lashed out at reporters seeking to clarify his intentions with Ukraine and repeatedly attacked the House Intelligence Committee’s chairman, Adam Schiff.

"Desperate and defensive, Trump sends one crazed tweet after another — insinuating that the whistleblower should be executed, threatening to prosecute the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warning direly of civil war,” Biden said.

Biden also called Trump a “bully” and praises the “courageous” whistleblower who first brought the matter to light but whose identity, for now, remains unknown.

If Biden is the nominee, you can expect a lot of focus on his gaffes and fabrications—which is one reason Biden really needs to tone that down. If it’s Bernie Sanders, this election will be about the rise of socialism. If it’s Elizabeth Warren, “Pocahontas” will be invoked as mockery—and as a substantive critique on Warren’s honesty and authenticity. Make no mistake, this will move the numbers. Remember, Michael Dukakis was polling at 55 percent of the vote as late as July of 1988. That was before George H.W. Bush’s team went to work on him. Dukakis dropped 10 points by election time.

The question is, who can endure these predictable attacks. The answer is Biden. By virtue of being a universally known commodity, he is the least susceptible to attrition. It’s also true that he plays best in the states that will likely matter most in 2020—which is my next point. ....

Based on this premise, Biden is the clearly the best positioned to win the presidency, because he hails from Pennsylvania, because of his unmatched experience, and because of the folksy image as a moderate. But even if you disagree with these educated assumptions—even if you think the key isn’t working-class whites in the Rust Belt, but rather, increasing African-American turnout—does anyone believe that Sanders or Warren would have a better shot at doing that than Barack Obama’s vice president—especially if he were to pick an exciting running mate?

There are plenty of reasons to think the smart money is still on Trump to be re-elected—especially if he can stave off a recession. Democrats do have a shot at defeating him, but the danger for Democrats is overconfidence. If they think any candidate would easily destroy Trump, they might make the mistake of nominating… any candidate. ...

Joe Biden is far from perfect. But in 2020, it is very clear that no Democrat has a better chance of winning the presidency than him. If Democrats are smart, they will bet big on the best horse they’ve got. Biden is—by far—the best Democrat for this job.

So here are a few explanations for why black voters have tended to side with the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. I have tried to order these explanations from strongest to weakest (in my view, at least):

1. Establishment candidates typically have existing ties to the black community
This will sound tautological, but an establishment candidate is … well … established. A candidate who is part of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party likely has fairly strong ties to major constituencies in the party, such as labor unions, women’s rights groups and, of course, black leaders and voters. So when black voters backed Gov. Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon in New York’s Democratic gubernatorial primary last year, or Andy Beshear over Adam Edelen in Kentucky’s Democratic gubernatorial primary earlier this year, that was not shocking. Not only did Beshear and Cuomo spend years developing their own ties with the black communities in their states, but their fathers did, too. (Steve Beshear was governor of Kentucky, Mario Cuomo the governor of New York.)

Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 similarly entered the primaries with longstanding ties to black voters. It’s worth considering if the story here is not that establishment candidates are smarter in appealing and connecting with black voters during the campaign, compared to anti-establishment candidates. Maybe it’s that the establishment candidate in a race is likely to be the person who enters the campaign with the strongest support among black voters.

2. Black voters are pragmatic
White Democrats are significantly more likely than black Democrats to describe themselves as liberal. Perhaps that’s the simple explanation for why most black voters eschew more liberal candidates. But scholars of black voters argue that the liberal-moderate-conservative framework does not apply well to predicting the actual policy positions and voting behavior of black Americans.

But even if Sanders or Warren gets more support among black voters in 2020 than the Vermont senator did in 2016, I tend to think Biden will remain fairly popular with black voters overall — because of his ties to Obama and other black leaders and the perception that he can defeat Trump. So there is a very real possibility that black voters will play the same role in the 2020 presidential primary that they have played in Democratic politics over much of the last four years: blocking the path of the liberal left as it attempts to dethrone the party’s establishment.