message developed personally by Biden: “Dear old dad may have been right for his time—and I love him—but things are different now.”32
What history has forgotten about Biden’s 1972 campaign, however, was its economic populism, even if it targeted middle-class Delawareans who he claimed were “being attacked by both the rich and the poor.” Americans were most concerned with their pocketbooks, he stressed upon announcing his candidacy, calling for automatic cost-of-living increases for Social Security, something he repeated until Election Day. He told a crowd of United Auto Workers (UAW) members that Congress was debating mere “percentage points” when it came to such increases; rather, they should be raised “to a level where people can live in dignity,” he said, suggesting an income-supplement program to be carved out of the program for older Americans who were ineligible. Biden later demanded those payments be removed from the income formula used for Medicaid eligibility lest elderly Delawareans be thrown off its rolls, and he called for Congress to create an independent consumer protection agency “to serve as the lawyer for consumers.” At one stop, spirited applause interrupted Biden as he attacked corporate income tax structures.33
Biden wasn’t afraid to name enemies. His criticism of the “millionaires who don’t pay any taxes at all” and the “billion-dollar corporations who want a ride on the public’s back” became a staple of his campaign. He ran full-page newspaper ads demanding the elimination of tax preferences for “special interests,” property tax exemptions for elderly people on fixed incomes, and freezes on prices, utility rates, and interest rates. “If you’re a working man, you cannot hope to escape taxes. If you’re a rich man, you may,” the ads charged. Biden hit Boggs for defending Standard Oil’s absurdly small tax bill, and in the middle of a debate, he criticized both parties for being “controlled by big money” and unresponsive “to the tax woes of the American middle class.” At the Delaware State Labor Council’s annual convention, he warned unions not to fall for the GOP’s sudden use of pro-labor talking points. “Don’t kid yourself that they have changed their minds,” he said. “All they changed was the date they are going to do it to you. That is after the election instead of now.” He won the backing of the AFL-CIO and the UAW.34
“I believe he really thinks reducing the oil depletion allowance from 27 percent to 23 percent is something,” Biden said of Boggs. “He doesn’t question whether it should be eliminated altogether.” Such lines fed into Biden’s other major pitch: environmental protection. Building on his reputation in the county council as the defender of Delaware’s natural resources from heedless development and corporate rapaciousness, Biden released a plan for saving the nation’s wetlands and marshes as the election neared. Such moves bagged him the endorsement of the Washington-based Campaign Fund for the Environment, whose chairman, former Kennedy interior secretary Stewart Udall, made the pilgrimage to Dover and gave Biden his personal endorsement. Biden, Udall said, was “perhaps the most outstanding environmentalist in the whole country.”35
When simply ignoring Biden failed to stop the upstart from closing Boggs’s once-insurmountable lead, a parade of prominent national Republicans dropped by, including Vice President Spiro Agnew and “Mr. Republican” himself, Robert Taft, who set aside his archconservative image for the moment and touted Boggs’s liberal record.36
Crucially, Biden still had the energy and enthusiasm of a legion of grassroots volunteers from his county council campaign, and he dominated Boggs in fundraising. By the end of the campaign, Biden was both raising and spending twice as much as Boggs, thanks chiefly to small donations, where he had a five-to-one advantage. The campaign poured the proceeds into media, spending $268,000 in all to win, a huge amount for the time, and more than any other candidate in the state.37
Come November 8, Biden had completed what everyone in Delaware had assumed was a suicide mission, beating Boggs by 3,000 votes even as the state as a whole went for Nixon by twenty points. Just as he’d hypothesized, Biden’s path to victory had run through the GOP stronghold of Brandywine Hundred, which Biden lost by only 9,000 votes, compared to the usual trouncing that left Democrats an average of 17,000 down.38
The postelection numbers revealed other factors, too. Despite endorsements for Boggs from the state NAACP and Edward Brooke, the first black US senator since Reconstruction, Biden had run away with the black vote. In an election that saw relatively low black voter turnout statewide and even lower in down-ballot races, Biden finished second only to McGovern in the state’s African American districts, getting the support of 65 percent of those who had voted for president. And Biden dominated in union support. Nationwide, only seven other candidates, three of them running for president, outpaced Biden in money from organized labor.39
In front of a thousand-person-strong audience, Biden showered his fallen opponent with effusive praise, seeming almost apologetic that he’d won. Just as he’d campaigned, he told them, the Joe Biden of the Senate would be his own man, refusing to toe any party line, his highest loyalty to his voters and volunteers. “I may go down and be the lousiest senator in the world; I may be the best,” he warned them.40
Most election victories are the products of a murky alchemy, and Biden’s was no exception. Was it his appeal to middle-class and Republican voters on the issues of crime and drugs that put him over the top? Or the enthusiasm he inspired among volunteers, small donors, and particularly black voters? Did his nonpartisan, middle-of-the-road image make the difference? His forthright opposition to Vietnam? Or did his economic populist campaign unite voters across racial and class lines? Maybe it was just his youth, charisma, and bombast, compared to the soft-spoken, elderly Boggs.41
“The liberals thought I was holding back,” Biden privately mused in a Hotel du Pont corridor after the result. “Little did they know I’m not that liberal. The conservatives thought I was too liberal.”42
This would be a common refrain for the rest of Biden’s career: running away from the label of “liberal” even as he strategically championed liberal values to select audiences. In a Wilmington Morning News profile released early in the new year, Biden insisted he was “really moderate to liberal and a social conservative.” He compared liberals to lemmings (“every two years they jump off a cliff”) and recounted telling one applicant who hoped to work for a senator who would fight for consumers, “I’m not going to be an activist for two years.”43 If Biden’s victory had suggested many possible roads for his future political success, his words suggested he was already decided on one. The election had another effect, too: his unlikely triumph forever lodged in Biden the fear that a similar dark horse could one day unseat him.
First Casualties
Biden and his wife Neilia sat in front of a fire in their living room, she writing Christmas cards, he pondering his future in Washington. He would later say they sensed something wasn’t right. “What’s going to happen, Joey?” he recalled her asking. “Things are too good.”44
What should have been the biggest year of Biden’s life instead started with tragedy. The next day, exactly one week before Christmas, Neilia, who had decided to stay in Wilmington for one more day before joining Biden in DC, pulled away from a stop sign and was struck by a tractor trailer. She and 13-month-old daughter Amy were killed, and the couple’s two sons were injured. The mangled station wagon spun away and continued for another 150 feet before coming to rest against a tree. Campaign literature lay strewn across the road.45
“I was mad,” Biden said later. “I was mad at you guys in the press, mad at the people, mad at God, mad at everybody…. I just wanted to take my boys and go.”46
A devastated Biden ultimately decided against giving up his Senate seat and was sworn in at his sons’ bedside while they were still in the hospital. Though the truck driver was quickly absolved
