As summer ends and the race for the 2020 Democratic U.S. presidential nomination shifts into a higher gear, former Vice President Joe Biden’s perilous position atop the vast field stands to be tested under even more pressure.
Biden, 76, has consistently maintained a comfortable lead over his rivals. But his campaign has been plagued by doubts over his age, fitness for office and whether, as a moderate, he can be a standard-bearer for a party that has grown increasingly liberal.
Labor Day serves as the traditional marker for the White House race to intensify, with five months to go until the first nominating contest – February in Iowa – in the state-by-state process of picking the party’s nominee to challenge Republican President Donald Trump in the November 2020 election.
While Biden enjoys widespread name recognition because of his eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president and a long Senate career before that, he stands to suffer as voters begin to focus on other candidates, according to strategists.
“Biden is the weakest front-runner in a contested primary in a long time,” said Democratic operative Joel Payne, who worked on 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign and attributed Biden’s standing largely to voters’ familiarity with him rather than his performance on the campaign trail. – READ MORE