Biden Historical Trivia
1.) Despite Richard Nixon’s 49-state sweep of the 1972 presidential race, Democratic Senate candidates captured five GOP-held seats in what was probably the most left-wing class of Senate freshmen since World War II. In addition to Biden, William Hathaway ousted Margaret Chase Smith in Maine; Dick Clark bested Jack Miller in Iowa; Floyd Haskell upset Gordon Allott in Colorado; and Jim Abourezk took the South Dakota seat left vacant by the terminally ill Karl Mundt.
Of the five, only Biden won re-election. Haskell, Hathaway, and Clark all lost in 1978 (Hathaway and Haskell by more than 20 points), and Abourezk almost surely would have fallen to Republican Larry Pressler had he not retired from the Senate instead.
2.) Biden’s tenure owes something to the unintended consequences of a coin-flip. In 1974, the two junior members on the Foreign Relations Committee were Biden and Clark. Only one subcommittee chairmanship remained—African Affairs. Since the two had equal Senate seniority and no previous political service (which would have broken a tie), a coin was flipped to determine which of the two received the chairmanship. Clark won.
Why did this matter? African Affairs wound up a hotbed of controversy in late 1975, after exposure of the U.S. covert operation in Angola. Clark, as the relevant subcommittee head, led the Senate charge to end funding for the intervention. But by 1978, Clark’s association with Angola was a negative: conservatives painted the Clark amendment as the embodiment of Democrats’ softness in dealing with communist expansionism, and the South African government (which had sided with the United States in the affair) funneled money to Clark’s Republican opponent, the otherwise witless Roger Jepsen. By losing the coin toss, Biden avoided the stigma associated with the congressional cutoff of funds for the Angolan affair and the outside efforts that were determined to defeat Clark.
3.) It’s ironic that Biden was chosen in part because of his experience, because he once was the embodiment of youth in politics. Though the Constitution says a senator must be at least 30 years old, there’s no restriction on how old a Senate candidate must be.
Biden is one of only two senators who were not 30 years old at the time the people of their state elected them to the upper chamber. The other was West Virginia’s “boy senator,” Rush Holt, who was elected in 1934 at age 29. Holt didn’t turn 30 until the middle of 1935, and so couldn’t take his seat until that time. Biden turned 30 between the election and the opening of the 1973 Senate session.
4.) There are a couple other tangential connections between Biden and Holt. Like Biden, Holt was perceived as one of the Democratic Party’s key Senate voices on foreign policy. In the late 1930s, the West Virginia senator strongly opposed U.S. intervention in the European conflict. Unlike Biden, whose foreign policy profile seems to have helped him secure the vice-presidential nomination, Holt’s activism hurt him: identified as an opponent of FDR, he lost his bid for renomination in 1930.
Holt’s son, however, eventually entered politics: New Jersey congressman Rush Holt, who has a Ph.D. in physics, has one of the most unusual backgrounds of any member of the House. And Congressman Holt was one of the few Democratic officeholders in New Jersey not to endorse Hillary Clinton.