The twin traumas of 2016 haunted the Democrats as Biden wrapped up the nomination four years later.
That election had split the party and brought on four years of Trump. In March 2020, Democratic leaders were desperate for a different outcome. They knew the party would need to be united to defeat Trump. Forging a peace between Biden and Sanders was vital.
Sanders did his part by making a relatively quick, painless exit from the primary and immediately calling on his troops to rally behind Biden. Once that race was over, Biden repaid the favor by working to bring Sanders and the left into the fold. The ambitious agenda from Biden’s first years in office that drew praise from Ilhan Omar and other progressives was the product of a sustained effort to reach out to Sanders and his cohort and give them input on shaping a policy platform that Biden carried from the campaign into the White House. Those peace talks began with Barack Obama.
A source who was involved in the process explained that the former president was fixated on the bitter battles of 2016—and on not repeating them when faced with the threat of Trump.
“Obama, it’s fair to say he was obsessed with the unity aspect of this, having learned the lesson of ’16,” the source explained.
That race had ended with Sanders accusing the party establishment of corruption and with his supporters protesting at the convention and, more importantly, not turning out in force for the general election. In 2020, the party establishment that once thwarted Sanders worked to court him.
Privately, Obama spoke with Sanders and the other major progressive candidate, Elizabeth Warren. He wanted to ensure the two factions of the party could build a solid alliance to take on Trump.
“He had multiple conversations with Senator Sanders and with Senator Warren, knowing the context of ’16,” said the source, “making sure that the unity building behind Biden was more heartfelt and authentic and stronger and robust than it was around Hillary in ’16.”
As part of those conversations, according to the source who was involved, Obama suggested that the policy teams of the Sanders and Biden campaigns could begin to work together. It was the kernel of an idea that eventually grew into official “unity task forces.” As of this writing, Obama’s key role in the process has not been reported.
The task forces gave progressives real input on Biden’s platform. That didn’t prevent disagreements—including from Sanders himself—during Biden’s first term. However, even though some on the left would criticize Biden for being insufficiently aggressive, the most consequential opposition to his agenda would ultimately come from the center.
Sanders initially jumped on board with the unity task force plan, and his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, made a crucial stipulation: The Sanders and Biden campaigns would have to agree to each other’s appointments.
When the task forces were announced in May 2020, the members included multiple former Obama administration officials; Conor Lamb, the outspokenly moderate congressman from Pennsylvania; Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The representatives of both teams met and produced 110 pages of recommendations for the Democrats to include in their platform at the convention.
With their help, Biden faced off against Trump in the general election with what Waleed Shahid—the communications director for Justice Democrats and former campaign aide to Ocasio-Cortez—described to us as “the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in the modern history of the party.” To be sure, Biden didn’t produce a Green New Deal or Medicare for All. Nevertheless, as Shahid said, Biden’s plans were well to the left of anything Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had ever proposed.
The formation of the task forces also showed the pitfalls Biden faced as he embraced progressives. As soon as the members of the groups were announced, the Republican National Committee pounced on Ocasio-Cortez’s presence and released a statement declaring that it should serve as a warning to the “American people that there isn’t a far left policy [Biden] is not hellbent on advancing.”
Biden was undeterred. The task forces had a distinct impact on the campaign trail. Many progressive operatives marveled at the way Biden applied his pragmatic moderate branding on a far more left-wing set of policy prescriptions than the Democratic Party had ever offered to the country. As the campaign accelerated towards election day in November 2020, Biden’s stump speech became increasingly dominated by progressive promises to tax the rich, build up organized labor, abolish the death penalty, and tackle climate change.
In an interview, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington State, who is the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on the Hill, reflected that the task forces “did two things.”
“It actually allowed us to do a lot of planning and kind of outline the agenda that we wanted, so we actually had some time to do that work together,” Jayapal said. “And it held the president accountable.”
Overall, Jayapal, who credited Sanders with seizing upon the idea, said the task forces “forced a joining of the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”
The policy exercise resulted in lasting relationships and that synergy persisted after Biden stepped into the White House.
“I’m still very close with some of the people on that task force, and some of the president’s picks on that task force,” Jayapal said, before rattling off the names of specific Biden advisers. “Faiz insisting on [the campaigns] approving each other’s picks was actually important because it meant that we worked better together.”
Jayapal would emerge as a crucial figure in that partnership.
After he defeated Donald Trump, Biden faced the dual crises of a once-in-a-lifetime public health disaster and a volatile predecessor who had no intention to accept defeat or physically quit the White House.
Every previous president had enjoyed a peaceful transfer of power. Not Joe Biden. He watched Trump call a mob to DC and dispatch them to sack the Capitol in an effort to prevent the certification of his election.
Every previous president had sworn the oath of office with his face proudly uncovered. Joe Biden wore a mask to his own inauguration. “A once-in-a-century virus silently stalks the country,” he said in his address. “It’s taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II.”
To answer those challenges, Biden turned to the veteran Democratic operative Ron Klain, naming him chief of staff the week after the election was called. Klain had run Biden’s vice presidential office, so he was firmly ensconced in the newly elected president’s inner circle. He also had experience that was relevant to the two raging crises Biden was confronted with as he took office.
In 2014, Obama put Klain in charge of the administration’s response to an Ebola outbreak. His stint as “Ebola czar” had given Klain the authority to become a harsh critic of the Trump administration’s approach to the coronavirus pandemic. Biden’s campaign produced a series of videos of Klain in front of a whiteboard criticizing Trump’s handling of the crisis. He also had a unique experience navigating the murky waters of contested elections. In the nervous fall of 2000, Klain had been candidate Al Gore’s commander on the ground during the Florida recount effort.
But Biden had given Klain another assignment as they transitioned from the campaign trail to the West Wing: tending to the relationship with progressives in Congress. A familiar face in the executive branch, Klain was less well known on the Hill, where he hadn’t worked since the 1990s, and he threw himself into the task of making new connections. Jayapal became one of his regular contacts.
Jayapal had arrived in Congress in 2017, two years before “the Squad,” with her own ideas about disrupting business as usual. Born in India, she came to the US as a teenager to attend college. After an improbable start as a financial analyst, she became a civil rights activist focused on immigrant advocacy. That work gave her an appreciation for the inside-outside game, which led her to set her sights on politics.
“I never wanted to be in elected office,” Jayapal said, “but it occurred to me that you could organize on the inside, and that in order to organize on the inside, you actually had to have some structures to do that.”
With Biden in office, Jayapal’s inside-outside game had made it deep within the West Wing. She was in consistent contact with Klain throughout the start of the administration.
“I didn’t know Ron when he came in, and we really built that relationship,” Jayapal said. “Every text was answered immediately.”
While Klain wasn’t necessarily a familiar face to the progressives he was reaching out to, he did know the ropes. Starting on Capitol Hill as an aide for then-Representative and now-Senator Ed Markey in 1983, Klain had built a life within the institutions of the Democratic Party and the federal government. He’d started his career working with more liberal members, like Markey, but had also managed solidly centrist endeavors. Klain had staffed both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns and run the triangulation-focused Democratic Leadership Conference during the mid-’90s. He’d also been chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno and Vice President Al Gore, which is why Gore tapped him to lead his recount effort in 2000.
The world had changed drastically since 2000, of course, and especially since 2016 when Klain had last worked for the executive branch. Progressives had new prominence, particularly on social media. Klain’s job was to build bridges with the left, and social media was where he found them—for better or worse.
“Ron is a bit of a mad genius,” a senior White House aide said. “He’s so smart, so, so, so, so, so smart, but he’s very frenetic and I think a little reactive and has a bit of an old-fashioned sensibility, which I think is kind of funny. He’s been working in this [business] for long enough and he knows the tricks and he’s got his bag of tricks and that’s what he does, but he is informed a lot by Twitter.”
Klain’s fastidious attention to the fast-paced discourse on Twitter helped—literally—bring activists into the White House.
A senior Hill aide recalled an early Biden-era experience of encountering Melissa Byrne, a progressive known for her relentless push for student debt relief, on a “message call” set up by the Biden campaign. The White House regularly schedules such calls to inform House and Senate offices and “outside validators,” as the aide put it, of what they’re doing, why, and how they will “message” it to the general public. This one was being held in the buildup to the president’s August 2022 executive order forgiving a broad swath of student loans. Normally, this would have been a fairly staid affair where the administration hands off talking points to reliable cheerleaders. But in this case, the activist Byrne was on the line, and she was peppering the Biden team with “hard questions about student debt,” the aide said, marveling that she maintained her influence despite the lack of decorum. “She kept pounding. But also, Ron Klain would retweet her. Like, she had their ear.”
Byrne would later go on to defend Biden online even as other activists pointed out his policies fell well short of her longtime mantra: “Cancel student debt.” While the administration wasn’t giving rabble-rousers everything they wanted, it was soothing tensions by making them feel heard.
“The White House has been very attentive and very listening,” Byrne said in an interview, while declining to say whom she had spoken with in the West Wing. “I definitely trust them, and I think they are genuinely engaged.”
Coming into the White House, Biden’s team was not expecting a normal transition.
“We were prepared for it to be the most difficult” in American history, said Jen Psaki, who ran Biden’s transition “war room” before the inauguration and became his first White House press secretary.
“That’s how we were approaching it,” she continued. “I mean, Trump was clear before the election, and certainly right after the election, that he was going to challenge the outcome, and that they wouldn’t operate as a normal transition. Even pre–January 6th, they weren’t sharing information. There were all sorts of challenges even before January 6th.”
But there was an upside—the harrowing times made many Democrats eager to help Biden. In fact, Psaki said, the administration attracted a lot of staffers from the Obama era back to government service. She was one of them.
“If Hillary Clinton had won,” Psaki mused, “we maybe wouldn’t have gotten involved again, because it was time for another group of people to do it. But this was, ‘if there’s a way I can be helpful—’ And everybody who works in government has an element of this; there’s a pull of public service.… You’re thinking: ‘Maybe if there’s any little thing I could do to help get us out of the last four years.’ ”
While the Biden team was groping towards normalcy, Trump was denying Biden everything: an acknowledgment of his victory, meetings with cabinet departments, vital information, and even—for an extended period—the transition office space due to Biden under federal law.
“I’ve been part of two transitions before this one,” Psaki recalled, “You’re preparing to govern the country. So, it’s actually more of a time for any president—it should be: we’ll put Trump aside—[to] make clear that though you didn’t get everyone’s votes, you’re going to govern for everyone. That involves bringing your party together, and anyone who you may not have been the first choice for, but also making clear to the country that you’re going to govern with the vision of trying to make people’s lives better.”
As he presented his vision, Biden wasn’t casting himself as a member of any of the factions that had emerged within the party. Psaki framed this as a return to the way things were before 2016.
“It’s less about positioning yourself as the leader of any particular wing, because most people in the country don’t think like that,” Psaki explained. “Most people in the country are not like, ‘Are you a Blue Dog, or are you a member of the Squad?’ The transition for him, but also for Obama, was more about saying, ‘I know you didn’t vote for me, but I’m here because I want to govern to make your life better.’ And that’s really what it’s about.”
The idea of appealing to and governing for all the people, even those who supported the other guy, is an old one, and it’s central to American democracy. But the concept sat awkwardly next to the reality of 2020, in which a vast number of Americans had set aside their commitment to democracy, considered Biden’s leadership illegitimate, and wanted an authoritarian installed in his place. It’s one thing to transcend partisanship and occupy the lofty rhetorical space of a president for all Americans if your disagreements boil down to tax policy or social issues, but what happens when the other side is willing to violently assault the Capitol to prevent you from taking office?
Psaki acknowledged that tension and noted Biden “gave entire speeches on authoritarianism” and made efforts to repudiate the anger of the Trump era. However, it was also something he tried to transcend.
“At the same time,” she said, Biden “made a point not to make it about an ongoing campaign with Trump, because he didn’t feel that was what the American people wanted, or needed, or desired at that point in time.”
But as he tried to move beyond the chaos of the Trump administration, Biden would need to deal with his razor-thin majorities in Congress and the enduring splits within his party.
National unity was perhaps a chimerical goal in the immediate aftermath of January 6.
The Republican Party, after a brief flirtation with respectability after the Capitol attack, plunged ahead with a defense of Trump against his second impeachment trial and a campaign of resistance to the COVID vaccines, which Biden’s administration had put at the center of his pandemic policy.
Unity among Democrats, however, appeared within reach, and Biden’s aides put together a team to lock it down. With the success of the unity task forces during the campaign, the Biden team found itself in extraordinarily close alignment with progressives.
“We were very deliberate when we started putting things together at the beginning of the administration,” one senior White House official said.
With the various divisions on Capitol Hill, the official said Biden’s team was focused on “taking a big picture” approach.
“There are cliques, caucuses, groups, committees, and we looked at everything and tried to make sure that basically we were going to have a representative from every quadrant that was going to be on our team,” the White House official explained. “We knew that we were going to need that as we came into this with really high expectations and a great deal of excitement about Biden and about Democrats kind of running the tables.”
That energy stemmed from the fact that, as Biden took office, for the first time since 2011, the Democrats had an edge in both houses of Congress. Voters who had poured their hearts into the effort to unseat Trump and retake the Senate expected dramatic changes, but Biden’s margins were beyond slim.
In the House, the Democrats had a single-digit edge and, in the Senate, it was evenly split. Thanks to Bernie Sanders and Maine’s Angus King, two independents who caucused with the Democrats, they had fifty senators—the same number as the GOP. With Biden in the White House, that positioned Kamala Harris to serve as the chamber’s tiebreaker—a role she would need to fulfill more often during the first two years of their term than any other vice president in history. This tight dynamic meant that, for Biden to have any chance of passing a substantial agenda, which would not have Republican support, Democrats had to remain virtually in lockstep. For Biden, the trouble came from the center.
The Blue Dogs are a famously conservative group of Democrats, probably the closest to the Republicans in Congress. In late 2020, as Biden was preparing to take over, the group sent him a letter urging him to pursue “bipartisan priorities” in his first hundred days. The Blue Dogs listed out five potential policy focus areas: COVID relief, job creation, government reform, holding foreign adversaries accountable, and fiscal responsibility. With the exception of COVID relief, the long list of progressive policy priorities that Biden had campaigned on was absent from the Blue Dogs’ letter.
While the Blue Dogs were firing warning shots, the Jayapal-led Congressional Progressive Caucus had, by contrast, made a key choice to embrace Biden as tightly as they could.
“It started very early on with a very strategic decision that we made to call this the president’s agenda,” Jayapal said. “Giving him credit early on and making him the focus of our work was really important because then it wasn’t that we were fighting for a progressive agenda, which maybe some big portion of even Democrats don’t identify with, but we were fighting for the president’s agenda.”
Biden’s team knew that, as one White House official put it, the Blue Dogs “had a big footprint” on Capitol Hill. With Congress as narrowly divided as it has ever been in living memory, for its first major legislative push, the Biden administration chose to prioritize a version of pandemic relief, known as the American Rescue Plan, followed by an effort to reform and strengthen ballot access and America’s election systems. That meant deferring other essential agenda items, like infrastructure, industrial policy, and climate, to later in the administration, a time when victories come far less easily.
Biden’s decision to put COVID relief before everything else was consequential and controversial. It would force the president to take a second pass in order to enact other aspects of his platform and some progressives—notably Sanders—would later express frustration that Biden didn’t use his initial mandate more aggressively.
Asked about this critique, a senior Biden administration official invited us to think back to “where we were when we came in … and remember what this was like.”
“We weren’t even going up to the Hill. We were in lockdown.… It was crazy town,” the official recalled.
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which had passed on a bipartisan basis under the Trump administration in the early days of the pandemic was “clearly not meeting the moment,” this person said. Vaccines had yet to roll out, the economy was flailing, and people were suffering.
The Biden administration’s challenge, the official said, was to get members of Congress “in a new environment and thinking more ambitiously about this as opposed to honestly, and this isn’t disrespectful, everyone kind of being in a fetal position.” Amid the chaos and danger of Biden’s first months in office, the official said it was imperative he get some measure of pandemic relief passed quickly.
“We had to get people out of a fetal position, [and] get everybody aligned on where we needed to be,” the official explained.
In these circumstances, the official argued Biden’s American Rescue Plan actually seemed ambitious to most Democrats.
Bernie Sanders didn’t think so. He had prepared an outline for the stimulus bill that included authorizing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, free preschool and childcare for working families, guaranteed paid family and medical leave for every worker in America, and student debt cancellation, according to one of his books. Sanders, in other words, wanted to wrap as much of the Democrats’ agenda as he could into the COVID relief package. He thought that the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan should have been far bigger if it was going to occupy the precious political space of a new president’s first major legislative push. Democratic leaders, he wrote, wanted to postpone the debate over those issues.
In Sanders’s view, Biden should have used the momentum from his win and the emergency of the outbreak to enact many of the transformative policy goals that were agreed upon by the unity task force. To Biden’s team, the urgency—and the hard reality of the numbers in Congress—made that approach unrealistic.
In the face of Sanders’s criticism, Biden aides made certain to remain diplomatic. “I think, without commenting on whether I agree or disagree with Senator Sanders, because he’s got views on this that are well thought out and well researched …,” a senior administration official began, before disagreeing rather strongly with the senator’s analysis.
“The COVID situation was so dire, not only in terms of material conditions in the country but also in terms of the mindset in Washington, that everything else had to take a back seat,” the official said.
The Biden administration official argued it was far easier for Sanders to nitpick when he sat down to write memoirs months later than it was to have an immediate impact in the midst of an unfolding crisis.
“I understand,” the official said, “that maybe in a perfect world, in a sort of Monday morning quarterback, we could have done differently, but people have to understand the kind of clock we were under and what people were … like, our friends, our family, the people that we went to high school and college with, what they were living with at that time—It was nuts.”
In light of the immense challenges and the nearly split Congress, the official argued it was “extraordinary that Biden managed to do as much as he did.”
After the American Rescue Plan passed and the election reforms failed, when it came time to pursue the rest of Biden’s initial agenda—his signature domestic spending measures and tax reforms—the administration still found itself allied with progressives. They may have had issues with some of his approach, but Biden’s efforts to build relationships on the left had clearly earned him some support and trust. However, Biden would find that his prioritization of COVID relief over the more ambitious, progressive aspects of his agenda had not brought much bipartisan agreement, or even earned any appreciable warmth or goodwill from the Blue Dogs. National unity and party unity, as the first hundred days came to a close, remained tantalizingly out of reach.
As Biden navigated the rest of his first two years, it must have seemed like people were lining up to hang albatrosses around his neck. His signature domestic spending legislation twisted in the wind for a year and a half while centrist Democrats on the Hill extracted concession after concession. Arrests boomed along the US southern border. His initiative to end America’s longest war in Afghanistan became a bloody catastrophe when the government that the United States had spent two decades supporting with blood and treasure collapsed overnight. Russia massed its troops and assailed Ukraine, starting a war on NATO’s borders.
A major falling out with progressives, however, hadn’t been one of Biden’s burdens. The Democratic left had cause to complain, of course. But, thanks to the lines of communication Biden had opened, when they had issues they took them directly to the White House and were far more muted in public. And, at the times when the Biden administration overruled the progressive argument and steered federal policy away from their preferences, they didn’t seek to impose any significant political cost on the president.
Jayapal and her leadership of the progressive caucus was a major force ensuring Biden didn’t face attacks from his left flank.
“I made a commitment early on that we wouldn’t always agree on everything,” Jayapal said, “but if we were going to do something and it was going to be critical of the president, or the administration, that we would notify them, that we would tell them, that he would never get, or be, surprised by something we did.”
That decision came from Jayapal’s close relationship with the administration, which was the result of Biden’s sustained focus on outreach to progressives. Jayapal said she had “very deep engagement with the White House from the very beginning.”
“And that was at the highest level,” she added. “It was with the chief of staff. It was with the president himself.”
There were times, Jayapal said, when she would hear from Biden almost out of the blue.
“Ron understood and, most importantly, the president understood that the biggest part of his base was progressives in Congress,” Jayapal said. “There were a number of times where the president has completely surprised me by calling me because he saw me on TV—and I know he has done this for other people too—and he really appreciated that we were pushing for his agenda.”
Jayapal said these conversations with Biden made progressives “partners in the fight” and described the talks as being built on mutual trust and respect.
“There were things that we discussed that were not to be spread and they could trust me on that, and I needed to be able to trust them too,” she said, “And so that really was the relationship we had. It was very consultative.”
According to Jayapal, her admiration for Biden was “cemented” in interactions that were facilitated by Klain, including a breakfast where the president took her through pieces of his agenda in detail.
“I do think that breakfast was kind of a really incredible time, because he was so engaged on the policy and so was I,” Jayapal said, adding, “He was asking me what I thought, and we were going back and forth, and it was just really great, it was a terrific interaction.”
Klain’s close work with progressives was so essential that, when he decided to leave after two years in February 2023, it created an awkward gap in Biden’s bridge to the left. The exit heightened the risk that Biden’s delicate truce, which was forged with the unity task forces and sustained by Klain’s outreach, could fall apart.
A senior Biden administration official acknowledged that Klain’s departure was disruptive, saying it was like when you “shake the globe and you’re letting the snow fall again.” But they were quick to downplay the problem, noting that Klain wasn’t the only conduit to progressives.
But Jayapal said losing Klain worried her. Despite not knowing Klain beforehand, Jayapal had come to believe that his appointment as chief of staff “really helped” the progressive caucus. She reacted to his resignation with dismay.
“When I found out he was leaving—and I found out before it went public—I just, I said, ‘What are we going to do?! What are we going to do without you there?” Jayapal recalled.
But Klain, as Jayapal recounted, set her mind at ease. “Don’t forget, Congresswoman,” he said, “the president’s agenda is still the president’s agenda. He still wants to get this done.”
When progressives expressed skepticism about Klain’s successor, Jeff Zients—thanks, in part, due to his past work as a corporate consultant—Klain urged Jayapal to work with him.
“Give Jeff a chance the way you gave me a chance,” Klain said, according to Jayapal.
Jayapal followed Klain’s lead and so did Zients. In the early part of 2023, Jayapal said she continued having regular calls with the new chief of staff and having visits at the White House. About a month after Klain’s departure, Jayapal confirmed the truce was still in place and that progressives’ inside-outside game was still being played all the way up to the West Wing.
“Jeff has called me. Actually, he dropped in on a meeting I had today at the White House,” Jayapal said. “Jeff seems like a great guy.… I hope I can build the same kind of relationship that I had with Ron.”