When Joe Biden became the Democrat presidential candidate, besting the progressive senator Bernie Sanders in the party’s primary, the two men vowed to campaign together. Many Sanders supporters, and American progressives more generally, saw the Biden administration as an opportunity to push the president and the Democratic Party to the left. And for a while, with comparisons between Biden and ambitious past presidents like Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) and Lyndon B Johnson, and the quick passage of a stimulus to get Americans through the pandemic, it looked as though that might happen.
But the first year of the Biden administration has painted a more mixed picture for progressives. The threat for Biden is not so much that he is credibly challenged from the left in 2024 – though progressive candidates have successfully beaten long-time Democratic incumbents in primary elections in Congress, and may well do so again in the midterm elections this November – but rather that party infighting hurts his perception in the mind of the public, or that disenchanted left-leaning voters stay home instead of going to the polls. The threat for progressives, meanwhile, is that what is perhaps the best opportunity in their lifetime to see the centrist status quo broken will go unrealised.
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