On July 7, 2023, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York gave her full endorsement to President Joe Biden, well before the 2024 elections. According to The Independent, AOC said of Biden, “I think he’s done quite well, given the limitations that we have. I do think that there are ebbs and flows as there are in any president, in any presidency.”
I have some problems with this. As we’ve discussed before, Biden has continued to let down working class and marginalized folks. He dragged his heels on his campaign promise to forgive student loan debt, eventually settling on an amount far less than he had promised (which we then didn’t even get). Biden mismanaged the COVID pandemic, is against universal healthcare, and his track record on immigration is disturbingly similar to Donald Trump’s.
So why is AOC endorsing him? To be fair, she’s not the only left-to-center-left politician doing this. Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders have also thrown full support behind Biden before any clear idea of potential challengers has come up. The loudest argument in favor of Biden comes from the ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who!’ camp, which insists that maintaining the party line is the only way to protect our democracy, and that a challenger to an incumbent president would only split the vote, leading to a Republican (likely meaning Trump) win.
One problem with this: Biden is deeply unpopular with the voter base for (some) very good reasons. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden currently sits at a 53.2% disapproval rate, which is one of the highest in American history and close to Trump’s disapproval rate at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an actual possibility Biden could lose the 2024 election. And yet, plenty of news pundits and regular voters will insist that things are actually okay—that the economy is doing well, COVID is over, Donald Trump is indicted, and it’s Democrat blue skies from here on out.
Except people are still either unemployed or working terrible jobs that can’t pay living expenses. Republicans just added work requirements back to welfare benefits and the Biden administration let them do it. It was the Biden administration that did nothing to protect unemployment benefits as they withered away. It was also the Biden administration that told voters to simply “vote more” after Roe v. Wade was shot down. Obviously, the president doesn’t have the power to fix all our problems but the least we can ask for is less complacency in the trampling of our rights. Disillusionment with the Democratic party seems to be at an all-time high. Despite that, politicians and journalists will still insist that the man who helped make this a reality is still our best chance.
If we only ever throw support behind the “pragmatic” neoliberal, we will only ever get repeats of 2016 and 2020 respectively. It is so disappointing to see AOC, like Sanders and Ohmar—all people frequently held up as strong examples of progressive politicians—throw support behind Biden without even waiting to see if a better and more popular candidate might rise up to stop the Republicans.
We are fighting a two-front war in Congress: against Republicans, who actively want to make the world worse for all of us, and Democrats, who seem most concerned with maintaining the status quo. The only way out is drastic upheaval of what has become a political clique. Let’s move beyond Biden and nominate someone who actually cares about us.
(featured image: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
