More than a week has passed since Joe Biden’s dreadful debate performance. As the miserable polling numbers continue to roll in, Democrats across the party—elected representatives; former, current, and possibly future strategists; and commentators—have begun to say, aloud, not just anonymously, that they think Biden should step down from his campaign.
Famed Democratic strategist James Carville declaimed loudly that he thinks Biden should bow out. Former congressman and Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan has said that Biden should step aside; ditto aspiring Colorado congressman Adam Frisch. Two of the three members of the leadership group of the Blue Dogs Coalition, a conservative caucus of Democrats, have come out with independent public statements saying that Trump will win the presidency in a prospective matchup with Biden. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton has called on Biden to bail, and California Rep. Scott Peters has said that if Biden doesn’t show he can win “asap,” Democrats need a new candidate.
What all these members have in common is this: They’re avowed moderates. Meanwhile, the one group that has been notably quiet on the president’s fate is the left. There has been not a peep from the Squad or the other members of Congress known for barnstorming progressive activism. Two other sitting congressmen who have called on Biden to step aside—Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Raul Grijalva of Arizona—are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but that is a broad-tent coalition. And neither Doggett nor Grijalva is anywhere near Squad levels of progressivism.
For a group with a reputation for intraparty conflict, this might come as a surprise. The Squad has occasionally been inclined to spar publicly with the president on policy disagreements and has been routinely pilloried for being insufficiently deferential to Biden. One might think that the group would seize on any opportunity to push against the president: Don’t forget, New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman just lost a primary race after being besieged by nearly $20 million in advertising spending that criticized him primarily for being insufficiently loyal to Biden.
But they have been surprisingly mute on this whole affair, at least for now.
The reason is that the question of whether Biden should run again is an internecine fight within the centrist wing of the party. Joe Biden has, for his lengthy, decadeslong career, always been the man in the middle, if not slightly to the right, of the Democratic continuum. Progressives lost the 2020 Democratic primary in part because centrists circled the wagons on Biden’s behalf, assuring the rest of the party that he was unequivocally the most electable candidate despite already showing signs of decline. Supporters of the race’s last remaining competitors, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, tried to make this case but did not break through.
Now many of the same centrists who previously pushed for Biden are freaking out about his ability to win the election. There’s no real upside for Squad members to put themselves in the line of fire during an already bitter public deliberation.
Meanwhile, the Squad has an immediate electoral concern of its own, one that comes due well before November: incumbency. The group is being challenged in the primaries by an unprecedentedly well-funded opposition spearheaded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. They already suffered the loss of core member Bowman, who was replaced in the general election by moderate Democrat George Latimer. Bowman was outspent in his campaign by over $15 million.
The next contest of top concern is in Missouri, where progressives are all hands on deck to try and save Rep. Cori Bush from a similar fate. Bush is facing an AIPAC-recruited and -supported challenger named Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney of St. Louis County, who once managed the campaign of a Republican challenger for the very same district. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party apparatus has largely left the progressive representatives to fend for themselves as they fight to protect their seats, offering endorsements in the case of Bush but little money, seemingly uninterested in the once-hallowed purpose of incumbency protection. Bush, like Bowman before her, is on pace to get outspent by millions of dollars in Republican-funded ad bonanzas. Already, grassroots volunteers are descending on the district on Bush’s behalf, and there’s every expectation that Squad members will be close behind.
It’s an interesting role reversal. For years, it has been centrists crowing about the sanctity of incumbency, spending money and energy to protect moderate and conservative Democrats who held office, while progressives have demanded changes in vision and leadership. Now progressives are desperately trying to avoid drowning in a flood of money (again, much of it from Republican donors) that is being spent to put more moderates in office.
Part of this is also because the Biden years have staged an interesting intraparty reversal themselves. Progressives have been willing to go to the mat for Biden and his agenda, while centrists have routinely undercut the president in his policy agenda. There also may be some strategic thinking at work here; there’s concern that having progressives lead the call for Biden to withdraw would only cause him to dig in and could alienate the caucus from the White House even more if Biden does indeed hang on. All of that has resulted in the group with the loudest reputation playing a nonspeaking role as this Democratic drama reaches its breaking point.