Biden Wants It Both Ways

This week felt like a month. On the menu today: After President Trump asked, “Would you close down the oil industry?” Biden responded, “I have a transition from the old industry, yes,” and now Biden’s campaign insists the candidate didn’t mean it. Biden also insisted that he “never said I oppose fracking,” which is contradicted by many of Biden’s past statements. It was that kind of a debate, wrapping up that kind of a week. Also, Operation Warp Speed’s chief adviser, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, offers a really encouraging timeline for vaccine distribution.

Joe Biden: ‘I Have a Transition from the Old [Oil] Industry, Yes’

After the catastrophic failure of the much-hyped “Battleground Texas” project by Democrats in 2014, Lone Star State Republicans could be forgiven for thinking their opposition would never get their act together.

The first tiny rattle in the engine came in 2016, when Donald Trump won the state by “only” nine percentage points. Because we’re talking about such a huge state, that amounts to more than 800,000 votes. But it was a somewhat smaller margin than preceding cycles. Mitt Romney had won the state by 1.2 million votes, and John McCain won by about 950,000 votes.

And then in 2018, Beto O’Rourke came respectably close in the Senate race against Ted Cruz, Republicans swept all the statewide offices again, but incumbents who usually won by wide margins, like Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and state attorney general Ken Paxton, won by just a handful of percentage points. Democrats picked up two U.S. House seats, two state senate seats, and a dozen state House seats. Suddenly the Democrats’ dreams of winning the state were unlikely, but no longer laughable.

Heading into 2020, some Democrats started to believe that this was the year. A few polls here and there put Joe Biden ahead in Texas, and when Trump led, it was rarely by more than four or five points. Trump largely alienates suburbanites, and Texas has a lot of suburbs. Those allegedly boring college-educated minivan-driving soccer moms and white-collar dads used to be the bread and butter of the Republican Party. Trump had started to enjoy better polls, and the formula at FiveThirtyEight suggested Biden’s chances had never been better than one in three.

And then during last night’s debate, Joe Biden said this: