Joe Biden may have earned Bernie Sanders’s endorsement months before Hillary Clinton did in 2016, but the former rival’s voters aren’t necessarily sold on his campaign just yet.
The warning signs have been flashing for some time, with the presumptive 2020 Democratic nominee and former vice president never managing to crack low double-digit support among young people in this year’s primary contests. That didn’t matter when it came to winning most Super Tuesday states, where the field was split enough to allow Biden to cruise to victory easily.
In later primary elections, black voters so overwhelmingly supported Biden that it was easy to ignore that a slim majority of black voters under the age of 30 actually supported Sanders in most states. Younger voters, across all demographics, tend to vote in such few numbers that their effect on primaries is often negligible.
But a general election is a different story, particularly one that could be as close as 2016, when Trump won a number of swing states by just a few thousand votes.
On Tuesday, Sanders gave a pessimistic account of where he thinks the former vice president’s campaign is heading during an interview with MSNBC.
In order to defeat Trump, the Vermont senator said, Biden “is going to have to reach out to working-class people and young people in a way that he has not done up to now.”
[Read more: ‘Not a fighter’: Trump taunts ‘Crazy Bernie Sanders’ while trying to woo his supporters]
That prognosis likely came as a surprise to the Biden campaign, who regularly signals he’ll be running to the Left in the general election compared to where he was on many issues just a few months ago. Earlier this month, Biden announced that Sanders and left-wing firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would join his campaign’s “unity task forces.”
Toward the end of the primary race, Biden announced a modified free college plan for families making less than $125,000 and said he supported a bankruptcy reform law proposed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. During his semidaily public addresses, he regularly touts how a $1.7 trillion “Green New Deal” should be included in the next round of congressional stimulus, although that number is far short of Sanders’s $16 trillion proposal.
That pivot has left many of Sanders’s most vocal supporters unimpressed, with some saying they don’t plan on voting for him in November. Most notably was Sanders’s former national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, who (with a handful of other Sanders staffers) regularly attacks Biden as insufficiently left-wing on key issues such as healthcare.
“Biden can’t win without the support of hundreds of thousands of, whatever it is — millions of Bernie supporters. He needs not only their votes, their energy and passion and dedication, and their boots on the ground. There was no lack of enthusiasm for Bernie,” said Labor for Bernie 2020 co-founder Rand Wilson.
“It’s May. The election that we’re talking about is now in November, and people are still reeling from the fact that Bernie lost and withdrew, and there’s a little bit of sadness and pain in that defeat,” Wilson told the Washington Examiner.
Other former Sanders organizers, such as Steve Early, has already declared he’ll be supporting Green Party presumptive nominee Howie Hawkins, with the caveat that he’s registered in the safely blue state of California. If he lived in a state such as Pennsylvania or Ohio, he said he’d likely hold his nose for Biden.
“In November, thanks to the U.S. still being saddled with an Electoral College, I will be taking advantage of California being a pretty safe state for the Dems in the presidential election,” Early told the Washington Examiner.
Despite Biden’s constant overtures to the Left, saying he needs their votes to unseat Trump in the fall, many younger voters would prefer a different candidate altogether.
An April poll concluded that 40% of Democrats under 45 want the party to replace Biden. Twenty-six percent of all Democrats said the same.
A separate focus group found a lack of enthusiasm in younger millennial and Generation Z voters in 11 swing states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida. A majority of those voters said they preferred Sanders’s socialist message and didn’t see the former vice president as relatable or tough enough against big business.
Most glaringly missing is one platform concession that Sanders’s supporters say is the most important: “Medicare for all.” Even as late as March, Biden said his position on the matter hasn’t budged, saying a period of crisis isn’t the right time to overhaul America’s healthcare system.
The allegations from Tara Reade, a former aide to Biden in the 1990s, that Biden sexually assaulted her hasn’t helped things either, with younger voters far more likely to believe her allegations over his unequivocal denials.
“There’s no question 2 million people stayed home in 2016. They didn’t vote. We know that. And if they don’t vote this time, we’ll have the same result as we did with Hillary Clinton,” said Wilson. “We got a lot of work to do with younger people, to listen first and figure out how we’re gonna bring them out to the polls to vote.”
