Biden veers left to woo Sanders backers

Ben Riley-Smith in Washington

JOE BIDEN is mulling a raft of left-wing policies as he changes his election pitch to win over key Bernie Sanders backers suspicious of his centrist record.

Last week, Sanders backed Biden, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for the November election — but deep party divides mean the senator’s supporters are not guaranteed to follow his endorsement.

Biden faces a struggle to avoid a repeat of 2016 when many of Sanders’s ardent supporters refused to rally behind Hillary Clinton.

The former vice-president has set up new policy groups with Sanders’s team in an attempt to unite the party.

Biden has started arguing that his agenda would create the most progressive US government since World War II in a bid to reassure liberals who see him as too moderate.

Biden and Sanders appear all too aware of the risks of a repeat of the 2016 election which brought Trump to power. After endorsing Biden last Monday, Sanders said any of his supporters who do not vote for Biden would be “irresponsible”.

But some remain reluctant. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 30-year-old leading light of the party’s progressive wing, said she would vote for him but held back full-throated support.

In a New York Times interview, she called his healthcare policies “almost insulting. Progressives aren’t a monolith like every voting block isn’t a monolith.

“From a Latino perspective, I think we need a real plan to be better than with the Obama administration,” she said of Biden.

Sanders’s former press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, tweeted that while she had the “utmost respect” for her former boss, “I don’t endorse Joe Biden”.

David Sirota, another high-profile Sanders adviser, wrote a blog post headlined, ‘Which Joe Biden Are We Getting?’.