BALTIMORE, MD — Progressive leaders are increasingly frustrated with Democrats now eager for President Joe Biden to step aside after months of being ridiculed for suggesting the president wasn’t the party’s best bet for November.
“Even the New York Times editorial board is out here saying Biden should step down, and nobody’s calling them traitors in the same way,” Abbas Alawieh, who leads the Uncommitted National Movement, told NOTUS. “I think it is really a question of who gets to have an opinion on the strategy of the Democratic Party.”
Not that long ago, mainstream Democrats chastised those in the “uncommitted” movement for pointing out that Biden was bleeding support over his policy on the war in Gaza and handing Donald Trump a win in states like Michigan, Alawieh said. Now, every day brings news of another Democrat ready to dump Biden.
Progressive leaders and activists at Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of left-flank organizations, activists and lawmakers — local, state and federal, are having a bit of an I told you so moment.
But they also know how intraparty fights often play out for them: Progressives have long been blamed for breaking the Democratic line. The organized left’s calculus is to stay as far away from center stage as possible.
“The freak-outs that have been happening around Biden’s performance at the debate and ‘Oh, my God, is now the time to replace him?’ Folks nine months ago told you this is going to be a problem because the guy is genocide Joe,” Ramah Kudaimi, a community organizer with the Action Center on Race and the Economy, told the room to applause at a panel about combatting Islamophobia Thursday. “I think I can speak on all of our behalf that it’s been very frustrating.”
“A lot of folks’ worry was that if Trump won in November, that the Palestine movement, and folks in solidarity, were going to be to blame,” Kudaimi, speaking personally, told NOTUS after her panel. “And now it’s kind of like well, I guess other people also have a problem with him.”
Former Ohio state Rep. Nina Turner argued in an op-ed last week that replacing Biden wasn’t progressives’ “fight” and that weighing in on the viability of other candidates, such as Vice President Kamala Harris, would cause the Democratic establishment to not listen to them.
“You’d better believe we’ll be blamed when their hand-picked replacement loses (we always are),” she wrote.
These pangs of frustration extend to Capitol Hill, where elected progressives have proven to be some of Biden’s most steady allies, even as the president’s most ideologically aligned lawmakers — including several frontline Democrats — come out against him.
Some progressive leaders in Congress have been baffled by what they’ve seen as centrist rhetoric that is soft on Trump. Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, both running in red-leaning districts, were among the first Hill Democrats to publicly speak out against Biden after his debate performance.
Both said versions of “Trump is going to win, and it’s time to accept it” — a sentiment that deeply annoyed operatives on the left who are trying to keep the pressure on a message that Trump is an existential threat to liberal priorities.
“Centrists always say the real drag on [Democratic chances] is progressives, but it’s like yeah, we’re gonna chuck the center-left president under the bus,” said one senior operative.
Progressives’ angst at the centrists spilled out into the public with a tweet posted by Wisconsin progressive Rep. Mark Pocan, who appeared with the president days after the debate while others were, in the minds of some progressive leaders, attacking a president they feel has sincerely tried to work with the left.
The party’s most left-leaning members are taking an approach that operatives say is aimed at keeping the conversation focused on Trump rather than Biden. During a television appearance on Fox News, Rep. Pramila Jayapal took a shot at the former president and alleged that he’d also been in cognitive decline during his four years in office.
But messaging discipline in the party is hard to come by right now, as lawmakers seem more than willing to air the dirty laundry, both anonymously and publicly.
Progressive leaders at Netroots said it’s made it hard to focus on motivating issues for far-left voters.
“The hot-button issue of the moment is the thing that dominates the news cycle,” said Serita Fontanesi, who spearheads voter engagement programs at Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity (URGE). “Now that you’ve addressed that, great. Let’s move on and talk about these more nuanced, deeper issues and what we’re gonna do.”
Of course, progressives haven’t entirely excluded themselves from Democrats’ fights.
But as the growing group of middle-of-the-road Democrats and battleground candidates calling for Biden to step down from the Hill drives the news cycle, progressives see a familiar pattern.
“When it comes to progressives, our votes, our coalition, our caucus is needed,” Maryland state progressive delegate Gabriel Acevero echoed during a panel on bringing out progressive voters. “But our ideas, our demands, our priorities that we’re often pushing are essentially put as back-burner issues.”
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Tinashe Chingarande and Claire Heddles are NOTUS reporters and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows. Evan McMorris-Santoro, a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.