Why Did AOC and Bernie Sanders Keep Backing Biden in His Campaign’s Last Days?

In the turbulent final weeks of Joe Biden’s doomed reelection bid, as Democratic Party leaders coalesced in a full-throttle push to end the president’s campaign, several leading progressives made the surprising choice to go against the grain.

“I will do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) wrote in a New York Times guest op-ed, published July 13. “Despite my disagreements with him on particular issues, he has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country and is the strongest candidate to defeat Mr. Trump.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) also cemented herself as one of the Biden campaign’s most ardent defenders. On July 18, she took to Instagram live to warn of the “enormous peril” that would come from Biden dropping out of the race. “If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave that they will support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” she said. Just days later, Biden ended his campaign, and Kamala Harris quickly saw a flood of donations and endorsements. Contrary to Ocasio-Cortez’s claims, the majority of elected Democrats voiced their support.

Historically some of Biden’s toughest critics, progressives including Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) also publicly stuck with the sitting president until the end, citing the dangers of a second Donald Trump presidency. Meanwhile, representatives like Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) declined to take positions on the Biden campaign.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the only Palestinian American in Congress, has forged a markedly different path. She did not endorse Biden in either 2020 nor this election cycle, stating outright in November 2023 that the president has “supported the genocide of the Palestinian people.” In February, she urged Democrats in her home state of Michigan to vote “uncommitted” in the primary to protest Biden’s enthusiastic support for Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza.

“It is important, as you all know, to not only march against the genocide,” Tlaib said during a February speech. “It is also important to create a voting bloc, something that is a bullhorn to say, ‘Enough is enough.’”

The split response from the “Squad” during the last gasp of Biden’s presidential run, particularly as his administration funneled weapons to Israel, flummoxed parts of the left, who said the lawmakers were abandoning their progressive values. While some sources told reporters that progressives were backing Biden out of political self-interest, many analysts noted that their support was part of strategy to get the president to push his platform to the left. Squad members seized upon a vulnerable moment when Biden was ostracized by the Democratic mainstream to seek new policy concessions. Indeed, in the final stretch of his campaign, Biden announced a slew of proposals favored by progressives, including reforming the Supreme Court, limiting rent hikes and eliminating medical debt from credit reports.

Now that Biden has dropped out, the electorate will be watching closely to see how Harris shapes her campaign platform. But progressives’ much-maligned choice to enthusiastically back “Genocide Joe” raises the question: In our current political moment, how much can a centrist candidate really be “pushed left”? And given Biden’s decision to ultimately drop out of the race, was this the right time for progressives like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez to make that push?

It’s true that the Democratic Party’s platform has drifted left over the years, in large part due to breakout support for Senator Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016, which galvanized voters around a left-wing populist message. And endorsing electoral opponents in exchange for specific policy positions is, of course, a well-established political tactic. After Sanders dropped out of the 2016 race, he held off on endorsing Hillary Clinton until he won a number of — albeit limited — concessions on the official Democratic Party platform. Mainstream Democrats ultimately agreed to embrace a $15 an hour federal minimum wage and to commit to a “reasoned pathway for future legalization” of marijuana.

During the 2020 election, the Democratic Party incorporated additional progressive messaging into its platform again in response to conversations with Sanders’s team. Medicare for All, while not officially endorsed, was mentioned for the first time. And the platform expressed opposition to Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

Biden received Sanders’s 2020 endorsement after he promised to form “unity task forces” to develop his agenda. Those task groups included notable progressives like Ocasio-Cortez, who was made co-chair of the climate committee, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), who was assigned to work on health care. Dubbed the “Progressive Unity Platform,” that agenda advocated to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour and adjust it for inflation; end capital punishment; implement a tax on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; end cash bail; establish universal pre-kindergarten; and repeal President Donald Trump’s travel and immigration bans, among other recommendations.

Shifting language may reflect a new ideological mainstream, but it is not a substitute for political action. It is notable that few of the policies from any of these platforms have been implemented during Biden’s presidency, despite his administration notching key wins on legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The federal minimum wage still sits at $7.25 per hour, the United States is not one of the 27 countries that currently implement a federal carbon tax, and even 2020’s Progressive Unity Platform contained no mention of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal or the cancellation of college debt.

Biden repealed many of Trump’s immigration policies when he entered office, only to reverse course this year and enact a ban on asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border that pulls straight from his predecessor’s playbook. And while Biden’s administration revived a U.S. legal ruling in February that deemed Israeli settlements illegal — which they are under international law — it also pushed forward with Trump’s plan to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a widely condemned decision that violated United Nations resolutions. Since October 2023, Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has enabled the killing of at least 39,000 Palestinians, and likely many thousands more.

This final point is the most crucial. There is no way to push a pro-genocide candidate left. There is no such thing as a progressive genocide. Yes, the Squad might be able to achieve some domestic policy wins at home, but there is a deep hypocrisy to granting one’s imprimatur to a candidate who enables the mass slaughter of civilians overseas.

Coalition-building among Democrats is, of course, important for doing politics. But let us not also undersell the power of popular movements to force those in power to change their tune. While Biden announced some new policy proposals in response to progressive pressure — including ones that can’t go into effect without congressional approval — they were also notably positions that already polled well among the public, such as medical debt relief and expanding Social Security. It was activists who pushed the Democratic Party to adopt tougher stances on climate change, and Harris’s campaign will now likely be closely watching the “vote uncommitted” movement, which galvanized more than half a million Democrats to cast uncommitted primary ballots in protest of Biden’s support for Israel.

Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy, and his stance on Israel is just as militaristic as Biden’s, if not more so. But we can, and should, demand more from our officials than cynical political maneuvering. Harris has long been unequivocal in her support for Israel, and if elected, she’s unlikely to diverge significantly from Biden’s policies. Now that we have arrived at this unusual inflection point, it’s critical for those on the left to continue to push for the ceasefire and an end to weapons shipments to Israel. What we need now is continued grassroots pressure and unified, clear and principled messaging from our progressive lawmakers.

One such message arrived on July 21, after Biden dropped out of the race. Representative Tlaib released a statement, inviting Harris to engage in a dialogue with her team about what her constituents would like from a Democratic nominee. “They want to see a permanent ceasefire and an end to the funding of genocide in Gaza. They want to see immigration policies that support a fair and humane system, not one that vilifies immigrants,” Tlaib wrote. “We are in unprecedented times but the demands of our constituents and people across the country remain the same: they want a President and government that is focused on saving lives, giving people the ability to thrive, and valuing the humanity of one another over bombs.”