AOC, Sanders erase Biden as progressive movement moves on

When he secured the 2020 Democratic nomination, Biden made a deal with Sanders and other progressives, giving them a role in drafting the party platform and incorporating their ideas into his campaign and administration. To progressives’ surprise, he often responded to their direct actions; climate activists protested with Ocasio-Cortez for a New Deal-style “climate conservation corps,” and he created one by executive order.

“When it comes to domestic policy, President Biden probably would go down as one of the most effective presidents that centered the working class,” Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times in January.

But Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza smothered progressives’ good will. In Denver, Sanders mentioned the former president just once by name, when he denounced Trump for maintaining “the horrific Biden policy of giving more money to Netanyahu to destroy the Palestinian people.”

Now Biden, who’s made just two public appearances since leaving Washington, is a non-factor in his party. His achievements, including trillions of dollars of infrastructure, health care and climate spending, are being pulled down by his successor. Democrats rarely talk about Biden’s role in those programs as they fight (and sue) to save them.

The erasure started before Biden left office, with Sanders crediting Trump’s victory to “Democratic leadership” that defended the “status quo” and lost working class votes.Sanders and other progressives had taken another tone during the campaign, defending Biden and his record. (So had Williams: IAPUT endorsed Biden, then Harris, in the 2024 election, and he praised “Union Joe” as the best president for labor in generations.)

“We came out of that economic downturn a lot faster than anyone dream we would have, and you can thank President Biden for that,” Sanders told a crowd in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on June 28 — the day after the disastrous CNN debate with Trump that unraveled Biden’s campaign and damaged Democrats’ argument that voters could overlook his age. “Biden’s policies, by and large, are for the working class of this country, and we’ve got to appreciate that.”

In conversations on Monday, progressive strategists said that there was no upside to mentioning Biden at all, even when defending programs he funded or created. In Denver, Ocasio-Cortez spoke more positively of the Democrats than Sanders did, praising the state’s senators and Democratic members of Congress by name for opposing the GOP’s spending packages.

“I want you to look at every level of office around you, and support Democrats who actually fight, because those are the ones that can win against Republicans,” she said.

Why does it matter if Democrats and progressives wrap up Biden’s presidency into a story of Democratic failure? It explains the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez project, which in part is about disentangling their politics from a toxic brand and turning it into an anti-establishment cause.

“Trump basically said the system is broken, and I’m going to fix it,” Sanders told me before his “Fight Oligarchy” tour began last month. “Democrats more or less said: You know, the status quo is not perfect, but we’re gonna tinker with it around the edges.”

The senator’s new electoral project is recruiting progressives to run against Republicans and beat them, whether they want to run as Democrats or independents.

“There are a whole lot of people, who voted Republican, who are not crazy about the Republican Party,” Sanders told me in Greeley. “Working-class Republicans don’t want tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to veterans programs.” In the story he’s telling, those voters did not have an ally in the White House who did the right thing for four years; neither party has answered those voters’ concerns.

But Republicans have not forgotten about Biden. During his address to Congress last month, Trump mentioned Biden, “the worst president in American history,” 14 times. In remarks to reporters, the president frequently blames Bidens for problems he didn’t leave him, like a stock market correction. The story Trump and the GOP are telling is that their party is delivering for the working class, rescuing it from the costs and failures inflicted by their last president and the Democratic Party.

Defeated parties have been here before. George W. Bush vanished from Republican politics after leaving the presidency in 2009; apart from a few “Miss Me Yet?” memes and Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama presidency’s anti-terrorism strategy, that team played no role in the Tea Party-era GOP rebrand. Republicans built space to attack their former president’s legacy, with conservative candidates taking down incumbents who had supported Bush’s Wall Street bailout. The party won the presidency again with Trump, who has mocked Bush as a failure.

Parties have also swung hard in the other direction. In 2021, when Trump was beaten but able to run again, his party retconned his presidency into a success. They were boom years, with no new foreign wars, undermined only by a deranged anti-Trump deep state and the COVID-19 pandemic. The few Republicans who criticized Trump over his handling of that pandemic, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, lost to him and endorsed him.

This was never going to happen for Biden, who left office when voters held a far darker view of the economy than they did in 2020. But it’s significant that the progressives are skipping right past it. Democrats’ argument about how they can win back working class voters might start with Biden, who implemented some big progressive ideas and watched more of those voters walk away.

As Biden left office, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel called him a “remarkably consequential one-term president” who “orchestrated the best recovery in the industrial world” and “consolidated the break with the failed market fundamentalism of the conservative era that Trump began.” It’s the sort of analysis many progressives had of Biden — Gaza record aside — until the results came in from Pennsylvania on Election Night.