We might get a repeat of the 2016 election, but the odds currently favor a Biden win, though not by as much as the media would like us to think. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site give Biden a 70% chance of winning, and today's composite betting odds are 52.7 to 46.7 in favor of Biden. So it is worth beginning to consider what a Biden presidency might look like.
Of course the official party platform is pretty far left, but that is to be expected since Biden had to accommodate the Bernie Sanders wing of the party and keep them in the fold. But in fact party platforms generally have little real effect on administration policy. They are just window dressing for the campaign.
The Joe Biden of the past decades was a moderate Democrat, but the Democratic party has moved sharply leftward even since Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run for the presidency. How much has Biden moved with them? His vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, is in fact pretty far left, even though the Biden campaign is trying to paint her as a moderate. Her voting record in the Senate has been one of the most liberal of any Senator, though as Attorney General in California before she was elected to the Senate she was a fairly strong law-and-order supporter.
Considering all the worries that Biden has lost a step or two to age, the question of who is advising him becomes more important. Jared Bernstein and Ben Harris, both of whom were Biden's chief economic advisers under Obama, are left-of-center economists who consistently pressed for more government stimulus and banking rules in the Obama White House. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have had a lot of input to the Biden team (and there are even rumors that Warrant might get appointed Treasury Secretary in a Biden administration), so that suggests a fairly far-left economic policy.
Foreign policy looks to be controlled by Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Avril Haines, Brian McKeon, and Julie Smith. The Biden team has formed lots of working groups, who all forward their work to these five people, who seem to be a national security brain trust for Biden, and who from their past positions on foreign policy appear to be of the more “hawkish” interventionist wing of the party that kept us in the Middle East wars. Jake Sullivan has, however, claimed that a Biden priority would be to get us out of the Middle Eastern “forever wars”, as well as to re-negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.
Much depends, of course, on whether the Democrats capture the Senate along with a Biden presidency. If Republicans keep control of the Senate, that will put a damper on the more extreme far-left proposals. If the Democrats capture the Senate (and of course they will almost certainly keep control of the House) that would free a Biden administration to enact just about anything they want to, at least for the first two years.
So what would I expect of a Biden administration? Domestically, probably a larger COVID stimulus and recovery package, perhaps on the order of $3-4 trillion, and a rollback of the Trump tax reductions, and perhaps an attempt to tax corporations and the rich more, though that will probably be more for show than practical effect since the rich and big corporations are good at evading taxes. He will rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, though that will make little or no practical difference to the climate problem, but it will appease the green crowd. I would not expect his administration to try, or to be successful, at implementing some of the more extreme far-left proposals (universal income, free college, reparations to African-Americans, etc), but clearly the party believes that more aggressive federal spending is the way to solve lots of problems.
In foreign policy I assume he would keep up the pressure on China, and probably follow through with Trump’s rapprochement between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors. And he will no doubt continue the nation’s withdrawal from the world order which started back with several previous administrations, though probably with more finesse that Trump has shown. He will be under pressure from the left to freeze or even reduce defense spending, which would be unwise, in my opinion, given the current budget problems the military faces as it tries to retool for the changing technology advances and geopolitics of the world.
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