Bernie Sanders’s private warning to Biden about the 2024 campaign

The Vermont senator and Biden’s onetime rival for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination cited Roosevelt as part of his broader take on one of the most important debates facing the administration — how the president should respond to voter anger about the economy, which Democrats believe is as strong as it is due to their interventions. (The people who recounted the meeting, which hasn’t previously been reported, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation.)

In the roughly hour-long meeting, Sanders urged Biden to affirm the public’s frustration over the economy and focus on identifying the political opposition to enacting the president’s agenda — such as big businesses and pharmaceutical firms — rather than convince the public they should be pleased with current circumstances. Sanders also quoted to Biden a line from a 1937 address by Roosevelt, still two years from the end of the Great Depression: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Sanders has personally reiterated the message multiple times since then, including in another meeting at the White House with top officials last week, the people said.

How the administration handles the economy will emerge in the president’s State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday, as Biden’s 2024 election message against likely GOP nominee Donald Trump comes into fuller view.

Sanders confirmed his pitch to Biden and White House officials in an interview with The Washington Post. Biden tried approving an ambitious set of new social programs early in his term — including an expansion of Medicare benefits, a top Sanders priority — but was ultimately defeated by opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and congressional Republicans, and how much he’ll talk about those proposals in the campaign this year is unclear.

“The bubble is extraordinary: Democrats seem to think — many of them — that, only if we can explain all that we have accomplished, people will come on board. But that ignores the pain ordinary people are now experiencing,” Sanders said. “He has got to lay out a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of working people, and promise if he has a Democratic majority in the House and Senate that he will implement that in the first few months of his term.”

Sanders made clear he is offering his advice as an ally who wants to see the president succeed. Unlike Sanders’s relationship with some other Democrats, the two octogenarians enjoy a mutual respect formed during their time together in the Senate, and Sanders has backed the White House — supporting all of the president’s legislative compromises, for instance — even amid pressure from others on the left.

The White House has telegraphed that Biden will embrace aggressive policy proposals — taxing the wealthy, for instance, and reining in prescription drug prices for seniors — in his State of the Union on Thursday.

“President Biden and Senator Sanders have a strong working partnership that grew out of the 2020 primary," the White House said in a statement. "Their alignment on the need to fight for working families and take on Republicans who back big corporations will be apparent in the President’s State of the Union address.”

Though it’s in line with what he’s said publicly and privately to Democrats for years, Sanders’s pitch to Biden is not without its detractors, including among some of his allies on the left.

The unemployment rate has been below 4 percent for roughly two years, and the stock market has soared. Inflation-adjusted wages have grown for most workers over the last year.

Some White House advisers are adamant that the president needs to hammer home these positive trends, as well as his actions to lower drug prices for seniors on Medicare, spur clean energy manufacturing and approve the biggest investment in the nation’s infrastructure in decades.

The White House has been buoyed by a recent uptick in consumer sentiment, which suggests brightening views on the economy that could boost the president’s popularity — a new development since the initial meeting with Sanders last fall. And while Biden has tried to convince the public of the economy’s strengths, the president does sometimes cite plans for a second-term agenda that would fit the Sanders approach.

“Biden should be telling his story: They have to emphasize the positive, given how much good economic news there is, or nobody else will,” said Dean Baker, a White House ally and economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s really for Biden and his administration to highlight the positives of the economy, and there are a lot, and they shouldn’t be shy about it.”

Some economists point out that Roosevelt was running for reelection in markedly different circumstances in 1936 than Biden is today. The unemployment rate remained above 16 percent that year, compared to below 4 percent today, giving voter views on the economy a starkly different basis. Inflation — typically a symptom of the economy running too hot — is the problem many voters see with today’s economy. In the depths of the Great Depression, the opposite was true.

“On the economics, it’s tough to make an analogy between now and 1936,” said Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Though, there’s a clear distinction to be made between economic data and how people seemingly feel about them, so maybe there’s more of an analogy on the politics.”

In an interview, Sanders said Biden has “has a lot to be proud of” and that Biden should “proudly talk about those achievements” but that the president should be far more focused on articulating a forward-looking agenda than he has been thus far.

In conversations with the White House, Sanders has urged administration officials to produce an agenda for their first 100 days if Democrats win back the House and keep control of the Senate and the White House, the people familiar with the meeting said. He has argued that Biden should campaign on expanding Social Security and Medicare benefits for seniors, taxing the estates of wealthy multimillionaires, and raising the federal minimum wage, among other policy initiatives — reprising themes from Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

In the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden joined Sanders and the rest of the Democratic Party in proposing solutions to long-standing financial challenges facing much of the country — unaffordable housing and child care, rising health care costs, insufficient retirement benefits for seniors. Despite recent gains in the economy, these problems remain unsolved or are getting worse: Rent has never been less affordable, child care costs have risen, and hunger rose sharply in 2022, the most recent year for which Agriculture Department data is available. Child poverty roughly doubled following the expiration of a tax credit expansion approved by Biden in 2021, and roughly half of Americans will struggle to pay typical expenses in old age, said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. But it is unclear how much these problems will determine a 2024 election that appears likely to be dominated by questions about Trump’s indictments and Biden’s age.

The meeting last fall was attended by Biden senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, as well as Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, the people familiar with the matter said. At one point in the meeting, Donilon presented Sanders with polling data that gave an optimistic take on the 2024 election, suggesting that many voters skeptical of Biden would eventually come back into the Democratic fold before November, the people said.

Sanders asked the White House advisers to name their public enemies in the campaign, arguing it was essential to doing well in the general election. Biden reacted positively to this idea, the people said, although it remains unclear to what extent castigating large firms will feature in his State of the Union address.

“You have to understand that people can’t afford housing. The health care system is broken. The housing system is broken. We have more income inequality than we’ve ever had,” Sanders said in an interview. “If you want to get reelected, talk about how you’re going to solve and address those enormously important issues.”