There’s a Good Reason AOC and Bernie Sanders Stayed Behind Biden for So Long

Between the stump speeches and public appearances—and multiple closed-door appeals to his Democratic colleagues—President Joe Biden spent the past three weeks of his now-concluded reelection campaign doing something unexpected: rolling out a robust set of progressive policies.

He hammered corporate greed. He promised to make the rich pay more taxes. He pushed for the expansion of Social Security and called for eliminating medical debt. He started drawing up plans for Supreme Court reform and promised rent-control caps to deal with the high cost of housing nationwide.

It started with his NATO press conference (the one at which the president accidentally called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “President Putin”), and it signaled a remarkable shift for the Biden campaign.

During general election seasons, presidential hopefuls almost always tack politically to the center, hoping to court undecided voters who are presumed to have centrist leanings. In the months leading up to Biden’s late-June debate with Trump, this is exactly what the president did. His signature policies over that period were a hawkish, uncritical embrace of the Netanyahu government in Israel, condemnation of student protesters, and an executive-order crackdown on long-standing asylum programs.

But after his calamitous debate performance, which ultimately led to his historic decision to step down from the 2024 ticket, Biden zagged back toward the left, unveiling a handful of sweeping progressive policy commitments—some of which seemed to be brand-new additions to the platform.

It’s unclear if this surprising new tranche of Biden proposals will become priorities for Vice President Kamala Harris, who is almost indisputably going to be the next Democratic nominee. Still, that the president pushed an emphatic vision of governing in the interest of the middle and working classes was a welcome development—even if it was way too late to save his campaign.

There are several likely reasons for the rapid rollout of these proposals.

First, and perhaps most important, the proposals Biden embraced at the eleventh hour tend to poll extremely favorably. Expansion of Social Security and medical debt relief are well regarded by Democrats, independents, and Republicans alike. Ditto raising taxes on the wealthy, which has long been a priority of the president.

Given Biden’s historically low approval ratings this year, the move to refocus his campaign around popular policies makes plenty of sense. And it gave his campaign a way to highlight the vast difference between Democrats and Project 2025, the conservative policy wish list put together by a bunch of former Trump aides and affiliates, which is chock-full of deeply unpopular suggestions, including abolishing the Department of Education.

American voters continue to hate Trump, who is scarcely more beloved than Biden. But hammering the former president on character seemed to carry less promise than it initially had. (That’s especially true after the assassination attempt.) The good news for Democrats is that American voters also hate Trump’s policies.

Advisers to the president insisted to the Washington Post that Biden had sincerely backed these progressive policies all along, but the timing is doubly notable for another reason—the avalanche of proposals (some of which may have been in the works for months) came immediately after a number of meetings Biden had with progressives in an attempt to shore up support.

As the Post reported, while a number of Democrats in Biden’s own centrist wing of the party began openly calling for him to step aside, Biden aides held closed-door meetings with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom pushed for policy concessions in exchange for their unstinting support. Sanders urged Biden to roll out an ambitious 100-day plan, the Post noted, which the president articulated publicly not long after. On that list of priorities was the expansion of Social Security and eliminating medical debt, both of which were Sanders’ suggestions. Ocasio-Cortez pushed for rent caps in exchange for her support of the president.

The Biden team had been in search of a robust housing policy for a while, as evidenced by the president’s public comments regarding inflation—housing remains a primary driver of inflation, and polls show that rental costs are especially salient to young voters. Where Biden announced this policy, on the stump in Nevada, also likely played a role: Housing costs have been particularly dire in the state, and Nevada Rep. Steven Horsford, also the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (which remained steadfastly supportive of Biden until he left the race), backed rent caps as far back as 2022 as a policy proposal.

With those commitments secured, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez loudly voiced their support for Biden to stay in the race. On Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram Live for almost an hour to talk about the danger, as she saw it, of elbowing Biden out of the running.

That flurry of activity may have slowed the push, but it certainly did not stop it. And no matter how good those policies are, they could not, in such a short time, have improved Biden’s standing with voters, especially those who remain incensed by his support of Israel during its relentless and brutal decimation of Gaza.

It remains to be seen how Harris handles these issues on the campaign trail—and whether this episode was an act of wise opportunism for the two progressive stalwarts or a wrongheaded move to jump aboard a sinking ship. (Ocasio-Cortez has since endorsed Harris.*) If these newly articulated progressive policies remain part of a Harris platform, along with whomever she might run alongside, the fact that Biden articulated the agenda might actually help smooth the handoff and transition. Regardless, the past few weeks have been an extraordinary display of campaign politics. Biden was going down swinging, and he was swinging left.