Joe Biden greeted news of Nikki Haley’s dropping out of the Republican presidential primary by claiming that “there is a place for” Haley supporters in his campaign. He elaborated:
I know there is a lot we won’t agree on. But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.
The ploy here is obvious: to present himself as more aligned with the views of these voters than Donald Trump is. There do indeed seem to be many Haley voters who already outright prefer Biden and his policies to Trump. (Also true: Trump is not exactly desperate for Haley voters.) But has Biden given any indication that he would do anything to earn the votes of Trump-skeptical Haley supporters who are actually conservative?
It is doubtful. His outreach resembles similar overtures by figures on the left during the Trump era. Their entreaties, in apparent good faith, to conservatives skeptical of Donald Trump take for granted that such conservatives should receive, at best, nothing in return and, at worst, must sacrifice their own principles.
In 2021, Robert Kagan made one such proposal in the Washington Post. He called on anti-Trump elected Republicans to leave their party to make good on their essential opposition to Trump. Yet at the same time, he lambasted them for continuing “to act as good Republicans and conservatives” in other ways, such as by maintaining the filibuster, resisting imperious voting-rights legislation proposed by Democrats, and criticizing Biden’s policies and conduct. “The result,” he concluded, “is that even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection.” For Kagan, the only way to oppose Trump properly is to give up on conservatism entirely. No, thanks.
The Hillary Clinton campaign behaved similarly. At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama had the audacity to set himself as the judge of conservatism when he averred that “what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican — and it sure wasn’t conservative,” the hope being that voters interested in those things would move to the Democratic camp. Clinton herself called the 2016 election “a moment of reckoning for every Republican dismayed that the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Trump.”
Were they prepared to offer anything to help the reckoning along? Not really: Instead, for example, the 2016 Democratic platform dropped “rare” from the “safe, legal, and rare” abortion triad of former president Bill Clinton. And influential left-wing elites mused about “taking a hard line” against conservatives after a Hillary victory. (It “seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”) The message was, again, the same: Trump is bad enough that conservatives skeptical of him should be willing to abandon their principles, and get nothing in return, just to stand against him.
Biden gives every indication of employing the same strategy. It’s hard to walk back from comparing opponents of your preferred legislation to George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis (how’s that for “decency”?). His appeals to “democracy” seem dependent on a curious definition, according to which Democrats always get their way. Despite constitutional impediments: Just a few weeks ago, for instance, he bragged that a Supreme Court decision striking down his unilateral student-loan-debt jubilee “didn’t stop” him from pursuing a smaller effort. If Biden’s “outreach” to conservatives, like previous iterations, includes not even slight concessions on principle, he shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t work.