Before becoming president, Joe Biden was widely known within the Democratic Party for his moderate political stance.
Throughout his 36-year career in the Senate, Biden was seen as a consummate negotiator and a trusted figure among top leaders as chairman of the Foreign Relations and Judiciary committees.
When President Barack Obama picked Biden as his running mate in 2008, much of the Delaware senator’s appeal was his track record of bipartisanship in Congress.
Many observers were surprised by Biden’s adoption of more progressive policy positions after taking office in 2021. He supported strict environmental protections, canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and expanded clean energy tax credits.
According to Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Biden, who ran against the more liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, felt progressives played a key role in his victory that year.
And Biden felt the need to include them in his coalition as he worked with Congress to enact his legislative priorities.
“When he became president, he felt he had to govern with them,” Murphy told The New York Times Magazine about Biden’s feelings toward progressives, “and Joe Biden is a loyal man.”
“I think Biden has gone through this transformation as well. He’s gone from being a neoliberal to being an economic statist,” the Connecticut Democrat added. “He’s come to the conclusion that markets are fundamentally broken and that there’s too much concentrated power and that workers are disempowered.”
Once in the White House, Biden, a longtime staunch supporter of labor unions, became the first sitting U.S. president to join a picket line. He also supported a bold social spending plan known as “Build Back Better,” but it died after opposition from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. (Manchin later played a key role in crafting the Beat Inflation Act, which passed Congress and was signed into law by Biden in 2022.)
More recently, some of the most prominent progressives in Congress, including Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rushed to Biden’s defense when several Democrats called on him to drop out of the presidential race. After saying for weeks that he would remain the party’s nominee, Biden dropped out of the race in July amid growing speculation and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor.
