I will absolutely vote for Biden in November (even though my state is beyond safe for him) even if he says many things that disappoint me between now and then.
If Biden wins the election, however, all criticism is fair game. I'm not expecting him to govern like Sanders or Warren, but if he can't at least move things a bit in the right direction and makes no effort beyond platitudes to address income inequality, the affordability of higher education and health care (among many other things), climate change, criminal justice reform, or our immigration system, and basically just protects the status quo, he'll get an earful from me, and I will reassess whether or not I should continue considering myself a Democrat in 2024 and beyond. People are suffering in this country, and while Republicans have made no secret of the fact that they don't care, I'm running out of patience for Democrats saying that they care and not backing that up with their actions.
The issue is that there's nothing in it for him because no matter what he does he will still get the exact same criticism, with the exact same ferocity, from the left.
Biden's has moved his rhetoric substantially to the left, brought a lot of Sanders and Warren people on board, and adopted many of their most popular proposals, and he gets zero credit for it and we still have people saying "as soon as he becomes president we're going to attack him and force him to do what we want."
Why should he continue any sort of appeasement strategy with you guys any more than he's already done? Clearly a lot of lefty folks were persuadable since this doesn't feel like Clinton again. But the continent on the far left continues to say the exact same things about him that they said about Clinton. There's no way to win other than to transform into Bernie Sanders.
He'll get criticism from
a small number of people on Twitter if he doesn't govern exactly like Sanders, but if he at least got a few legislative victories, he'd get far less criticism than if he did absolutely nothing to tackle the issues that progressives care about.
I don't know if you noticed, but I
did acknowledge Biden's pivot in rhetoric more than once, and I wasn't the only one on here. If you recognized that several of us here do that, and dropped the "you guys" gag to refer to everyone who voted for or likes Sanders (and used fewer strawmen), I think you'd face much less criticism here. I'm willing to have an open mind about how Biden will be as President, and I'm simply saying that I'll assess him honestly. If he does prove to be a very effective president who brings about a great deal of progress, I'll certainly praise him for it. If he does next to nothing to improve lives, I'll also express how I feel. I don't see how that's "forcing him to do what I want."
He's not going to win over literally everyone who supported Sanders, but he'll certainly have a lot to gain from making a good portion of the left happy, or at least somewhat satisfied (and just because someone on Rose Twitter posts about how much they hate Biden, that doesn't mean every progressive is hating on him or being unreasonable.) A better legacy, higher turnout in 2022 resulting in a more cooperative Congress in 2023-24 (or at least avoiding a complete train wreck for Democrats that year), and perhaps bridging the divide somewhat in the party. He has plenty to lose by throwing the left under the bus after taking office, even if he only plans on serving a single term.
