Biden’s swift move to shore up his left flank underscores the difficult choice many progressives began facing when Sanders abandoned his presidential bid: Side with the more centrist former vice president or keep up the fight and potentially lose the White House again.
As they weigh their options, activists are already working to persuade Biden on key issues. And Biden is amenable to the idea because he will likely need them to defeat President Donald Trump.
A strong indication of just how much came when Biden announced he’d support expanding federal health insurance through Medicare to people 60 and older who opt out of employee-sponsored coverage — down from the current 65 minimum age requirement. Biden also promised to forgive student debt for many low- and middle-income borrowers.
“Senator Sanders and his supporters can take pride in their work in laying the groundwork for these ideas,” Biden wrote in an online post announcing what he called “two important steps we can take to help ease the economic burden on working people.”
Neither proposal goes as far as Sanders promised had he won the presidency. And they may not be enough to persuade supporters of the Vermont senator to embrace Biden.
“We can try all we want to use our leverage as a movement, but at the end of the day, I wouldn’t expect anything coming from the establishment, the Biden campaign or the Democratic National Committee as a way to bring in the base,” said Nomiki Konst, who worked on Democratic Party reforms on Sanders’ behalf. “I think they want power — and I think they want money.”
If Biden can’t bridge the ideological divide, he risks heading into the fall with the same vulnerabilities as Hillary Clinton in 2016. But if he gives too much to progressives, he could be portrayed as too far left, an argument the Trump campaign is already trying to make.
Despite Thursday’s moves, Biden has signaled he’s not willing to make concessions on the most important issues in the minds of many Sanders’ supporters: embracing Medicare for All universal health insurance and the sweeping Green New Deal to combat climate change. He has, however, embraced an overhaul of bankruptcy laws proposed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the other leading progressive, who ended her presidential bid last month.
RoseAnn Demoro, a close friend of Sanders and former head of the National Nurses United union, predicted Biden would also move to appease Sanders supporters on labor and environmental issues — but said she’s unsure it’ll be enough.
“The calculation is, this base has nowhere to go but Biden because of Trump,” she said. “But if history teaches anything, a lot of the base sat it out last time.”
Demoro noted that, after 2016, many Sanders supporters knew he would try again for the presidency four years later. That seems unlikely going forward, potentially raising the profile of rising-star congressional progressives such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Sanders, and Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who was a Warren backer.
Sanders and Warren have notably stopped short of endorsing Biden.
Biden aides began outreach to Sanders’ camp to discuss policy weeks before the senator suspended his campaign.
The former vice president himself also has had conversations with some of his former rivals — the kind of direct interactions that preceded his adopting Warren’s bankruptcy proposals.
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