Can Joe Biden Successfully Run a Campaign Out of His Delaware Basement?
The former vice president is reviving the ‘front porch’ style of campaigning to connect with voters amid the pandemic
In 1896, William McKinley won the presidency while sitting on his front porch smoking cigars. Over a century later, former Vice President Joe Biden may need to do the 21st-century version of the same thing.
The coronavirus has brought the 2020 presidential campaign “back to the future,” with Biden revisiting elements of the front porch campaigns that were the norm in American politics for the better part of a century.
“Until the end of the 19th century, it was considered uncouth for a candidate to campaign for himself,” said H.W. Brands, an award-winning historian and professor at the University of Texas. Instead, presidential hopefuls stayed home and let others do the work for them. Rallies would still be held but without the candidate. In some cases — like that of William Henry Harrison’s “log cabin and hard cider campaign” of 1840 — attendees would get free drinks instead.
But the model front porch campaign is McKinley’s. The Ohio Republican faced off against William Jennings Bryan, the first major-party presidential candidate to ever hit the hustings…
