Bernie Sanders, America’s leading progressive politician, has issued a stark warning to Joe Biden at the start of presidential election year: be more aggressive in addressing the anxieties of millions of struggling voters or risk handing back the White House to the anti-democratic demagogue Donald Trump.
In an interview with the Guardian from his home base in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders urged the Democratic president to inject more urgency into his bid for re-election. He said that unless the president was more direct in recognising the many crises faced by working-class families his Republican rival would win.
“We’ve got to see the White House move more aggressively on healthcare, on housing, on tax reform, on the high cost of prescription drugs,” Sanders said. “If we can get the president to move in that direction, he will win; if not, he’s going to lose.”
The US senator from Vermont added that he was in contact with the White House pressing that point. “We hope to make clear to the president and his team that they are not going to win this election unless they come up with a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class of this country.”
Sanders’ warning comes at a critical time in American politics. On Monday, Republicans in Iowa will gather for caucuses that mark the official start of the 2024 presidential election.
Biden faces no serious challenger in the Democratic primaries. But concern is mounting over how he would fare against Trump given a likely rematch between them in November.
Recent polls have shown Trump not only doing well in key battleground states but gaining traction with demographic groups who proved vital to Biden’s 2020 victory, including Hispanic and young voters.
In his Guardian interview, Sanders cast the threat of a second Trump presidency in existential terms. “It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” he said.
He predicted that over a further four years, Trump would shift the electoral goalposts so that “many people who would vote against Trump are unable to do so. He will make it harder for young people, people of colour, to participate in the political process.”
It is in that dystopian context that Sanders criticises the president’s re-election team for failing to bang the drum hard enough. “They’re not their own best advertisers, they don’t do a particularly good job in explaining what Biden has accomplished,” he said.
Sanders praised Biden for the $1.9tn Covid rescue plan which he said helped avoid economic collapse during the pandemic, and for the Inflation Reduction Act which pumped money into transforming US energy away from fossil fuels. He was also effusive about Biden’s historic decision to join a United Auto Workers (UAW) picket line during the union’s strike with the three biggest carmakers, which he said made him “the strongest pro-union president that we have had, certainly, since FDR [Franklin D Roosevelt]”.
But Sanders urged the White House to resist sitting back on its laurels. “The president has got to do something that’s very, very hard,” Sanders said.
“He should be proud of his accomplishments, but he’s also got to say that he understands that there is a housing crisis, that people can’t afford healthcare or prescription drugs or childcare – that he’s trying, but he hasn’t yet succeeded.”
Biden could find a historical template for such messaging, Sanders suggested, in Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election campaign. By then, the Democratic president had been in office for almost four years and had implemented the first two of his groundbreaking New Deal programmes.
“Roosevelt didn’t go around saying, ‘Look at all I’ve done’,” Sanders explained. “He said: ‘I see a nation that is ill-clad, ill-housed. We made some progress, but I know there are enormous problems.”
Critics will accuse Sanders of attempting to press his own brand of politics on to the establishment of the Democratic party. But he has credibility when it comes to presidential campaigns, having come close to securing the Democratic nomination twice and having given Biden a leg up into the White House in 2020.
The Vermont senator not only rallied his millions of young supporters to vote for Biden, he also used his influence as runner-up in the 2020 Democratic primaries to push the candidate in a more progressive direction. He formed a set of “taskforces” in which top Biden and Sanders advisers worked together to forge policy agreements in several key areas including the economy, immigration and the climate crisis.
In his new book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, Sanders sets out a similar progressive agenda for 2024. He calls for the Democratic party to wean itself from “corporate elites” and redirect its sights on to working-class struggles.
He told the Guardian that if that does not happen, he fears that many young Americans will simply stay at home in November. “The polling is clear. Given the choice between Biden and Trump, a lot of people are saying, ‘Thank you, but no thank you’.”
The danger of support for Biden fading among young voters has been enhanced by the Israel-Hamas war. The senator said that Biden’s staunch support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza could affect his standing among young progressive voters in November.
He implored Biden to detach himself from Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who has taken a hard line on the military assault. “I hope that he [Biden] understands that you can be pro-Israel without supporting Netanyahu and the horrific war he is waging against the Palestinian people.”
Opinion polls have shown a generational divide, with younger Americans tending to be more critical of US backing for the bombardment of Gaza. Almost three-quarters of voters aged 18 to 29 disapproved of Biden’s handling of the conflict, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found.
Sanders also faces challenges over his position on the war. Though he has become steadily more damning of the Israeli onslaught, calling it a “mass atrocity”, he continues to resist calling for a permanent ceasefire which he says would open the door to further Hamas outrages following the 7 October attack.
That has strained relations with some of his army of young supporters. Asked whether he feared that the coalition he has so diligently nurtured since the 2016 presidential election was in danger of splintering, he said: “I think, at the end of the day, we’ll be all right”.
The senator said he was actively working with allies to develop what he called a “progressive strategy to defeat Trump”. Central to that is “rallying the working class of this country to stand up to Trump”.
He said he draws confidence from recent labor union victories, including wage increases won by the UAW and new agreements secured by the Teamsters at UPS and by Hollywood writers and actors. “We are seeing the revitalisation of the trade union movement in this country in a way that we have not seen for many, many decades.”
