How Progressives Can Still Move Joe Biden Left (But They Have to Vote for Him to Do It)

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE)

We are a little under a week out from Bernie Sanders decision to drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination for president, guaranteeing the next Democratic nominee will be former Vice President Joe Biden.  A lot of people are spending time moving on to speculation about Biden's vice presidential choice, but I wanted to talk about something that I was going to let slide.  I am aware that after a candidate drops out of a race, it is something of a performance to go online now and proclaim "I'm just not going to vote!" or "he needs to earn my vote!" or something of this sort, and I get that.  Losing elections suck and particularly right now, we're all inside & additional disappointment is tough to swallow (plus it's hard not to believe at least half of these tweets are coming from bots).  But some of the statements have gotten a bit absurd, and so I wanted to talk about this weird phenomena, something that has gotten exponentially worse in the Trump era, particularly since one could argue that Hillary Clinton's inability to transform Bernie Sanders' voters may well have cost her the election in 2016, so this has the potential to move from cathartic to dangerous if not handled properly.

When I am asked for my political ideology, the phrase "practical progressive" will come up.  I am, for all intents-and-purposes, very liberal, arguably more liberal as I've gotten older and seen a bit more of the world than I was in college, and was traditionally supposed to be at my "most" liberal.  If I were taking one of those tests where you figure out whom you should vote for based solely on the issues, I would decidedly favor Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to Joe Biden.  A lot of the major public policy pushes they support around healthcare, climate change, student loans, and immigration are ones I also share & support.

But I'm also someone who has seen how Washington works, and I know that before you shoot for the moon, you have to build a rocket, and so I voted for Biden in the primary.  Biden is more popular, for reasons that I'm not going to dissect here today, with more of the electorate than Bernie or Warren.  People will complain "Medicare-4-All polls well!" but frequently liberals (for whatever reason) aren't able to translate an issue they support into support for the candidates themselves.  The best way to look at this is to look at minimum wage increases, which are a frequent statewide ballot initiative.  In 2018, Missouri passed a minimum wage increase by 25-points, a huge margin, signaling strong support.  That same year, Missouri hosted a very important Senate race between Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Josh Hawley.  Polling showed them close, and one of the big issues of the campaign was the minimum wage increase.  McCaskill supported it, made it central to her campaign, and Hawley opposed it.  At the end of the day, though, Hawley won the election.  Countless Missouri voters voted both for a ballot initiative & the man who opposed it, proving that while ticket-splitting is not as common as it used to be, it doesn't mean belief systems are becoming more uniform.  This is not an isolated incident. Arkansas & South Dakota in 2014, as well as Arizona in 2006 and Florida in 2004 had exact copies of McCaskill's situation in 2018-the minimum wage increase passed, the Democrat in the competitive Senate race whose party supported that increase failed.

This is all to say that voters are complicated, and since Biden had the best shot in the polls, I supported him.  But the point here isn't why someone should support Biden in the primary-it's why Sanders & Warren supporters should support Biden in the general.  From what I see online, the complaints against Biden fall into one of two camps-either "Biden is not as progressive as Biden/Warren, so I can't support him" or "Biden won't push hard enough on climate change/student loans/minimum wage/other pet issues."

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer

To the first group, I say-you need to get over it.  I'm not saying you can't complain about the guy, but he's the only option in November.  The American political system doesn't have room for a third-party movement while the electoral college exists, or at least until Ranked-Choice-Voting is more universal.  You can try again in 2024, but in 2020, the only choices for president are Joe Biden or Donald Trump.  Voting for someone else if you're a Biden/Warren voter is a vote for Trump; you can go through the mental gymnastics you need to to convince yourself otherwise, but your excuse is not based in evidence, and is akin to people trying to convince us "the earth is flat" at this point-we've seen this in 2000 & 2016 already, no more convincing is needed.  And the reality is that the next president will assuredly nominate someone to replace either Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Breyer, or probably both; it is something of a miracle that they have made it this long, but it's unlikely they'll both make it the next four years as jurists both into their eighties.  John Roberts has been able to skate away from taking back abortion rights, gay marriage, and the Affordable Care Act; that won't be possible if Ginsburg or Breyer are replaced with a Brett Kavanugh.  For that reason alone, voting for anyone other than Biden (who will put jurists that are similar to these two ideologically on the court-don't believe conspiracy theories or thirty-year-old quotes taken out of context) is unforgivable.  If you don't vote for Biden, you don't support abortion rights or gay marriage, because supporting him is the only way to guarantee they still exist.

The second concern (about Biden not matching your more left-leaning views) I have a better solution for you, though, than not voting for Joe Biden.  This one feels more of a vital complaint to me so I'm going to give it a little more credence, so here goes.

Movements should never be about one person.  As much as you admire Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (and I'm not here to say you shouldn't-they have made an incredible mark on American politics, especially in this past primary), their ideologies should be about more than them.  We have seen Trump proclaim "I'm the only guy who can fix it" and we all know that to be totally untrue; don't make the same mistake of assuming Sanders or Warren are "the only person who can fix it."  The focus should be on getting the issues that progressives believe in passed, not necessarily getting hung up on who passes them.

Donald Trump can sit in that Oval Office and veto legislation out of a Democratic House & Senate until he's blue-in-the-face, and his supporters will love him for it.  Voting for him (either by checking his name or simply not voting for Biden-again, they're the same thing) doesn't do anything to further student loan relief, climate change legislation, and gun control.  BUT, Joe Biden doesn't have that luxury.  Joe Biden is a Democrat, and unlike Donald Trump, he doesn't have a cult-of-personality behind him that makes him impervious to criticism from his supporters.  He's, in fact, a left-of-middle candidate that is in a party that is heading further left.  Progressives need to use that to their advantage not by pressuring Biden-the-Candidate to change his policy positions, but by putting in power advocates that will make Biden-the-President move to the left.

This is not achieved by saying "if Biden doesn't support Medicare-4-All, I won't support him."  That's pointless, and doesn't really get past the point that you need two houses of Congress to make any sort of Medicare reform feasible.  It also doesn't have anything to do with whom Biden picks as his vice president.  Mike Pence was supposed to be a moderating force on Donald Trump's behavior; picking a devout born-again Christian who probably doesn't even swear as Trump's running-mate didn't do jack in changing his public antics.  Picking someone like Elizabeth Warren or Stacey Abrams might make you feel better about voting for Biden, but it does little practically, and if anything takes Warren out of the Senate as someone who can criticize the President from the left.  The VP has little public power.  They are never going to fight the president publicly, because if they do, they won't be able to help make decisions.  They are constitutionally required to have a pulse and break Senate ties-that's it.  Progressives who pretend that Biden picking a liberal running-mate will suddenly move him to the left have no concept of how Washington works.  The VP has as much practical responsibility as the president allows them to have-this is not a balanced relationship.  Biden would be well-advised to pick someone who would be qualified to be president (a senator or governor), someone whom he thinks he could work well with, and someone that will help the ticket achieve actual votes.  But if you're someone that wants him to be more liberal when he's the president, the VP is a terrible place to do that.

The way to push Biden to the left is not by blackmailing his campaign or insisting he pick a running-mate that doesn't match his politics...it's to give him a Congress that forces him left.  Joe Biden is not going to veto legislation that came out of a Democratic House and Senate.  It's not something that's done.  Trump only started issuing vetoes when Nancy Pelosi got to be Speaker.  Barack Obama only issued two vetoes while the Democrats held the House & Senate, and George W. Bush only did one in the five years where the Republicans also controlled Congress during his term.  The President is going to put pressure on Congress, sure, but he isn't going to risk continually vetoing progressive legislation out-of-Congress.  It'll make him unpopular with his own party, and will open him up to a primary challenge in 2024 (and despite other conspiracy theories you read, it's doubtful that Biden won't pursue a second term).  Biden won't want that-so even if the legislation is more left-leaning than he campaigned on, he's likely to sign it if it came from Schumer & Pelosi.

MJ Hegar (D-TX)

So the way to win the war for student loan relief, expanded public healthcare, and a Green New Deal isn't to not vote for Biden-it's to empower Schumer & Pelosi to pressure a President Biden.  And the only way to do that is to send more Democrats their way.  There are a plethora of options across the country you could choose from, but imagine a progressive like MJ Hegar taking down John Cornyn-the votes for that seat would instantly be reversed for the next six years.  Or how about not having to depend on Susan Collins having one of her "a broken clock is right twice a day moments" but instead have a reliable progressive like Sara Gideon?  Again, don't get hung up on it having to be the right kind of victory (Lindsey Graham & Mitch McConnell are solidly in their seats-I get the urge to want to beat them, but it's far more pragmatic to marginalize them by reducing the number of their Republican colleagues who are in more winnable races than to waste money on a quixotic move to beat them in ruby-red states), but there are a number of close races for the Senate that could move the Senate further left (I provided a list of the most competitive races here if you want to start volunteering or making donations).  For every Democratic senator you add to Congress, you make the Senate more likely to pass liberal legislation, even if it's a moderate Democrat like Steve Bullock coming in (because Bullock is far, far, far more likely vote for Democratic legislation than his Republican opponent).  The same is true for the House-every Democrat you retain or add moves the needle of what 218 House members can accomplish further to the left.  A Senator Hegar, armed with a six-year-term and her own branch of government, is 1000x more likely to make Joe Biden liberal than a single voter holding back their vote, or a Vice President Abrams.  Progressives need to not be in their head that they have to win a certain way or with a certain candidate-there are lots of Senate and House races this year that need winning, and you can still win your battle if you help deliver victories in these contests.  I'm not here to convince you that Joe Biden is the candidate-of-your-dreams if you voted for Sanders or Warren...he's not.  But that doesn't mean he can't be the president who delivers for you if you give him a Senate & House that will push him further to the left, and give Sanders & Warren gavels to make that happen.

Joe Biden is the best candidate that progressives can hope for in 2020-that's done.  The only way to make movement forward is to ensure you're casting a vote for him to beat Donald Trump.  How progressive of a president he'll be-that's still in the hands of voters, and depends entirely on how blue they're willing to paint the halls of Congress.  It's okay to mourn the loss of your candidate.  But don't throw in the towel or pretend that your voice can't be one for change.  Concede that you're voting for Biden (even if reluctantly), and then pick a new champion in a Senate or House candidate, and get to work making sure he's held accountable.