Joe Biden, who so far has defied calls to quit the presidential race from Democrats worried about his ability to beat Donald Trump, this week rolled out a catalogue of left-leaning campaign promises aimed at working-class and middle-class Americans. His renewed emphasis on core progressive priorities comes after leading Washington progressives, Senator Bernie Sanders and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threw their weight behind his beleaguered candidacy.
The moves reframe Biden’s campaign to focus on a suite of issues from US supreme court reform to ending medical debt. They come as Biden is reportedly more open to calls for him to step aside, but still has not left the race.
On Monday, Biden released a plan for the first 100 days of a second term at a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan – a vital swing state that is home to a large segment of the Democrats’ working-class base.
The plan included strengthening social security and Medicare, bolstering voting rights and introducing legislation to restore women’s abortion rights previously enshrined in Roe v Wade, a historic ruling overturned by the supreme court two years ago.
Biden has also vowed to “end” medical debt, which burdens many poorer Americans, in an apparent extension of reforms his administration has already promised that would ban such debt from appearing in credit rating reports – potentially making it easier for millions of people to own a home or a car.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Biden is planning to introduce a package of reforms to the US supreme court, which has issued a series of pro-conservative rulings heavily influenced by rightwing justices appointed to the bench by Trump.
“I’m going to need your help on the supreme court, because I’m about to come out … with a major initiative on limiting the court,” Biden said in a Zoom call with the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus on Saturday, held to allay concerns over his candidacy.
Biden signalled his support for ending term limits – which, if enacted, could help shake up the rightwing stranglehold on the court – and for introducing a code of ethics to a court that has been rocked by scandals such as undeclared gifts by a billionaire to Justice Clarence Thomas.
Brad Sherman, a Democratic Congress member from California, told Axios “it was not a complete coincidence” that Biden dangled many of the policies the progressive caucus wants, considering where the president was now drawing support in the party.
“This is his base,” Sherman told Axios. “You see who has called upon him to move on, and who has called upon him to stay, and the progressive caucus lines up with those who have asked him to stay.”
The shifting of Biden’s campaign strategy along more leftwing lines follows the full-throated endorsement of, Sanders, the Vermont senator, who made the case for Biden on economic grounds in an opinion article for the New York Times.
“To win the election, the president … needs to propose and fight for a bold agenda that speaks to the needs of the vast majority of our people – the working families of this country, the people who have been left behind for far too long,” Sanders wrote.
“If Mr Biden and his supporters focus on these issues – and refuse to be divided and distracted – the president will rally working families to his side in the industrial Midwest swing states and elsewhere and win the November election.”
The support of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez effectively threw Biden’s candidacy a lifeline. Biden also gained backing from Netroots Nation, an organisation of progressive activists, in Baltimore last weekend.
Keith Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told the Guardian at Netroots that backing Biden was essential to prevent a second Trump presidency.
“Quite honestly, what’s the alternative?” he added.
Greg Casar, a progressive Democratic congressman from Texas, also backed Biden, saying: “The fact is that we’ve had primaries and Biden is the nominee. The decision is entirely his to remain the nominee or not.“
“As long as he is, it’s important to rally the country around making sure that he is reelected.”
But not all those present agreed.
Aaron Regunberg – a former member of Congress from Rhode Island and a member of the Pass The Torch campaign, which is calling on Biden to stand aside – said: “This is an issue that does not have any ideological valence.”
The president has also wooed the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses, via conversations on Zoom and speeches aimed at Black and Hispanic audiences, including an address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Las Vegas on Tuesday in which he called for a cap on annual rent increases at 5%.
Biden’s success in enlisting the support of prominent progressives in the Democratic party momentarily halted the mutiny, abetted by the temporary reprieve after Saturday’s failed assassination attempt on Trump. But on Wednesday, California congressman Adam Schiff became the 22nd member of Congress to urge him to stand aside for a younger candidate, and new reports on Thursday detailed how Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, told Biden that it would be in the country’s interests if he stepped aside, according to ABC News. Eighty members of Congress have publicly pledged support for the 81-year-old Biden.
The new-found enthusiasm for Biden among progressives – a segment that has been bitterly critical of his support for Israel’s long military offensive in Gaza – may also reflect the fact most leftwing members of Congress represent electorally-safe districts. That represents a stark contrast with many of the centrists pleading with him to step aside partly because they fear voters’ concerns over his age and mental acuity are undermining their re-election efforts.
Even as Biden has gained support from some leading figures in the party’s left, other elements skeptical of his candidacy have resumed their offensive to persuade him to stand down, armed with new polling data that shows 15,000 voters in seven swing states supportive of an alternative candidate.
A polling memo from BlueLab Analytics and circulating among party officials showed a list of potential candidates that included Kamala Harris as well as several Democratic state governors all performing better than Biden, Politico reported. The strongest candidates were Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor; Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan; Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland; and Arizona senator Mark Kelly, who all out-performed Biden “by roughly 5 points across battleground states”.
The memo could further encourage those Democrats who favor Biden standing aside, and who were enraged by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s push to officially nominate Biden early, through an early electronic roll call of delegates starting in July that would lock Biden in well before next month’s party convention kicks off on 19 August in Chicago.
Several Democratic members of Congress had complained to the DNC that there was “no legal justification for this extraordinary and unprecedented action which would effectively accelerate the nomination process by nearly a month”.
On Wednesday the party changed tack, declaring that it would not start early voting in July and that the ostensible reason – an early deadline in Ohio – no longer applied after the state changed its law on 31 May.
