Biden the first establishment Democrat to win since 1932.

[Earthling]

There is still hope for the dying 1932 comparison it seems...

I am not comparing Biden to FDR. And don't think 2020 is similar to 1932.

[Earthling]

Most of the people we now know to have been supporting Obama were not public supporters of Obama in 2008 - nobody wanted to get on the Clintons' wrong side. Hillary also had superdelegate support and recall that she hinted at winning the nomination on the convention floor with heavy superdelegate support.

Voters definitely saw Obama as an outsider. Even his theme was "change is here".

This.

Obama did have support from the Party elites. That doesn't make him the establishment candidate in 2008. That year, Hillary Clinton was.

[Orser67]

I don't think that making it a dichotomy is especially useful; most recent-ish winning candidates other than Trump, Bush I, and to a lesser extent Carter and Eisenhower have been somewhere between being a full-on outsider and a full-on establishment candidate. Even Biden faced a lot of skepticism from senior Democrats, including Obama.

But I guess I could agree that Biden is the most establishment-oriented Democrat to win since LBJ in 1964, and since FDR in 1932 if we're excluding incumbents.

[StateBoiler]

John F Kennedy was not really an outsider when he ran in 1960.  Sure he was a Catholic, but he was a high-profile long serving congressman from a family already relatively well-known in Democratic circles who commanded support from a lot of Democratic elites during his primary run.  If he was truly an outsider he would not have defeated LBJ and Stevenson on the first ballot before primaries were really important, lol.

Not to mention Truman was literally picked by the establishment to oust Wallace.