After weeks of debate about the viability of President Joe Biden’s run for reëlection, the mounting pressure for him to leave the race finally overwhelmed his own efforts to stay. In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s historic decision to end his campaign, the enthusiasm that coalesced around Vice-President Kamala Harris as his replacement seemed to be as much a reflection of relief about Biden as it was excitement about Harris herself.
Since Biden’s revealing performance in the first Presidential debate, on June 27th, his candidacy had been leaching support. Even after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which many believed would buy Biden time, growing numbers of Democratic members of Congress abandoned the President’s campaign. Other Democrats, especially those in the Congressional Black Caucus, maintained their support for Biden. But Biden’s most stalwart defenders came from the Party’s left flank. Senator Bernie Sanders described Biden as the “most effective President in the modern history of our country.” In February, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described Biden as “one of the most successful presidents in modern American history,” and earlier this month Representative Ilhan Omar called Biden “the best President of my lifetime.” This was a far cry from Ocasio-Cortez’s claim during the 2020 Democratic primaries that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party”—and it’s likely to have a pronounced effect on progressives’ ability to influence Harris.
Ocasio-Cortez went on Instagram Live late last week to explain her support for Biden. Her main concern was the tight timeline to decide upon a new candidate. As she put it, “I’m looking at a watch, and I’m looking at a clock, and I’m looking at a calendar.” She went on to characterize the rising post-debate opposition to Biden as rooted in the “donor class” and “élites,” who not only wanted to jettison Biden but Harris as well. She dismissed concerns about Biden’s declining electability, claiming that she, too, had once been down in the polls only to eventually win her race. Ocasio-Cortez touted Biden’s record with labor and other constituencies that she characterized as uniquely aligned with the President.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s relationship with Biden was formed in the cauldron of the 2020 race—when, as an act of détente, Biden invited Sanders’s delegates to participate in rewriting the Party’s platform. Beyond the Party platform, a joint task force, co-chaired by Ocasio-Cortez, produced a hundred-and-ten-page report that made a vast set of policy recommendations concerning climate, immigration, criminal justice, and health care. The imprint of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez on the agenda of the Biden Administration brought good will and time. So, too, did the nearly two-trillion-dollar American Rescue Plan Act—one of the largest domestic spending bills in American history. Critical changes to the Earned Income Tax Credit program briefly led to a precipitous decline in child poverty in the U.S. It is notable that, until the emergence of the student movement for Palestine, Biden had faced almost no public protest or demonstration.
As moderates within the Party began to desert Biden, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez bet that they could bend Biden’s political promises in their direction and activate a moribund base. In a July 7th press conference, Ocasio-Cortez explained, “If we can expand on health care, if we can make sure that people’s rents and mortgages are affordable, if we can actually provide and chart out a future that is more leaning into the needs of working people, then I think we can chart a path to win.” Sanders echoed this hope, saying, “I think if he runs a strong, effective campaign focussed on the needs of the working class of this country, he will win. And I think there’s a chance he could win big.”
Representative Ro Khanna, of California, spelled out the larger strategy of left Democrats with regard to the Biden campaign. “We see an opportunity to get this Party to move in a bolder direction on economic policy,” he said on July 9th. “I think some people should give the progressives credit. It’s not the progressives who have been part of the circular firing squad. And I think that progressives have really come out looking like we have a governing vision.”
In the days before Biden pulled out of the race, he did begin to introduce some of the left’s ideas into his stump speech, including term limits for Supreme Court Justices, a national cap of five per cent on rent increases, and a promise to wipe out medical debt. But, in the progressive Democrats’ attempts to shore up Biden, they assumed his lag in the polls was due to poor messaging. They ignored that Biden’s evident decline had left him unable to effectively campaign. His agenda didn’t matter because he could not explain or argue for it.
In putting themselves in Biden’s camp even as the vast majority of Democratic voters clamored for him to exit the race, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez made more than a political miscalculation. They staked their reputations on shifting the image of a quintessential symbol of the status quo. And they did so by disparaging the bottom-up revolt against Biden’s place at the top of the ticket. In characterizing the opposition to Biden as élite- and donor-driven, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez ignored that, for months, polls had shown that a large majority of ordinary Democrats did not want Biden to run. In an AP-NORC poll taken in August, 2023, seventy-seven per cent of Democrats aged eighteen to forty-four said they believed that Biden “is too old to run for president.” Among Democrats between forty-five and fifty-nine, the number jumped to eighty-three per cent. In April, long before the debate, an ABC/Ipsos poll found that a stunning eight out of ten adults said that Biden was too old to serve another term. If anything, the Democratic Party leadership and donors were slow to catch up to the mood of voters, not the other way around.
Democratic voters didn’t just think that Biden was too old. Low favorability ratings have dogged him throughout his Administration. He now has the lowest approval rating at this point in his term of any President in the history of modern polling, including Trump. That cannot simply be chalked up to the doubts around his ability to serve a second term. The Democrats who backed Biden ignored disappointment with his Presidency. Biden and the Democrats had the opportunity to make the reductions in child poverty permanent, but those efforts stalled because of conflicts within the Party in the Senate. Many of Biden’s other promises—a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, tax hikes for the rich, affordable child care—similarly died during negotiations in Congress. Biden had claimed that he would be able to fulfill these promises because of the historic protests that swept the nation in 2020. “I honest-to-God believe we have an enormous opportunity, now that the screen, the curtain, has been pulled back on just what’s going on in the country, to do a lot of really positive things,” he explained eight weeks before the 2020 election.
Biden had to make big promises to convert the anger of tens of millions of people engaged in street protests into votes for a candidate who had been in national politics for nearly five decades. And voters largely delivered. Not only did they send Biden to the White House but, in dramatic fashion, they put Democrats in both Senate seats from the state of Georgia. Yet, despite the praise from progressive Democrats, most people have experienced the Biden Administration as a period of devastating inflation. Moreover, even with Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders directly intervening in his candidacy, Biden still had remarkably little to say about the end of the right to abortion. On the issue of immigration, he adopted the right’s promises to tighten security at the border, including creating tougher standards for asylum seekers—a development that some Democratic elected officials have welcomed, even as it has strained Biden’s relationship with immigrant-rights activists.
The pall of broken or unfulfilled promises dampened Biden’s support among core constituencies and undermined his reëlection efforts. This was especially true among Black voters. Democratic Party activists and insiders have long portrayed Black voters as the bedrock of Biden’s support. In the weeks before Biden left the race, the turnout group Black Voters Matter, for example, claimed that the Biden Administration had “delivered on enough” of its promises and that the efforts to change the ticket were led by “white congresspeople, pundits and donors.” But that assessment doesn’t make sense of polling that consistently showed Black voters to be far less supportive of Biden in 2024 than they were in 2020. In May, polls still found that seventy-seven per cent of Black voters were backing Biden, but this was down from the ninety-two per cent who backed him in 2020. Among young Black voters, only forty-one per cent, compared with sixty-one per cent in 2020, said that they were “absolutely certain” to vote in the coming Presidential election.
One of many issues driving Black discontent with the Biden Administration was the President’s handling of Palestine. The number of Black Americans who felt connected to the plight of Palestinians grew from thirty-two per cent in October to forty-five per cent by the spring. More than two-thirds of Black Americans said in April that they supported an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Biden dismissed the national student movement as tinged with violence and antisemitism and seemed to agree with, if not sanction, the police and administrative suppression of the protests in the spring. In doing so, Biden alienated young voters either involved in or sympathetic to the protests and also offended Muslim and Arab voters. The war in Gaza may not be the most important political issue for most Americans, but it’s hardly insignificant. In the swing state of Michigan, more than a hundred thousand Democrats registered their discontent by casting their primary ballots as “uncommitted.” Across the country, more than half a million Democrats marked their primary ballots as “uncommitted,” “uninstructed,” or “no preference.”
Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez voiced their opposition to the war in Gaza, with Sanders describing it as “ethnic cleansing” and Ocasio-Cortez as an “unfolding genocide.” But, even during Biden’s most vulnerable moments, as the pressure mounted for him to leave the ticket, progressive Democrats did not attempt to leverage their support for the President to shift his position on Israel. And now with Biden out of the race, the failure of most of the so-called Squad and of Sanders to hold Biden to account for fuelling Israel’s war will make it nearly impossible for them to place any demands about the war on Harris. After Biden endorsed Harris, on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Cori Bush, and Ayanna Pressley fell in line, offering unqualified support for nothing in return—except, perhaps, safety from blame should voters decline to rally behind her in kind. (Sanders, notably, acknowledged that Biden was exiting the race but has not yet endorsed Harris.)
Of the Squad members, only Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan, a Palestinian American who encouraged voters to cast a protest vote of “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries, explicitly withheld an endorsement of Harris. Tlaib instead has called for a “transparent democratic process at an open convention,” with hopes of a “fair vote” on a resolution that calls for an arms embargo to stop the flow of weapons to Israel. In the same spirit, the president of the United Auto Workers, Shawn Fain, also refused to immediately endorse Harris, explaining in an MSNBC interview, “We’re not going to rush in and just throw it out there.” The day after the interview, Fain and the U.A.W., joined by several other unions, sent a letter to Biden calling on him to “immediately halt all military aid to Israel” as Benjamin Netanyahu arrived to give a speech to the U.S. Congress.
Tlaib and, to a lesser extent, Fain, are using their positions to try to shape politics, not just reflect the political status quo. The momentum around Harris is so intense that, ultimately, those efforts may be in vain. But if the support of the progressives is to mean anything, then it should be leveraged to make political demands. The left should not simply offer a rubber stamp to Harris before she has clarified the positions of her campaign. ♦
