The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party, page 25
Zach Wahls, the Democratic minority leader in Iowa’s state senate, said in a September 2022 interview that he had heard some early rumblings around Des Moines. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston, had traveled to Iowa “a couple times,” Wahls said. California congressman Ro Khanna, a prominent progressive Sanders supporter, had been spending time in Iowa “for a while.”
Khanna “genuinely has … relationships with people across the state,” Wahls said. “I think it comes from a place of understanding this kind of mutual symbiosis between heartland America, coastal America, and the need for those relationships to be better because there is real codependence in both directions.”
Overall, Wahls said the state was “very quiet” from a pre-presidential perspective, with big names like Harris and Buttigieg notably missing from the list of potential candidates who may have been testing the waters.
“I haven’t heard from her in a while,” Wahls said offhandedly of the vice president.
Harris wasn’t the only one who was conspicuously absent from the potential primary fray. While Wahls acknowledged there was still speculation surrounding Biden’s plans, the potential field seemed to be giving the president a wide berth.
“Although there are questions about the president—‘Is he going to run for reelection?’ [and] all that—I think the field is being very respectful,” Wahls said. “I think very few people are coming to Iowa.… They want to be respectful to the president and his team.”
The fact potential rivals were giving Biden room to run was a testament to his status as a surprisingly and uniquely unifying figure in the fractured party. As his second year in office drew to a close, Biden had taken Democrats from intense infighting and the daily indignities of the Trump administration to the White House and a surprisingly solid showing in the midterms. The man who had run as a moderate had also built real bridges to the left and—even as Biden suffered some defeats in Congress—those connections had produced legislation that both the White House and progressives were genuinely proud of.
There were still rifts between the left and center, but he’d earned real goodwill. Under Biden, the Squad was no longer having daily heated fights with the establishment and primary challenges were ending in quick, stirring calls for unity.
Of course, the party’s newfound gains were delicate. Polls showed a second coming of Trump was a real possibility.
And there were other worries. While Democrats were giving Biden space to campaign without serious opposition in their 2024 primary, a more outlandish scheme was being hatched for the general election. Throughout Biden’s second year in office, the centrist advocacy group No Labels reportedly raised tens of millions of dollars from undisclosed donors for an initiative to try to get on the ballot as a full-fledged third party and put forward a candidate of their own in enough states to win the presidency. Their audacious plan looked like a threat to spoil the race that was mostly aimed at Biden, and some No Labels allies like Representative Josh Gottheimer disavowed it. But at least one Democrat gave the would-be third party a warm embrace. Senator Joe Manchin praised the No Labels initiative to reporters as “the only game in town that wants to bring people together” and pointedly declined to rule out potentially running as the No Labels presidential candidate. Once again, after years of tension with progressives, it seemed like the radical centrists were the clearest challenge to the Democratic Party agenda.
For Democrats, the persistent primary fights and periodic legislative spats made clear the foundational tension between the left and center had not been fully resolved. Biden had his issues, but he had stopped the bleeding. The party’s desire to stick with him was indicative of fears there was no one else who could replicate his ability to build and sustain an anti-Trump coalition.
And, if Biden himself was hoping to step aside, that possibility was starting to seem increasingly fraught. Both of his likeliest heirs—Buttigieg and Harris—spent the start of his administration taking a series of stumbles that cooled all of the initial speculation about their futures.
The problems Harris and her team had experienced on her campaign had persisted during her time as vice president. Harris saw heavy staff turnover, with aides describing a toxic climate riven with factionalism and mismanagement. One source who worked for the vice president declined to go on record or even discuss matters anonymously due to the heated atmosphere around the office. They refused to characterize the experience of working for Harris apart from offering a three-word assessment. It was, they said, “Game of Thrones.”
Along with the turbulence behind the scenes, Harris’s public profile had taken a hit. While Buttigieg had been set up for success with his position as transportation secretary, the vice president, it seemed, got all of the trickiest tasks.
In April 2021, Biden tapped Harris to tackle immigration. A long-standing policy challenge, immigration had in recent years been made even more difficult by an increasing flow of migrants escaping intolerable conditions in Central America and seeking asylum on the southern border. As the Washington Post put it in a report announcing the move, Harris had been given “a politically perilous assignment.”
A White House official pointed out that, as vice president, Biden had played a high-profile role in the Obama administration’s failed immigration reform push. They suggested Harris wasn’t fazed by the job.
“Of course it was a difficult assignment,” the official said. “But a lot of the assignments she deals with are difficult.”
Harris brought her analytical approach to the immigration issue and focused much of her efforts on addressing the root causes leading to the exodus from Central America. She traveled to the region and brought together a public-private partnership that drove $4.2 billion in investment to countries there. However, despite some signs of progress, the topic remained fraught.
It was unclear why the White House would want to so closely tie Biden’s running mate and most natural successor to such a hot-button issue. It overshadowed other initiatives Harris spearheaded that fit with her longtime focus on families and economic opportunity. As Harris led efforts to expand high-speed internet access, eliminate lead pipes, and promote maternal health care, immigration dominated the headlines. The assignment made Harris a frequent target on Fox News. In 2022, Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott began sending busloads of migrants to Washington DC in an attempt to make the point that the border states were disproportionately bearing the cost of national policy. He often directed the buses straight to Harris’s official residence at the Naval Observatory.
Meanwhile, Buttigieg’s cakewalk had turned into a tightrope. A series of significant infrastructure failures including a holiday travel meltdown at Southwest Airlines that left passengers stranded, an FAA systems outage that grounded planes around the country for ninety minutes, and a train derailment that spread hazardous material in East Palestine, Ohio, led to questions about his leadership and put him under pressure. His normally quiet cabinet post had, by virtue of intervening events, become a hot seat.
Biden’s team had long said that he intended to run again, and there may never have been much reality to the idea of Biden—who had, after all, dreamed of inhabiting the presidency for decades—voluntarily forgoing the possibility of a second term. But as it happened, neither Harris nor Buttigieg inspired much confidence in their ability to quickly pick up the baton.
While it made sense that more establishment Democrats—particularly members of his own administration—would defer to Biden, progressives who might seem like natural challengers also kept their distance from the 2024 cycle.
Sanders, who is now in his eighties, repeatedly indicated he will support Biden if the current commander in chief runs for reelection. In an interview for this book, Sanders also urged his fellow progressives to focus on offices other than the presidency.
“If Joe runs, I will support him,” Sanders said. “I see other people may have different points of view, but I think what our job right now is … I think we’ve got to keep organizing at the grassroots level, both at the Congress, for the governor’s races, for city council, school boards, whatever.”
The next highest profile progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was just old enough—by a few weeks—to qualify for 2024. While she was technically eligible, in a mid-2023 interview for this book, her fellow “Squad” member, Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, noted Ocasio-Cortez had shown no interest in running for president.
“I think I would respect the fact that she has repeatedly said this is not something she thinks about and has not factored into the decisions that she’s made about politics or policy,” Omar said of Ocasio-Cortez, with an audible chuckle.
Omar, who was born in Somalia and is not eligible to run for president, suggested progressives overall were unlikely to touch the race.
“If I were to suspend my actual thoughts on this and just think politically, there could be nothing more damaging to Democrats’ potential to win a presidential campaign in 2024 than having a Democratic sitting president be challenged in the primary,” Omar said. “I think that would devastate our ability to win that election and I think it would undermine our ability to continue to talk about the headways that we’ve made in regards to policy, the achievements that we’ve been able to have in regards to policy and what we’ve actually been able to deliver to the American people.”
“I cannot imagine,” Omar continued, “without the president himself saying, ‘I am stepping aside, I’m not running for reelection,’ that it would be wise—politically wise—for anyone to say, ‘I am going to primary a sitting Democratic president as a Democrat,’ and not ruin and be responsible for ruining our chances of keeping the presidency.”
Asked what her “actual thoughts on this” might be, the ones she “suspended” to “think politically,” Omar declined to answer.
“I’m suspending it so you don’t get to know it,” Omar said with a laugh, later adding, “You were being sneaky.”
* * *
While the biggest progressive stars stayed out of the fray, there were some Democrats who lamented that progressives seemed to have agreed to the Biden truce as the president went into the second half of his first term.
Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator who was a co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign, suggested her experiences watching that race convinced her Biden needed a progressive challenger. To that end, she praised the candidacy of Marianne Williamson, the bestselling New Age author and eccentric 2020 candidate, who kicked off a second long-shot White House bid in March 2023.
Biden, Turner explained in an early 2023 interview for this book, “was at a fundraiser, I think it was at somebody’s home, but he was at a very-high-dollar fundraiser during the 2020 presidential election and was on record saying to that audience that nothing will fundamentally change for you. He is honoring that pledge that he gave to those ultra-wealthy donors. Nothing fundamentally has changed for the people who are in the one percent in this country, and nothing will fundamentally change for them as long as you have moderate Dems such as him—more moderate leaning and conservative in the White House.”
Turner, in trial balloon mode for her own potential candidacy, went on to say that “the people need a champion. They need somebody, they need a freedom-fighting progressive populist out there.” Turner explained that part of her decision-making included wanting to see the movement grow beyond presidential races.
“I will be out there front and center no matter who is running. I’m pushing as hard as I can and really trying to shake even the progressive movement that is somehow in a lull right now.”
And while she was one of Sanders’s most visible allies in the past two elections, part of Turner’s eagerness to see a new progressive challenger emerge stemmed from a belief the left needs to move beyond him.
“Another challenge that I see for this progressive movement is that we were tethered—and I don’t mean that in a negative way, right? To the persona of—of Senator Bernie Sanders during a presidential election cycle,” Turner said.
It might have been easy to dismiss Turner’s ambition to field a progressive primary challenger against an incumbent Democratic president as the normal operation of the ever-present discontent on the left-wing fringe. However, early 2023 polling showed sizeable majorities of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents believed the party should nominate someone other than Biden to run in 2024. Those polls continued to reflect Biden’s perennially low approval ratings, which were little affected in 2022 and early 2023 by the string of laws he’s passed or the largely favorable results for Democrats in the midterm elections.
The lesson of the Democrats’ experience in 2016, arguably, was that widespread discontent with the establishment’s consensus nominee can be a potent force on the campaign trail. Any candidate who throws their hat in the ring, even an unlikely one like an aging socialist senator or a spiritualist author, may find themselves riding an unexpected wave of popularity.
And, as she contemplated the race and her own part in it, Turner noted the energy of a presidential campaign could be vital for the progressive movement.
“It’s a whirlwind unlike anything you can create without having the imprimatur of running for president,” Turner said. “The challenge is to figure out whether or not we can get that same kind of energy within our movement not attached to somebody running for president.”
Turner’s ambitions aside, more established progressives who have a position in DC seemed to be steering clear.
Ro Khanna, the California congressman who had laid initial groundwork in Iowa, said he was staying out of the way—for Biden or Sanders. “I’m supporting President Biden for 2024,” he said in an interview for this book. “I fully expect him to run. If he didn’t run, I would support Bernie Sanders.”
Khanna did not see Biden as a fellow progressive; however, he called the president a bridge to a progressive future.
“He saw the energy … and adopted some of the good ideas of the progressive movement, particularly in Build Back Better, but I think we have to go further,” Khanna said.
As he predicted that the party’s two last leaders were still their most likely candidates, Khanna also suggested Harris was not going to be a factor. “I just don’t think she’ll be running in ‘24,” he said. “I think Biden will be the nominee or, if not, I think Bernie will be.”
For Khanna, it all traced back to Sanders.
“He is going to be seen as the father of the modern progressive era—and I do think that we will have a modern progressive era,” Khanna said. “I hope it’ll be as soon as possible, but it’ll happen. And then when it happens, Bernie Sanders will be seen as the father of that movement.”
While Khanna did not want to take on Biden or Sanders, he also clearly was not ruling out a potential run for president one day. In even a brief phone call, Khanna seemed to offer a clear glimpse at what the next generation of progressive candidate might look like. As he pushed for Medicare for All, free public college, and universal preschool, Khanna framed himself as a “progressive capitalist” and emphasized his roots. Khanna’s comments sounded like the beginning of a stump speech.
“Coming from being born in Philadelphia in 1976, our bicentenary … I frame a lot of our economic policies as supporting a new economic patriotism,” Khanna said. “I think [that] can be framed in very patriotic ways that help us get a majoritarian appeal for our progressive policy.”
Chapter 15
SOFT LAUNCH
Joe biden was doing it again.
In the year leading up to the 2024 election, Biden was repeating the same thing he had done eight years earlier, standing on the brink. He had a campaign in waiting, but he had not pulled the trigger and made an official announcement. The uncertainty had started to lead to bad headlines. Party insiders were increasingly antsy.
Biden’s aides brushed off the speculation and concerns.
“Democrats are always worried,” one staffer from Biden’s 2020 campaign said in April 2023.
After all, this was not 2015. Biden was the sitting president of the United States and the leader of his party. Waiting was his prerogative. He had the ability to fly Air Force One and make appearances around the country without a campaign apparatus. All of his most serious potential primary challengers had fallen in line and the donors would too.
“He intends to run,” the staffer said. “We’ve been clear. We’re making preparations.”
The staffer indicated Biden had “the space he needs, especially coming off the midterms.… We don’t feel like we’re in any rush.”
But the pressure wasn’t all coming from the press or anxious boosters. Trump was back, and Biden’s own team had put him on a deadline.
Trump officially launched his comeback bid in November 2022 and reporters wanted to know when Biden would make an announcement of his own. Ron Klain, who was still Biden’s chief of staff at the time, offered a real answer the following month. Klain said that he expected Biden to kick off his campaign after the holidays.
Yet the holidays came and went. Not just Christmas and New Year’s, but Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter too. Throughout early 2023, Biden hesitated to come out of the gate. As January passed, his team said the announcement would come after February’s State of the Union address. By the time that speech was delivered, Biden’s inner circle was again signaling something new—that the campaign would take off in April. As that month began and the flowers bloomed, Democrats who approached Biden aides looking for campaign work were told it would be even longer.
The president’s waffling led to a swirl of doubts, rumors, and probing articles by respected reporters suggesting he could bow out. Other politicians who were deferring to Biden were quietly making their own Plan B preparations and fishing for gossip about the president’s plans.
