Two weeks before the South Carolina Democratic primary, which will be held on Saturday, Kevin Freel packed a cooler with Yuenglings and big oil cans of Foster’s and drove six hundred and fifty miles, from Delaware, to knock on doors for his old friend Joe Biden. He’d done the same in Iowa, which was a thousand miles from home. “This might be Joe’s last stand,” Freel told me. “I figure, I ought to stand with him.” It is hard to imagine a more apt surrogate: Freel is a tall, shoulder-slapping, seventy-year-old Irish-Catholic from the Eastern Seaboard—he grew up in New Jersey—who has known Biden since the nineteen-seventies. A few years after Biden became a U.S. senator, in 1973, Freel ran for state senate in Delaware and lost, narrowly. Later, he worked as a campaign manager for local candidates. “Just watch Biden and try to do like him,” he would tell them. “He can walk into any church hall or fire hall in America and you’d think he’s been there his whole life.” Freel has also worked as a consumer-affairs investigator, a department-store Santa, and a community-theatre actor. He and Biden are the same kind of Irish, he said. “There’s the reserved kind of Irish, like my older brother. And then there’s the Joe Biden-and-me kind. We’re very physical. Yeah, yeah, how you doing. He’s been doing that ever since I’ve known him. That’s how we are.”
On the Sunday before the primary, I had a few pints with Freel at what he called a “pretty nice” Irish pub in downtown Charleston. It was only his second time visiting the state. Freel used to own a bar in Delaware—it hosted Beau Biden’s twenty-first birthday, he said—and he wore a hat with the bar’s name on it. (Freel has known Jill Biden since she was “stamping hands” at a bar in Newark, he said—the same bar where Freel saw Bruce Springsteen play just before “Born to Run” came out.) Freel also wore a Biden pin that was “on loan” from the campaign. It depicted the former Vice-President smiling widely and wearing his signature aviators. “One of the guys in the campaign lent it to me on the promise I would guard it with my life,” he said, adding, “They’re out of everything.” (Later, he explained that they had just run out of this particular button.)
Polls still show Biden ahead in South Carolina, although the gap between him and the national front-runner, Senator Bernie Sanders, has been narrowing for a while. On Tuesday night, CBS News will host a debate in Charleston; on Wednesday, one of South Carolina’s most prominent African-American politicians, Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, is expected to endorse Biden, in an apparent effort to stem the Sanders tide. Biden has long had a substantial lead among black voters in the state. Freel’s work had consisted mostly of speaking with black residents in Charleston and persuading them to stick with his friend.
“I’ve only seen maybe two white people,” Freel said, describing his days so far knocking on doors in North Charleston. “But I just act like I live around there.” His first Saturday in town, he said, “a cop pulled over to talk to me, while I was sitting beside the road. An African-American officer. He says, ‘You picking somebody up?’ I held up the literature and said, ‘I’m out here campaigning for my old friend Joe Biden.’ He goes, ‘Oh, no problem. I like Joe. Just pull a little more off the road.’ ” A few days later, Freel said, he was poking around “three or four trailers,” trying to find their street addresses. “Couldn’t see a number,” he said. “A lady was getting out of her car. She said, ‘Excuse me, sir, can I help you? That’s my house.’ I said, ‘I’m campaigning for my friend Joe Biden.’ She said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about him with us. He’s fine with us. He’s our man.’ I said, ‘Oh, thank you, dear.’ ”
Freel ordered another Harp and broke down the day’s numbers. “Forty people weren’t home,” he said. “Sixteen were strong Biden. I had a couple leaning Biden. A couple undecided. Then I had the one lady who was rude. One who moved. And a couple others.” He went on, “One woman said, ‘I’m undecided between Joe and Steerer.’ I said, ‘Tom Steyer?’ She said, ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’ ” After Sanders, Steyer, a hedge-fund billionaire who has spent millions in South Carolina, may be Biden’s main challenger in the state.
“You get into these neighborhoods and look around at these houses and think these people don’t know anything,” Freel said. “But they know what’s going on.” Most critically, he felt that they understood the difference between new and old friends. “More than one person has said to me, ‘Joe’s been around here for years. That means a lot.’ ” One of Freel’s favorite comments from a voter wasn’t Biden-specific. It was the person who said he’d “vote for Ronald McDonald” before voting for Trump. “I’ll support whoever runs against Trump and I know Biden will, too,” Freel said. “We’ll all get on the firing line.” He summed up his feelings for Trump by way of an Irish Gaelic phrase, póg mo thóin, which translates, roughly, as “kiss my ass.”
The next day, I joined Freel as he knocked on doors of previous primary voters in North Charleston, as a light rain came and went. A number of homes had Ring video doorbells peering from beside their doors; none had political signs in their yards. A postal worker pulled up to the sidewalk just as Freel and I were leaving a home where, once again, no one had answered the door. “I’m seeing tons and tons of flyers,” she said. Mostly for Steyer, some for Elizabeth Warren. “Not many for Joe,” she said. “But I like Joe.”
Whenever someone did answer the door, Freel would begin, “I’m out here campaigning for my friend Joe Biden.” Some of the men who answered doors said that they wouldn’t know who’d they be voting for until their wives or girlfriends had made up their minds. At one home, Freel arrived just as the woman of the house was returning. Her name was Jerrial Major, and she was a medical technician, an ordained minister, and a mother of four. “I know he’s capable of doing the job,” Major said, of Biden. “But he’s not putting the punch out there when it comes to the debates. He can’t be a good guy!”
Freel explained that he’s known Biden since the seventies, and assured Major that Biden was still sharp as a tack.
“I know he is,” Major said. “It’s just that … it seems like he’s becoming everyone’s punching bag. I said, ‘Lord, I’m just so undecided, I don’t know what I want to do.’ ”
Freel pivoted to electability. “Joe Biden is the only candidate who consistently beats Trump and beats him bad in all the swing states,” he said. “And that’s crucial. No way we win the White House back without them.”
Major didn’t disagree, but didn’t sound committed, either.
“Should I call him up tonight and tell him when he gets to the debate tomorrow night to just knock somebody over?” Freel said.
“Yeah, tell him to knock somebody over,” Major said. “Be a little more aggressive. Like I said, I know he’s capable of being President on Day One. He’s just not showing me, at this phase, that he wants to do this.”
She went on, “I’m weighing my options. I was driving up just now and I said, ‘I guess I’ll cast my vote for Joe.’ But he’s got to show me he wants to do this. Stop being the good guy.” She added, “We have a scum in the White House that needs to go.”
“I’ll try to get that word to him tonight,” Freel said.
A few houses later, a semi-retired operator of a commercial cleaning business answered the door. He said his name was Robert Smalls. “I’ve got to vote or my wife gonna kick me out,” he told Freel. Freel asked which way he was leaning. “I’m still debating,” Smalls said. “It ain’t the gay guy,” he added, referring to Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who would be the first openly gay nominee of a major party were he to win the primary. Small said that neither he nor his wife would vote for a gay candidate. “We talked about that last night,” he said. Smalls liked Sanders pretty well. “I’m not really satisfied with none of them, though,” he added. He wanted to hear more talk about reparations for descendants of slavery, he said, and about the “long prison terms for black men.”
Freel talked about Biden’s “ability to empathize with other people” and to “beat Trump like a drum,” particularly in the swing states. Smalls was unwilling to commit. He said he was looking forward to Tuesday’s debate.
At the end of the day, Freel tallied up his numbers. Forty-three people weren’t home. Twelve were strongly in favor of Biden; six, including Jerrial Major, were leaning his way. Four more were undecided. One person who’d been on Freel’s list was currently incarcerated, he had learned, and another, who serves in the Army, was out of state. Freel put them into the “other” category on the paperwork that he’d give to the campaign.
On his way back to the campaign’s North Charleston office, housed in a former dance club, Freel passed a place called Obama Quick Stop. Inside, a cashier said that she knew nothing about Biden or any other Democrats running for President. She said she loathed Trump, though. (The name of the shop, she explained, was unrelated to the previous occupant of the White House.) Freel offered a quick pitch on behalf of his man. “He was Obama’s Vice-President,” he said. The young woman nodded, seeming genuinely enthusiastic about that connection, and about voting in the primary. But Freel had his doubts.
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