What Biden can expect if he wins the 2020 presidential election

Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman joins the On the Move panel to discuss what issues Joe Biden will face if he wins the 2020 presidential election.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: We're turning our attention, because we're one week out to the presidential election. Going to bring in Rick Newman and that wonderful quote from "Schitt's Creek," don't count your poultry before it incubates. You're talking about what happens if Joe Biden wins and the potential for warring. We're already hearing AOC and left wing liberals making some demands. What have you got for us, because your story is posted to the website, right? Rick, I think you're muted, and I want to hear what you've got to say.

RICK NEWMAN: Sorry, Adam. Yeah, of course the Biden campaign doesn't want to talk about any of this publicly, but you know, look, they do have a lead. It is likely Biden is going to be the next president, so the first thing he's going to have to do is figure out his cabinet, and we're already hearing progressive Democrats, so this is Ilhan Omar, AOC, the so-called Squad in the House, saying things like they think progressive Democrats should account for all of Biden's cabinet appointees. They don't want anybody who's ever had a position in industry, for example, to run a cabinet department.

Bernie Sanders is kind of quietly campaigning to become the Labor Secretary. There are some people who want Elizabeth Warren to become Treasury Secretary, and of course she has a fair amount of animosity toward Wall Street. So I think if Biden wins, the moment he wins, we're going to see this battle break out that we saw during the Democratic primaries, which is Biden saying he's a moderate and trying to position himself as a moderate and a lot of the leftists trying to push him in the other direction, and I think this is just going to be a tough time for Biden all the way along if this actually happens.

JULIE HYMAN: Rick, in your estimation, how much power does the left wing of the party have right now? I mean, as Joe Biden likes to point out, they didn't win in the primaries, he did, right? So is that going to be enough of a lever for him against some of those forces on the left.

RICK NEWMAN: I think that's going to be the question for the first two years of the Biden presidency. Of course, it depends what the vote shows. Biden's right that he did beat a lot of progressives, most notably Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, in the primaries, but that's also where the energy is in the Democratic party. You know, Biden, if he wins, he's going to do it with a coalition of those leftists who may not like all his policies, but they are supporting him because they want to get rid of Trump, but moderates who are both Democrats and Republicans and independents.

And the trick for Biden is going to be keeping the left wing of the party content, placated if you will, without alienating the centrists. And we're going to see that, you know, I think the first thing a Biden administration would do is a big stimulus bill that mostly everybody would favor, and we've talked about that a lot. That'd be good for markets.

But then come the hard parts of legislation. How far do you go on health care? How far do you go on climate-- all the way to the Green New Deal, just part of the way to the Green New Deal? You know, we're going to have members of Congress formulating bills that Biden might have to veto because they go too far. So you know, this is going to be a bumptious family at best, and it's possible that the Democratic party could end up in a state of civil war two years from now if Biden wins.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Let's talk about this though. Your story right now is above the fold, as they used to say in the old newspaper days on our website page about Carly Fiorina. She backs Joe Biden's tax plans. We had Gary Cohn on, the man who gave us the 21% corporate tax said yesterday, said, yeah, let's go back to 28%. Not a problem. What can you tell us about Carly Fiorina and other, you know, business leaders who say, yeah, let's raise taxes.

RICK NEWMAN: There's this group of pragmatic, you know, they used to be Republicans, I asked, you know, she ran for president as a Republican in 2016, I asked her yesterday when we interviewed her, does she still consider herself a Republican? She said she doesn't know, because she doesn't feel like she fits into the Republican Party as constituted under Trump. So you've got pragmatic Republicans, and Adam, you interviewed Gary Cohn, and of course he pointed out he's a Democrat, but I think you could fairly say he's a pragmatic Democrat.

So you've got these pragmatic business oriented people who are moderates from each party, and Biden is winning them right now, because Trump does not seem like a moderate to these people. I mean, his tariffs, you know, he did cut taxes and he did cut regulation for businesses, but the tariffs not good for businesses immigration policy, not good for business, and a lot of them just don't like him personally. So if Biden wins, it's going to be in part because he gets those pragmatic moderates who are both Democrats and Republicans or at least used to be.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Yeah, the left wing of the Democratic party now tries to insult these people, calling them corporatists. That's the new slang, I guess, but [INAUDIBLE]--

RICK NEWMAN: Or institutionalists.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Pardon?

RICK NEWMAN: Or institutionalists or traditionalists, those are some other slurs.