I did not vote for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary, but here’s a short thread on why I concede that Joe Biden is remarkably well-suited for this moment: he’s the anti-pundit. I don’t imagine this will convince everyone, but hear me out.

Throughout the Democratic primary, pundits—especially white pundits—all had their specious notions of what Democratic voters REALLY want, or what Joe Biden has to do if he REALLY wants to win the Democratic primary, and he didn’t listen to any of them. He just fucking won.

What was true for nearly all of the primary? Consistent and significant support from Black voters, which was always a strong predictor of a Democratic primary win. Pundits tried to convince Democratic voters that it couldn’t possibly be that simple. Joe Biden didn’t give a shit.

And what the polling also consistently showed was that electability mattered most to Democratic voters. The last thing pundits were gonna do is tell the truth about that. They care about The Narrative™ and their hot takes and they treated Biden's gaffes as electorally upending.

This is an electability election: Democratic voters are laser-focused on just getting Donald Trump out. Joe Biden understood that and was not gonna heed the advice or appease a media class of people whose job seems to be not telling the truth about Democratic voters.

What a lot of Democratic candidates did wrong in the primary is they assigned too much power to punditry, ESPECIALLY Twitter punditry, and made political calculations based on them, and I honestly think that’s a thing Joe Biden could never be accused of doing.

To the contrary, if there was an evolution to his campaign, it was because he listened to Democrats. NOT pundits. We know the agenda he ran on evolved when he met with Warren for example. He doesn’t agree with her on everything, but he heard her out.

We need the anti-pundit. We need the guy who doesn’t give a shit about a media class that fucked over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and seems perfectly content to engage in fuckery in this election as well. We need someone laser-focused on not giving an inch to these people.

Because virtually everyone who was a bad actor in the press in 2016 is doing it again. Look at what they’ve tweeted over the past couple of days. Astoundingly shitty takes like “Should the election be delayed?” or “Should Joe Biden suspend his campaign for two weeks?”

And on the matter of Joe Biden campaigning from his basement, this was the punditry just days ago. After the past couple of days? I want Joe Biden in that fucking basement. The smartest thing he did was campaign from that basement. https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1309938063007772672

Joe Biden’s campaign is a giant middle finger to the pundit class that helped give us Donald Trump. Pundits tried to create narratives for why he’d lose the primary. They failed. Pundits tried to create narratives for why he should leave his basement. DONALD TRUMP HAS COVID-19.