Why progressives haven’t joined the ‘dump Biden’ chorus

BALTIMORE – The most important press conference of Joe Biden’s life was underway — sixty “critical” and “crucial” minutes at the NATO summit’s close, where any mistake could stagger his presidential campaign.

Forty miles away, hundreds of Democratic activists at the annual Netroots Nation conference were relaxing at a roof deck happy hour. Catering and drinks were supplied by the Black Male Voter Project. A DJ played Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” There were no TV screens.

“This circular firing squad, it’s very Democratic,” said Markos Moulitsas, whose Daily Kos blog birthed the 18-year-old conference. The blog’s commenters were “pissed off,” he said: “Project 2025 is finally going viral, people are finally paying attention to it, and Democrats would rather complain about Joe Biden, who’s got the nomination sewn up.”

Two weeks after the disastrous Atlanta debate, the president is still cleaning up the damage — 18 members of Congress begging him to quit the ticket, celebrity donors fretting that he’s too feeble to beat Donald Trump again, Nancy Pelosi nudging him to perhaps take the gold watch.

But there is no ideological edge to the panic, or to the fight-back. Among progressives, who were the least pro-Biden faction when he won the 2020 nomination, the mood is mixed. Some, like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have praised Biden’s record, urging him and the party to refocus on it. Others, who’d protested Biden’s support for Israel in Gaza, see an opening — but do not want progressives to be the face of a DNC putsch.

Polling by Our Revolution, a group founded by Sanders, found most Democrats wanted Biden to quit. But the debate over whether he should do so is taking place largely outside the movement. In Washington, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has mostly stayed in wait-and-see mode while other players look to influence Biden’s decision. “I am fully behind him as our nominee until he’s not our nominee,” chair Pramila Jayapal told reporters this week.

“This is the first time that the progressives are not being blamed,” California Rep. Ro Khanna said in a panel discussion. “I spent, as co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, one year listening to James Carville on CNN say that Bernie Sanders was unelectable. I’m glad now he’s talking about Joe Biden being unelectable.”

Forty-eight hours before the debate, progressives and the Democratic Party’s leadership were in a standoff. Pro-Israel groups, including some GOP donors, had crushed Rep. Jamaal Bowman in his New York; Gaza ceasefire protesters were confronting the president and his surrogates whenever they could find them in public.

Those dynamics aren’t gone. Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, who is facing her own pro-Israel primary challenge next month, warned the conference that “extremists” had “flooded our airwaves with lies about me and about this movement.” The Biden administration, unlike the Obama administration, has stayed clear of the conference; attendees earned a reputation over the years for heckling or interrupting party figures who weren’t meeting progressive demands.

But the drawn-out Biden crisis, which has consumed Democrats and drowned out their messaging, has exhausted party loyalists.

That included many progressives, who had their theories of how to win — sell the administration’s pro-labor record, highlight its anti-monopoly and anti-poverty policies, make the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 infamous, and make the election about Trump again. They could do a lot of that without Biden. But he wasn’t making it easy.

“I’m going to snatch the wigs of the entire senior staff of Joe Biden who let him walk out into the debate like that,” said author and investor Cheryl Contee.

Activists who were already pressuring Biden said that the debate and Democratic panic had strengthened their hand. Abbas Alawieh, a pro-ceasefire “uncommitted” delegate to the DNC, said that the president’s campaign had “diminished the concerns” of critics all year. After the debate, more people had seen that the campaign was overconfident, and not listening to some people who wanted to beat Trump, but thought that the candidate was making that impossible.

“If there were a change in the candidate, our advocacy would continue to focus on the current administration, because they need to change the policy,” said Alawieh, a former Hill staffer for Rep. Bush. “If it happens to be Vice President Harris, whose team has been sending out leak after leak saying that she doesn’t agree with President Biden’s Gaza policy, she would need to differentiate her Gaza policy very quickly.”

Biden’s crisis also activated Democrats who demanded a new nominee — and some of them were progressives. Aaron Regunberg, a former Rhode Island legislator who lost a 2023 special congressional election to a former Biden White House veteran, reacted to the debate by launching Pass the Torch, a group that was contacting members of Congress and party activists and urging them to abandon Biden.

“The stakes are high,” said Regunberg. “They’re running a ticket that is threatening to give Trump a GOP governing trifecta. The Democratic Party has been saying all year that this is an existential threat election, that it’s our democracy on the line. I think most Democrats believe that. Maybe the operatives who’ve been writing those fundraising emails don’t.”

Pass the Torch had conducted polling, with YouGov, that found most Democrats ready for a new ticket, likely led by the vice president; it organized 2,800 emails to members of Congress, and started to have positive conversations with delegates, nearly all of whom are bound to Biden.

Clint Keaveny, a Wisconsin activist who waved a sign at a post-Biden rally that read “pass the torch, Joe,” had not been working with the group when he did that. But he’d since been let go by the congressional candidate he was working for, and signed up with Regunberg’s group, which warned that Republicans wanted Biden to stay atop the ticket.

“Our opponents don’t want us to change,” said Abby Clark, who called herself an “establishment Democrat,” but began working with Pass the Torch as soon as she could. “They feel great about the situation we’re in. They’re already attacking the vice president — we’re getting all the downside and none of the upside.”

Progressives see two impediments in their long, unfinished march to power: The Democratic establishment, and the media. The Democrats giving blind quotes about how Biden must go have begun to remind activists of the dogpile that took out Howard Dean in the 2004 primary, and the panic that convinced Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to consolidate behind Biden after Sanders won the 2020 Nevada caucus. (Like Zelig, James Carville keeps showing up in these stories.)

Khanna wasn’t the only person at the conference relieved that the party couldn’t blame its mess on progressives. But most people I talked to were pragmatic, viewing Biden the way that social conservatives once viewed Trump. There were things they could never do if they lost the presidency, and things they could if a weakened Biden held on. I detected some worry about Harris leading the ticket, because she hadn’t proven herself like the president — who had next to zero support in this crowd in the 2020 primary.

• In HuffPost, Daniel Marans explains why progressives who’ve been critical of Biden have his back now. “Progressive lawmakers’ reticence to come out against Biden reflects an appreciation of the grave stakes of a Trump victory for ‘vulnerable communities, on working-class people, people of color and women.’”
• In Politico, Ben Jacobs captures the jubilant mood of Republicans as they watch Democratic panic about blowing the election: “Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) pleaded into a reporter’s phone for the embattled Biden to stay on the presidential ticket.”