There was another factor in Biden’s victory. He had said in 1973 that “the only reason Biden is not beholden to any fat cats is the fat cats didn’t take me seriously.” Having proved himself a serious political player, he no longer faced this problem.97
Biden’s staff were determined to recreate the big-spending ways of his 1972 run, setting an even bigger target of $350,000. This time, however, the campaign would rely increasingly on the well-heeled. In February, President Carter took 28 minutes to swing by a $1,000-per-couple Biden fundraiser at the Hotel du Pont’s Gold Ballroom, netting his early backer a cool $52,900. The price of admission alone was almost as much as Carter had raised in a three-county campaign trip in the state three years earlier, and it served to skirt campaign finance laws: $1,000 was the legal limit for donations, but divided among couples, it left the door open for donors to give more later on. The campaign also exploited a legal loophole that treated primary and general election campaigns as separate but allowed “excess campaign contributions” to be carried over for the candidate’s next race. This allowed donors to give as much as double the legal limit to Biden, who wasn’t actually facing opposition in the primary.98
By end of March, Biden had raised nearly a third of his $350,000 goal, and his donor lists were full of the names of the wealthy and powerful, Democrat and Republican, who had maxed out for the junior senator: businessmen, lawyers, executives, investors, and more, in descending order of frequency. The name “DuPont” in particular littered the lists of donors, as various top executives of the chemical company gave generously to Biden, including its chairman, Irving S. Shapiro.
Almost 70 percent of Biden’s donors would come from outside Delaware, with businessmen in California, the epicenter of the taxpayers’ revolt, especially well represented. This included Walter H. Shorenstein, a California real estate executive and major party benefactor who happened to employ Biden’s brother and whose company would greatly benefit from Prop 13’s virtual freezing of property taxes. Thanks to this support, coupled with the financial backing of labor unions, Biden’s donation totals dwarfed every other Delaware candidate, and he outspent Baxter three to one.99
Could this help explain Biden’s dramatic shift to the right? The Biden of old would have certainly thought so. A frequent critic of the role of money in politics, Biden had made his maiden speech in Congress about public financing of elections. He had spoken derisively in 1974 of trying to “prostitute” himself to big donors, complaining that “people who have money … always want something” and wondering aloud how long the public would “put up with a small group of men and organizations determining the political process by deciding who can run.” As he had told the Wilmington News Journal six months into his first term, there was always an “implicit” suggestion of a quid pro quo when officeholders solicited campaign donations. He recalled that just a few days before the 1972 election, a group of wealthy businessmen had met with him to ask if he was serious about his vow to eliminate the capital gains tax exemption. “If I wanted to raise money, I knew what I should say,” he recounted.100
The 1978 election helped solidify Biden’s ideological turn. Now fifth-ranked on the Senate Budget Committee, he pledged to keep the cost of government down as he tackled Carter’s budget proposals, which Biden said needed less spending, fewer taxes, and a lower deficit. He talked about imposing across-the-board cuts to federal agencies and employment ceilings for the bureaucracy, and potentially supporting a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced federal budget. Where he had started off his time in Congress endorsing the idea of national health insurance, Biden now vowed to fight such a program.101
There comes a point in any politician’s career where they must balance their ambitions against political realities and decide what they are comfortable sacrificing for the sake of expediency. The 1978 election was a learning experience for Biden in this respect. It taught him he could court wealthy donors and businesses and still get union backing. It taught him he could move way to the right and still count on the support of Democratic voters, at least as long as a scary conservative was the only other option. And it taught him he could—in fact, he needed to—strategically sacrifice the cause of civil rights to win over the fabled political center.
All of us can take the heat from the special interest groups if we’ve got the support of the middle-class guy.
—Joe Biden, 19771
It was November 1980, and one of Joe Biden’s staffers was poring over a list of congressional ratings. The liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action regularly scored every member of Congress on how progressive they were based on select votes. Biden wanted to find out where he ranked.2
Biden’s search had been prompted by Ronald Reagan and the Republicans’ staggering landslide victory earlier that month. Reagan, the first challenger to lop off an elected incumbent president since Franklin Roosevelt’s victory over Herbert Hoover 48 years earlier, had won by ten percentage points and carried forty-four states, earning 489 Electoral College votes to Carter’s forty-nine. He had done so expressly by shattering Carter’s winning 1976 coalition and poaching parts of it for himself: union members, Jews, Catholics, even self-described liberals all defected to Reagan in large numbers. He won the South and the Midwest. The fact that voter turnout had dropped once more to about half the adult population had helped, too.3
This wasn’t meant to happen. Reagan was a conservative ideologue, a man considered far to the right of not just the voting public, but reality itself. He had a habit of accusing his opponents of communist sympathies and railing against “big government,” and his flagship idea was a tax cut for the rich. He insisted Vietnam had been a “noble cause” and suggested at the time that the United States should “pave the whole country.” Now, in public statements, he itched for military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Bill Wilkinson endorsed him, gushing that his platform “reads as if it were written by a Klansman.” He planned to “make America great again.”4
Reagan was a creation of a long-gestating right-wing movement kick-started during the New Deal by a group of the country’s most powerful industrialists, including Jasper Crane and Pierre du Pont, two executives of the very same DuPont company that ruled Delaware as a fiefdom. Reagan received what he called his “post-graduate education in political science” while serving as General Electric’s “traveling ambassador” under its vice president, Lemuel Boulware, a union buster extraordinaire and part of the same corporate conservative network that had started organizing against Roosevelt. It was under Boulware’s tutelage that Reagan made the transition from New Deal Democrat to, well, Ronald Reagan, voraciously consuming the ideas of conservative thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, who in his most famous book had argued just about any government involvement in the economy was the first step on the road to totalitarian dictatorship.5
That conservative movement had, by 1980, succeeded in putting not just Reagan in the White House but a host of candidates in the US Congress who vowed to back his radical agenda. The National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), founded by “New Right” activist Terry Dolan with help from direct-mail fundraising wizard Richard Viguerie, was at the center of these efforts. With close ties to Reagan that made a mockery of election laws, the NCPAC had a symbiotic relationship with the Republican candidate, who asked his supporters to back the committee, which in turn raised money to support the candidate and attack his vulnerable liberal opponents in Congress. Thanks to the work of such organizations, the Democrats lost thirty-three seats in the House and twelve in the Senate come November. A number of those had been specifically targeted by NCPAC in a “hit list” of long-serving liberal senators, including Indiana’s Birch Bayh, Idaho’s Frank Church, and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern.6