“I get it,” Mondaire Jones says into the camera, shaking his head. He is speaking on a Thursday night four weeks out from the election, to the virtual audience of a virtual rally hosted by Our Revolution, the PAC created by Bernie Sanders after his first presidential run in 2016; someone has just asked him about Joe Biden. Fresh off a primary victory in the wealthy, largely white suburbs of New York, Jones, who grew up in Section 8 housing in his district, is poised to become the first openly gay Black member of Congress. He got there on a platform of policies that Sanders championed and that Biden has largely rejected—measures like a Green New Deal and Medicare for All. So he opens with a proviso: “None of us … had Joe Biden as our first choice.” Still, he goes on, “I can’t do any of the things that I ran on without electing him president.”

In a post–Bernie Sanders electoral field, candidates like Jones and groups like Our Revolution face the awkward double-step of having to throw their support and organizational capacity behind a presidential candidate who has repudiated many of the broad social-democratic programs and working-class politics that they stand for.

This article was sourced from NewRepublic