Why centrists now oppose Biden and progressives like AOC defend him

This week saw two Democrats take diverging stances on President Joe Biden.

On Thursday, Senator Joe Manchin, the mercurial conservative Democrat from West Virginia, said that the president “is not the person I thought he was” and questioned how he moved so far to the left. His words came despite the fact that — given the 50-50 breakdown in the Senate during the last Congress — Democrats actually had to bend over backwards to accommodate Manchin, not the other way around.

Conversely, on Tuesday evening, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — a progressive supporter of Medicare for all, the Green New Deal and a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas — appeared on CNN to defend Biden. She noted specifically that Trump and Biden are about the same age, making concerns about Biden’s age moot, while “Donald Trump has 91 indictments.” She proceeded to called Biden, who was in his second term in the Senate when she was born, “one of most successful presidents in modern American history” and praised him on passing the Inflation Reduction Act — the climate and health care legislation that Manchin all but wrote after he killed Build Back Better.

The common narrative in Washington is that progressives regularly clash with Biden. But in truth, moderate and conservative Democrats are now the biggest roadblocks to Biden’s chances to remain president, whereas progressives, despite their deep reservations, are helping to bolster him.

Manchin, of course, is not the only conservative or moderate Democrat who serves as a roadblock to Biden. Dean Phillips of Minnesota — who in Congress serves as a member of the New Democrat Coalition and moderate “Problem Solvers” caucus — has even staged a quixotic campaign for president, even as Biden drubbed him in South Carolina.

Similarly, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona frequently joined Manchin in blocking Biden’s agenda throughout the last Congress. She opposed changing the filibuster to protect voting rights before she eventually quit the Democratic Party and became an independent in 2022. She has yet to announce whether she will seek re-election this coming cycle, but if she did, she could make Democrats’ chances of holding the seat all the more difficult by splitting the field in a state Biden must win a second time.

A big reason for this is that a big chit for centrists politically is their ability to draw daylight between themselves and the White House. That means oftentimes breaking away from Biden’s more liberal aspects — or, in Phillips’s case, simply pointing out that Biden is old, as if Biden doesn’t already know that.

Conversely, Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida, the first Gen-Z member of Congress, have defended Biden. This isn’t to say that the young progressives do not have serious disagreements with the president. Specifically on Gaza, Ocasio-Cortez expressed the need to pressure the administration.

“I think first and foremost, the protests, civic actions organizing to defend innocent Gazans is necessary and I would say it is of primary importance,” she told me on Thursday after votes.

At the same time, Frost told me that it is entirely possible to balance both putting pressure on the president and defending him.

“As an organizer, that's what this job is about,” he told me after votes on Thursday. “You have good relationships, you're going to agree with people, you're going to disagree with people. That doesn't mean you completely cast them out. And it also doesn't mean you completely ignore the realities of where we're at right now.” In recent months, Frost has collaborated heavily with the White House on gun violence.

Despite his centrist temperament, Biden’s voting record in the Senate tends to be dead center of wherever the Democratic Party is. He always tried to find a median somewhere between the Manchins and Frosts of the party.

Another potential reason for their support for Biden: Both Frost and Ocasio-Cortez supported Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president. Sanders’s 2020 campaign showed progressives how they could easily win some states — but also humbled them in terms of much of the party remains moderate, particularly older Black voters in the South who tend to determine the Democratic nominee.

Unlike previous Democratic leaders, such as Barack Obama, whose team famously trashed the “professional left,” Biden has shown receptiveness to progressive ideas, which has allowed for a dialogue.

“They’ve never attempted to silence me here or stop me from criticizing when I felt like it’s unnecessary,” Frost said. “If I send a letter to President Joe Biden, I’m going to get a response and I’m going to have a discussion to be able to move in the right direction. If I send the same letter to former president Trump, he’ll wipe his ass with it.”

A Manchin run for president could easily open the door for voters to defect from Biden’s coalition, making a win easier for Trump this November.

Conversely, AOC and Frost’s push-pull approach with the White House could give progressives permission to vote for him, knowing they can also pressure him during a second term. Meanwhile, they’re well aware that a Trump win would move the political pendulum much farther to the right and make it harder to achieve their goals.