Joe Biden was not exactly the preferred Democratic presidential candidate of progressives in the US or, among those paying attention, elsewhere in the world. He does not back the Medicare for All plan for universal healthcare; he voted for the Iraq War; his track record on racial equality is contentious. The writer and Bernie Sanders supporter Meagan Day spoke for many on the left when she recently argued in the journal Jacobin: “We deserve better than Trump versus Biden.”
It is all vaguely familiar. Polling after the 2016 election found that registered voters who had stayed at home were more Democrat-leaning than those who had turned out, strongly suggesting that parts of the left were simply not motivated to vote for Hillary Clinton. Others backed Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate whose vote-share in Michigan and Wisconsin was larger than Donald Trump’s margins of victory in those states, and was only fractionally smaller in Pennsylvania. Winning those three states alone would have given Hillary Clinton the presidency. Might something similar happen again?
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