Biden has also been privately reaching out to a range of influential Democrats, including party donors, members of Congress and allies in the early primary states, to gauge their support. A pillar of organized labor, the International Association of Fire Fighters, is prepared to support him in the Democratic primary.
And in recent weeks, Biden’s strategist, Steve Ricchetti, has called a handful of would-be candidates and their aides to signal that the former vice president is likely to enter the race and of late has been telling Democrats that he’s 95 percent committed to running, according to officials directly familiar with the discussions.
Yet while Biden is plainly further along in preparing for a White House bid than he was four years ago, when he grudgingly deferred to Hillary Clinton after months of consideration in the aftermath of his son Beau’s death, there is still one crucial element that’s outstanding: full and final consent from the former vice president himself.
This juxtaposition — an eager cadre of supporters laying the groundwork for a campaign they assure is all but certain while the would-be candidate publicly vacillates — has effectively kept the nascent Democratic race on hold.
Biden’s decision looms as perhaps the most significant unanswered question of the 2020 contest and his entry could bring shape to what has been a diffuse Democratic primary, providing voters with a clear front-runner.
As a candidate, Biden would present Democrats with a clear alternative to the hard-charging liberals who now dominate the race and test the appeal of his old-school political profile at a moment the party is hungry for fresh faces but even hungrier to win.
“I absolutely believe he’s going to run,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, who talked to Biden on the phone earlier this week. “There may still be some doubt in his mind but there’s no doubt in my mind.”
Richmond, the former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, said he believes the former vice president is the party’s “best candidate to beat Trump.”
Still, in conversations over the phone and strategy sessions in his rented Northern Virginia home that are occasionally interrupted by his German shepherds, Major and Champ, Biden has acknowledged that he is uncertain about his place in the 2020 Democratic primary. He is also uneasy about potential attacks from rivals on his family, aides and advisers say, namely his son Hunter, a lawyer and lobbyist who went through a high-profile divorce in 2017 and has struggled with substance abuse.
And in a soliloquy that was unplanned if not unexpected to Biden advisers — rarely do the garrulous former senator’s private views remain private for very long — he openly gave voice to both concerns last week.
“I don’t think he’s likely to stop at anything, whomever he runs against,” Biden said about President Donald Trump, expressing his alarm about putting his “family through what would be a very, very, very difficult campaign” without directly mentioning his younger son.
And then he mused about not wanting to pursue “a fool’s errand” in an appearance at the University of Delaware. “What I don’t want to do is take people’s time, effort and commitment without there being a clear shot that I could be the nominee,” Biden explained.
While he is leading the field, Biden is far from an overwhelming favorite and appears to have support from about a third of the Democratic electorate. Sen. Bernie Sanders is close behind him and other prominent candidates, like Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, trail them both.
Biden has spent much of this year running what amounts to the non-incumbent’s version of a Rose Garden campaign: giving high-profile paid speeches and appearing at events, both in the United States and abroad, that project him as statesmanlike.
Avoiding Iowa and New Hampshire, and the probing questions that would come in early nominating states, Biden has instead appeared in Munich, where he spoke about the trans-Atlantic alliance, and in Omaha, Nebraska, where he warned that America’s “reputation is being tarnished” abroad during an event with former Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican who was a defense secretary for President Barack Obama.
Biden has already pushed back several self-imposed deadlines for a decision, extending an end-of-2018 timeline into January and then into March. One Democrat eager to work for Biden was told to expect a launch this month, but more recently got word that April was more likely.
This dilatory approach has not prompted any softening in Biden’s support. He enjoys a halo-like admiration among many Democrats from his eight years at the side of Obama and leads in initial polls. His ability to remain the early favorite even as other candidates have declared their bids has heartened his advisers, reinforcing their view that the former vice president does not need to rush into the race.
“People underestimate the intensity of his support and how broad it is,” said John Anzalone, who will be Biden’s pollster if he runs.
The decision Tuesday by former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg not to run has, in the eyes of Biden’s inner circle, only strengthened their hand by enlarging the vacuum for a left-of-center Democratic candidate who can appeal to voters chiefly focused on defeating Trump. On Thursday, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio also removed himself from consideration, eliminating a potential challenge to Biden from a populist Democrat similarly oriented toward the Midwest.
Bloomberg’s advisers conceded this week that they had concluded Biden could have been an insurmountable obstacle, recounting with awe the results of focus groups they conducted in which Democratic voters referred unprompted, and admiringly, to Biden as “Uncle Joe.”
“We need a nominee who can speak to the whole country, who can speak to the electorate that the party has been losing, and that quite frankly includes some of my members that were once dependable Democrats,” said Harold Schaitberger, the president of the International Association of Firefighters.
Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada, a moderate Democrat elected last November, said he believed Biden would be a strong candidate. Though he stressed his neutrality in the race, Sisolak described the party’s ideal candidate in Biden-friendly terms: “A good communicator that likes people.”
“He’d be a good candidate, like a lot of the other ones," Sisolak said of Biden, with a note of warning to candidates about tacking too far to the left: “I think they’re going to have a lot more trouble being successful, frankly, in the primary too.”
Yet in multiple interviews with Democratic aides and officials, including some who plan on working for a Biden candidacy, there are boy-who-cried-wolf doubts about his intentions and deep questions about his viability in a party that is increasingly young, female and nonwhite.
There is Biden’s penchant for praising Republicans, former segregationists and right-leaning columnists. Though aides say he will never back away from his belief in bipartisanship, Biden’s insistence on telling a story that centers on his relationship with former Sen. Jesse Helms — a North Carolina Republican who never apologized for his bigotry — grates on even members of his own team, who have told him as much.
Most of all, Democrats — even those who are more ideologically aligned with Biden — harbor severe doubts that the party should put forward a nominee who would turn 78 shortly after Election Day 2020.
“The only major organization in the world that has been, and is, run by 80-year-olds is the Roman Catholic Church,” noted James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist.
There are also practical elements of setting up a campaign that Biden cannot afford to put off too much longer, including ramping up his light footprint on social media and raising money for some of the big-state primaries that come early next year.
Advisers to Biden have begun extending tentative job offers to several sought-after operatives, asking them to commit to a campaign if Biden runs. Among them are Pete Kavanaugh, who ran New Hampshire for Obama in 2012; Kenny D. Thompson, Jr., who worked for Biden’s vice-presidential office, and Cristóbal Alex, a former minority-outreach official for the Clinton campaign. (Politico first reported Alex’s likely role on Wednesday).
Prominent Democrats from the early nominating states say Biden must move soon.
“He has a lot of goodwill in this state,” said Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a longtime South Carolina lawmaker. “But if he’s going to get in he needs to get in. I think the window is closing.”
Biden has so far resisted that kind of pressure, and the former vice president has in some cases used his drawn-out period of deliberation to address potential political vulnerabilities. He has spoken repeatedly by phone with the Rev. Al Sharpton, the influential civil-rights activist who hosted Biden at a Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast, where Biden expressed remorse for backing draconian anti-crime policies in the 1990s.
Sharpton declined to comment on private conversations with Biden, but he said it seemed unlikely Biden would so actively confront liberal criticism of his record unless he was planning a campaign.
“I think he’d have a big advantage because of his name recognition and because of the imprimatur of the Obama vice presidency,” Sharpton said.
Teri Goodmann, a veteran Iowa Democrat and longtime Biden ally, said she had spoken recently with the former vice president and expected him to run. She said she planned to support Biden because his experience in international affairs made him well equipped to “put things right in the world, if that’s even possible.”
“What there is to do now is to await his decision,” Goodmann added, “and that’s what we intend to do.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.