would turn up the pressure to cut spending.92
Despite his popularity and the clear lack of enthusiasm for Baxter, Biden’s strategy against his Republican opponent was to snatch his platform. At a September candidate forum, they took turns criticizing federal spending, with Biden talking up his “sunset” legislation and boasting that he’d been rated the sixth most fiscally conservative senator by the National Taxpayers Union in 1974. In their first debate later that month, the two agreed on everything but abortion, and Biden informed the crowd he was already doing the things Baxter was calling for: cutting taxes, spending, and regulations. His campaign took out full-page ads touting his fiscally conservative record, including blocking pay raises and automatic cost-of-living increases for the nearly 3 million federal workers. They christened Biden “one of the stingiest senators.” Biden later repeated that line in a candidate question-and-answer, in which he talked about balancing the budget by 1983 and tying tax cuts to spending decreases. As he explained, the primary difference between him and Baxter was that he at least still believed government had “social obligations” to meet the needs of the most vulnerable.93
Biden’s anti-spending proselytizing won him the endorsement of Howard Jarvis, the anti-government California businessman who championed Prop 13. “You have shown yourself to be in the forefront of the battle to reduce government spending and bring relief to the overburdened taxpayers of this country,” Jarvis wrote. Biden’s office released a statement saying he was “delighted” with the endorsement. Yet Biden clearly recognized this rightward swing might disappoint the loyal Democratic voters he still needed. At a candidates’ forum a few days later, Biden told a mostly black audience about the dire consequences of measures like Prop 13. When confronted about the apparent hypocrisy, Biden, who six years earlier had made truth and integrity the cornerstone of his campaign, said he didn’t “have any feeling about [Jarvis’] endorsement” and couldn’t “help it whether someone endorses me or doesn’t endorse me.”94
Back in Washington, Biden showed why he’d received Jarvis’s support, becoming one of nineteen senators to vote against Hubert Humphrey’s watered-down full employment bill, which merely asked that the president meet certain unemployment and inflation targets by 1983. “I do not think the government ought to make promises it cannot keep,” Biden said. While he’d voted with a GOP majority against the Democrats only 13 percent of the time in his first five years, now that rate leaped to 22 percent.95
With Biden’s rightward lurch leaving Baxter little to work with, the Sussex County GOP chairman resorted to a series of desperate, manufactured scandals. All of it went nowhere. Baxter floundered in the polls, which revealed that not only did a measly share of voters (9 percent) vote for him due to his conservatism, but that Delawareans were well aware of Biden’s flip-flopping on issues like busing and planned to vote for him anyway. “In spite of his horrendous record, like all Delaware politicians, of opposing busing, he will vote the way I would want him to most of the time,” one liberal voter said.
Like Boggs had in 1972, Biden secured major newspaper endorsements, including the neighboring Philadelphia Inquirer, and he made a clean sweep of labor endorsements; Biden was still a relatively reliable liberal vote, at least more so than his opponent. With the help of his dedicated volunteer network, Biden won easily in every part of the state, beating Baxter in not just his own county but his own district, his 16-point margin of victory the largest since du Pont’s 1972 reelection to Congress.96
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.
