Weed is More Popular than Joe Biden
Tags: Joe Biden, Marijuana, Politics, Drugs, 2020 Presidential Race

First and foremost, these results complicate a narrative of the Biden campaign itself: in trying to play it safe through a moderate policy on marijuana, Biden is undermining his own support among a public who’d like to see him be more radical on this issue. As of late 2019, marijuana legalization was supported by 69% of the American public. That support isn’t concentrated in one segment of the population either: support among baby boomers now sits at 63%, while support among Republican-leaning voters sits at 55%. In other words, legalizing weed is backed by the majority of both Democratic and Republican voters but neither of the political parties (as a whole).

While going beyond prior Democratic administrations by campaigning on “[d]ecriminalizing the use of cannabis and automatically expung[ing] all prior cannabis use convictions,” the Biden campaign has consistently shied away from the idea of a federal legalization of marijuana. His campaign has suggested that this is out of concern about “public health” until more research emerges.

It is true that the prohibition on marijuana has slowed medical research into its effects, but there is already a convincing body of research which has tried to comparatively measure the public health and safety consequences of different forms of drug use. Each has found that marijuana use has less severe effects than other illegal drugs, and those which have checked also found it less harmful than tobacco and alcohol use. Research suggests marijuana smoke is less harmful to the lungs than tobacco smoke is, and other studies have noted marijuana’s virtually nonexistent overdose potential. All of this is before taking into account the destructive public health consequences of mass incarceration, a status quo problem which marijuana prohibition directly contributes to.

More likely is that Biden’s hesitancy to fully embrace legalized weed is a combination of political strategy and his old personal views dying hard. He has been on the record against marijuana legalization since at least 1972, and has spent much of his career as a major architect of the war on drugs. In 2008, he passed a Senate resolution honoring the 35th anniversary of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The resolution praised the agency for seizing over 2.3 million kilograms of marijuana since 2000, which along with many other drugs enabled the agency to have “made over 240,000 arrests” in that time. Biden, who has spent much of his political career cautiously adopting positions in accordance with the calculus of a given moment, has only evolved on this issue to the extent he has due to the changing political pressures of the larger Democratic coalition.

Having built his career in an era where fearmongering about drugs was the politically safe move to make, new times have led Biden to now view decriminalization as a safe position that, by not going as far as full legalization, will avoid any backlash against him for going too far to the left. This year’s election results illustrate that this carefully-triangulated position likely actually puts Biden to the right of the American electorate, thus perhaps losing him votes by failing to embrace a position with popular support. Indeed, legalization is especially popular among young voters that the Democratic Party often struggles to turn out. Anecdotally, most young people in America know at least one other young person who is either right-wing or generally apathetic, but who does care about legalizing weed.

Attaching a national campaign to an issue which outperforms the campaign all over the country is seemingly sound political advice. But in this case, the opportunity has been passed up due to a stubborn insistence upon moderation even when unpopular. This is an issue-based example of a larger phenomenon in which party establishments promote moderates within their ranks even when there is no electoral advantage to doing so, just on pure ideological preference alone.

While marijuana policy is likely to change over time, this is something of a running theme in American politics: an elite, “responsible” bipartisan consensus emerges which is separate from the actual public consensus on the issue. Unity, divided. This counterintuitive dynamic has multiple causes: the measurable tendency of politicians to view their constituents as more conservative than they actually are, the influence of campaign contributions from a donor class not ideologically representative of the public, political distortions created by America’s anti-majoritarian institutions, and so on.

It should be noted that the Biden campaign’s official excuse of waiting on additional research gives him cover to come out in favor of full legalization later down the line (similar to how Obama supported only same-sex civil unions in his 2008 campaign and then came out in favor of full same-sex marriage four years later). As such, the Biden administration has room to further “evolve” on this issue, especially as support in congress continues to grow and progressive Democrats continue to press the issue.