Biden looks to the Left as he fights to hold on to 2024 nomination

Progressives helped lift President Joe Biden to the presidency in 2020, and he’s going for broke in recent days trying to shore up his support among that segment of the Democratic Party in the final months of the 2024 election.

The president has spent all of July working to reassure Democrats he remains fit enough to perform the duties of office, including after testing positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, but those outreach efforts have coincided with a number of official policy decisions catered directly to progressives.

Multiple veteran Democratic operatives and the Biden campaign itself disputed the idea that the president is extending olive branches to progressives, arguing instead that Biden has remained constant on these issues since the 2020 campaign.

“Politically, President Biden isn’t the same man he was during his time in the Senate or vice presidency,” one Democratic strategist with insight into Biden’s campaign told the Washington Examiner. “What you’re describing to me is someone who listens to what his voters want, someone who, because of MAGA Republican obstruction, is outlining his plan for accomplishing things he couldn’t get done in his first term. That’s Joe Biden.”

On Tuesday, the White House announced proposed 5% rent caps for corporate landlords with at least 50 properties in their portfolios, lest they lose out on lucrative federal tax breaks. Progressives have repeatedly called on Biden to do more to address skyrocketing rent prices in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and recent polling shows that housing costs have grown into an increasingly important election issue for voters of all stripes.

Later that day, news broke that Biden is contemplating two major reforms to the Supreme Court: establishing term limits for all justices and installing a new, enforceable code of ethics. Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has spent most of his time in the White House resisting calls from progressives to reform the nation’s highest court.

He’s also reportedly weighing publicly calling for an end to presidential immunity, though he remains less set on this third proposal as the other two.

And the president continues to make advancing new gun control legislation, including reinstating his 1994 ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, a core pillar of his reelection bid.

These all come on top of campaign promises Biden has rolled out over the past year, including vowing to erase people’s medical debt for “pennies on the dollar” and closely aligning himself with top labor unions in battlegrounds across the country. The president, who has yet to release a formal agenda for a potential second term in office, frequently asks voters on the campaign trail to help him “finish the job” on the aforementioned issues.

Notably, virtually all the progressive bucket list items Biden has touched on while campaigning hold no chance of being enacted in the immediate future, given Republicans’ majority in the House of Representatives. 

Biden’s early-July outreach to Democratic power players stemmed the tide of lawmakers calling for his exit but didn’t end those calls entirely. The total number of elected Democrats imploring Biden to step aside grew to 20 on Wednesday, when Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) called on him to drop out. 

Still, some of the president’s strongest Democratic backers in government could be referred to as significantly further left-of-center than Biden himself. That group includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

“I spoke with the president extensively this weekend. He has made abundantly clear that he is in this race. He has made abundantly clear that he is not leaving the race,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters last week. “He is the nominee. I am making sure that I support him and making sure that we win in November.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) similarly released a statement last week outlining his support for the president’s “path to victory.”

“Biden and Democrats can win this election if they address the needs of the working class,” he wrote. “The American people want change. It will either be the change of Trump’s reactionary and xenophobic policies, or change that benefits working families.”

And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a 2020 primary rival of the president and one of the leading voices on Capitol Hill, joined a group of Biden campaign surrogates on a briefing call Monday to excoriate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), former President Donald Trump’s newly picked running mate.

It remains uncertain if Biden’s capitulation to progressives will help him hold on to the Democratic nomination, let alone win reelection in November, and unfortunately for the president, he’ll be sidelined for the next several days in Delaware after testing positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday afternoon in Las Vegas.

A poll published by the Associated Press on Wednesday morning found that 70% of respondents, including 65% of Democrats, believe that Biden should allow someone else to accept the Democratic nomination next month.

A significantly smaller number, 57%, believe that Trump should not be the Republican nominee, but 73% of Republicans surveyed want to see him atop the ticket.