Top progressives are backing Joe Biden's 2024 campaign. But some activists have reservations
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President Joe Biden would seem an unnatural fit for the activists at Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of progressives that was created to harness online rage over George W. Bush's administration. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, even concluded the event by recounting how she had become a Biden convert.
“When Biden was in, I was like, ‘Oh, man,’” said Jayapal, D-Wash., lamenting that Sanders and Warren had fallen short in the presidential primary. "But I gotta tell you, I am a Biden fan now.”
That brought cheers, which was no easy feat given that pro-Palestinian activists moments earlier had shouted down Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., on the same stage.
“This isn’t someone who’s spent the first term doing all kinds of objectionable things,” said Karthik Ganapathy, a veteran of Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign who also helped progressive Brandon Johnson win election as Chicago's mayor this spring. “I think the sense is, he’s had a much more successful, impactful, consequential presidency than progressives expected.”
“We have not ‘Built Back Better,’” said Walton, referencing Biden’s 2020 campaign slogan. “And it’s very frustrating to be a working-class American and being fed this ‘vote blue’ narrative, when the real conditions of our everyday lives are not changing.”
“I think people are not clear about what they actually got for that vote,” DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director for the progressive Center for Popular Democracy, said about some Biden supporters from 2020.
Cooper said Biden and top Democrats need to do a better job “messaging what actually has happened.” Referring to opposition to Trump's candidacy, he said: “There’s going to be a motivation factor. And I don’t think we should assume that people are just going to go out and vote for the same reason.”
Biden acknowledged the importance of turning out even reluctant progressives in 2020, when he told that year's all-virtual Netroots conference in a taped address, “I badly need you.”
Ganapathy said that progressive support for Biden runs deeper than simply attempting to thwart Trump once more.
“There’s a lot that this president and this administration can stand on in terms of their record," he said. "It doesn’t have to be a ‘Don’t vote for that guy.’”
Not everyone is convinced.
Anabel Mendoza, a 25-year-old media relations professional and Chicago native who recently moved to California, said Biden “ran on a lot of promises, but many of those have been unfulfilled and I think he could be bolder.”
“There is a lot at stake in this country, and young generations are feeling that," said Mendoza, pointing to slow federal progress on combating climate change and gun violence, as well as on immigration, an issue where she said Biden “kept in place a lot of Trump policies and that’s something I firmly disagreed with.”
But Mendoza also said “in no world am I ever going to go for Trump."
“When I go out and vote for a candidate, it might not be the candidate who has everything that I want," she added.
Walton has similar feelings. "As badly as I would love to sit this one out and prove a point,” she said, she'll be voting Democratic in 2024.
“Am I going to not vote and give the country away to another four years of Donald Trump?" Walton asked. "Absolutely not.”
Rahna Epting, executive director of the progressive activist organization MoveOn, said Biden “leveraged the first two years of his administration to pass some of the most progressive and people-first policies we could have ever dreamed of.”
She said Biden is no “movement candidate," but he does not have to be a star on the left for progressives to turn out for him in 2024.
“When push comes to shove, they’re going to vote for Joe Biden," Epting said. "For stability, for someone who is governing for the people, no matter what was left on the table in the last congressional cycle.”
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