Sexism and Joe Biden’s shot at the White House

The former VP is doing well largely because sexist anti-Clinton Democrats and Independents are coming back to the party

Last week, I wrote about why Biden seems to be doing well in polls in rural states. As I wrote, he is out-performing Hillary Clinton in states with the lowest population densities. This runs counter to our expectations; Over the last two decades, the trend in urban-rural polarization has been for Democrats to do better in cities and Republicans to outperform in the sparsely-populated countryside. There was a large increase in the correlation between population density and Democratic vote margin from 2012 to 2016. So it’s worth asking why that trend would be reversing in 2016.

The clearest explanation to me seems to be that voters who would have otherwise voted for a Democrat in 2016 didn’t so because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton. And there are probably multiple explanations for that. Some voters were likely turned off by her embrace of non-whites. Others probably didn’t like her long ties to Washington. But the clearest explanation, and one that gets shunned by a lot of media times…