Jill Biden Tells Voters to Settle for Her Husband

In making the anemic pitch, she encouraged Democrats to “swallow a little bit” and vote for Joe Biden.

Alex Edelman/ZUMA

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Jill Biden has a message for voters reluctant to get behind her husband: settle or face another four years of hell.

That’s essentially what the former second lady, in surprisingly blunt terms, told a group of teachers in New Hampshire on Monday, as she attempted to make the case for why Joe Biden is the best candidate to take on Donald Trump. In making the rather anemic pitch, Biden appeared to acknowledge that there may be Democratic candidates who have offered more popular policy plans.

But so what? 

“Your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, healthcare than Joe is,” Biden said at a campaign event in Nashua, New Hampshire. “But you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘Ok, I personally like so and so better.’ But your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Donald Trump.”

“I know that not all of you are committed to my husband, and I respect that,” she continued. “But I want you to think about your candidate, his or her electability, and who is going to win this race.” Biden then referred to early polls that have consistently shown her husband leading his rivals. 

The campaign’s emphasis on electability and poll numbers above all else—even if it requires voters to compromise their standards—comes on the heels of a gaffe-filled visit to Iowa, during which the former vice president mixed up basic facts and insisted that “poor kids are just as bright…as white kids.”

Biden’s remarks on Monday beg the question: who would she be backing if Trump were out of the equation?

 

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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