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.