Frank Newport, Ph.D., is a Gallup senior scientist, opines that the most significant storyline coming out of the June 27/28 Democratic primary debates was Sen. Kamala Harris' attack on front-runner Joe Biden's opposition to school busing in the 1970s, while he was serving as U.S. senator from Delaware. Harris referred to her own positive experience as a young black girl being bused in California in 1969 and asked Biden: "Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?"
Biden equivocated in his response, attempting to thread the needle between his opposition to federal court-ordered busing and local busing. Most observers scored this exchange as a victory for Harris, and some horse-race polling (but not all) conducted after the debate showed Biden losing ground and Harris gaining as the preferred Democratic presidential nominee. Of course, as I have discussed in some detail, Biden's extraordinary longevity as an elected official at the federal level (stretching from 1973 to 2017) means that he was taking positions on issues in contexts that are ancient history to many voters today. His busing position in the 1970s is one of these.
The environment of the 1970s pertaining to race relations, busing and Biden has been the subject of a number of reviews since the debates. My focus here, however, is the public opinion context in which Biden was operating in that decade. While we don't hear so much about busing these days (the last time Gallup asked about busing in a national survey was in 1999), it was a more prevalent polling topic in the 1970s. I find at least nine different times during the 1970s when Gallup asked about busing, using a variety of question formats and contexts. The key finding: A significant majority of Americans disapproved of the concept of busing in every poll Gallup conducted during the '70s, with most polls showing 70% or more who registered a negative opinion.
Biden's opposition to busing in the 1970s, in short, was consistent with majority national public opinion. (Gallup didn't conduct polls in Delaware in the 1970s on the topic of busing, but apparently it was opposed in that state as well as nationally.) Some, presumably including Harris, would assert that public opinion should not have mattered; that Biden should have courageously supported busing even in the face of majority public disapproval. This position assumes that Americans' opinions on the matter should have been ignored. This is what I call the "Profiles in Courage" position, after John F. Kennedy's 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book in which he (and his coauthor Theodore Sorensen) extolled the courage of U.S. senators who took positions against prevailing public opinion and partisan pressure.
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