As Biden Mulls His Future, A Progressive Group Is Urging ‘Don’t Run Joe’ – San Francisco Chronicle

The name points to the campaign’s two audiences: One, of course, is Biden. The other is Democrats at large, asking them to “not run” Biden as their candidate. Campaign organizers are not waiting around for Biden’s answer. Last week, it began a TV ad in early state New Hampshire encouraging Biden to retire.

As images of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Trump flash onscreen in the ad, a voice-over says, “We can’t afford to risk the White House to a Republican who could defeat ‘status quo Joe’… our ideas are way more popular than Joe Biden is.” The ad closes with a series of people looking into the camera and saying, “Don’t Run Joe.”

The Don’t Run Joe campaign may be run by progressives — including the California-based Roots Action network — but the sentiment isn’t just theirs. They’re just the ones saying it out loud.

A CNBC poll this month found that 70% of the respondents said Biden should not run for a second term with just 19% thinking he should. That total includes 57% of Democrats and 66% of independents.

But the Don’t Run Joe campaign and these respondents have very different reasons for wanting Biden to spend more time with his grandkids in Delaware. The campaign wants someone more progressive to run.

The poll respondents think Biden is too old.

Disapproval of Biden is not a new sentiment, points out Norman Solomon, the Marin County resident who is national director of the progressive Roots Action organization, and one of the drivers behind Don’t Run Joe. Biden’s approval rating has been below 50% since mid-August 2021, according to the website FiveThirtyEight.

“It’s just extraordinary how unpopular his views are among the electorate in general. So that’s a pretty weak hand to be holding to go into a general election,” Solomon told me.

Yet Biden’s approval rating — currently at 43% — is right around what Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan were registering at this point of their presidencies. It is far below where Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were at. Obama, Clinton, Reagan and George W. Bush were elected to second terms. The others weren’t.

But this “is uncharted territory,” said Chris Liquori, the New Hampshire coordinator of the Don’t Run Joe campaign. Biden may have won in 2020, but he benefited from Trump’s poor handling of the COVID pandemic.

“This is going to be a very different race than 2020. There’s no COVID catastrophe like there was,” Liquori said. “And just because the midterms went better than everyone expected doesn’t mean two years from now that’s still going to be the case.”

Biden’s approval numbers didn’t change much after Democrats defied expectations in November’s midterm elections, holding control of the Senate and narrowly losing their majority in the House. Some worry that younger voters — whose strong turnout helped Democrats avoid the oft-predicted Republican “red wave” — will turn out in 2024 for the octogenarian Biden when many were skeptical of him in 2020.

Alan Minsky, a Los Angeles resident who is executive director of the Progressive Democrats of America, said he is supportive of the Don’t Run Joe campaign “because I want to see a progressive elected president. And if he runs that’s unlikely.” The organization has not made a decision on whom it will back for president in 2024.

But there are some major challenges with the Don’t Run Joe campaign:

If not Joe, then who? There are (at least) three hackneyed axioms in politics. No. 1 is “The only poll that counts is the one on Election Day.” No. 2 is “It all comes down to turnout.” And No. 3 is the one that is applicable here: “You can’t beat somebody with nobody.”

Who is going to take on Biden and persuade him not run? Sanders said he won’t run if Biden does. Gov. Gavin Newsom, amid his repeated assurances about having “subzero interest” in running for president, said he won’t challenge Biden, either.

Is Vice President Kamala Harris the great savior? Her approval rate (42%) is lower than Biden’s, and her 2020 presidential campaign dissolved before 2019 ended. Not that the Don’t Run Joe crew would want her.

“She’s completely up on the Biden train,” Solomon said. “The Don’t Run Joe campaign has a distinct lack of enthusiasm for either part of the Biden-Harris ticket.”

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg? He’d better hope not if South Carolina is the first primary in the reshuffled Democratic primary calendar. Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential run was sunk, in part, because only 2% of Black voters backed him.

Mentioning the A-word: Biden turned 80 last month. He would be 86 at the end of a second term.

Shortly after the midterm elections, I spoke to the Democrats of Rossmoor, which counts more than 1,000 members and bills itself as the nation’s largest Democratic club. It is based in Rossmoor, the 10,000-resident Contra Costa County retirement community. Its members are very engaged and are a prolific hub of campaign texting, postcard writing and phone banking, not to mention being a regular campaign stop for Democratic candidates passing through the Bay Area.

In the most unscientific of surveys, I asked the few hundred people gathered how many people thought Biden was too old to run. Roughly two-thirds of the hands went up.

They aren’t alone in feeling that way.

In that CNBC poll this month, Biden’s age was the major reason 47% of those who think he shouldn’t run — including 61% of Democrats and 66% of seniors.

Other than 2020, when it was Biden versus the then-74-year-old Trump, the last time age was a factor for an incumbent president was back in 1984, when Reagan was seeking a second term.

When the issue came up in a debate against his 56-year-old Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, Reagan famously quipped, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign… I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Reagan’s age at the time: 73.

Ten years later, he wrote an open letter saying, “I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.”

Don’t Run Joe organizers aren’t using Biden’s age to make their point. Perhaps some won’t because their favorite candidate — Sanders — is 81.

For most, like New Hampshire’s Liquori, their objections have to do with Biden not being progressive enough.

“We’re not going to attack Joe Biden because he’s old,” Liquori said. “We’re going to attack him on policy because we think the policy can be better.”

Can progressives win nationally? The new HBO documentary “Pelosi in the House” has a scene where Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on the phone with Biden in the run-up to the 2020 general election. She tells him, “Don’t go too far to the left. You have to win the Electoral College.”

Pelosi later explained that it didn’t make sense to try to “carve up a pie we don’t even have.” Just win elections, then figure out how to enact progressive priorities like Medicare for All.

But Democrats have made little progress nationally in advancing universal health coverage and Biden — never a fan of the program — is unlikely to be the person to make it a reality.

And while the first two years of his presidency saw record investments in climate change policy, a cap on prescription drug costs and other movement on progressive staples, activists like Solomon feel that Biden could have pushed further, even with slim majorities in Congress.

It will be a very uphill fight. The Don’t Run Joe movement doesn’t have a lot of money behind it or many big names. It is hoping that the fears and frustrations around Biden running again will ignite a grassroots movement. Its fledgling campaign in New Hampshire — where Sanders won the most votes in the 2020 primary and Biden finished a distant fifth — is a good place to start.

“Biden is a roadblock right now,” Solomon said. “And our first task is to get the roadblock out of the way. After that happens, then a lot of possibilities open up.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @joegarofoli