FiveThirtyEight: Joe Biden Could Be ‘Most Liberal President in Modern U.S. History’

Former Vice President Joe Biden could be the “most liberal president in modern U.S. history,” according to Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver’s popular polling and analysis site.

Bacon argues that even though the Democratic Party establishment rallied behind Biden to defeat the left-wing insurgency of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a Biden presidency would be more left-wing than anticipated.

There are two reasons, Bacon argues. One is that Biden has not followed an ideological path in his career, but has taken positions in the center of the Democratic Party consensus — and that consensus has shifted to the left in recent years.

The second reason is that the coronavirus pandemic has made the public more amenable to government interventions.

Bacon writes:

Biden’s long record in public office suggests that he is fairly flexible on policy — shifting his positions to whatever is in the mainstream of the Democratic Party at a given moment. So if Biden wins the presidency and his fellow Democrats are still clamoring for more government spending to help the pandemic recovery, Biden is likely to be a fairly liberal president, no matter how moderate he sounded in the primaries. [footnote omitted]

…

[I]t seems fairly likely that Biden, if he wins, will enter the Oval Office with Americans struggling through a recession and the public and his party clamoring for the federal government to do more to help those who are struggling. In that scenario, we might look back at how Biden won the Democratic primary — by emphasizing his moderation — and marvel that he became the most liberal president in recent history.

In April, Biden promised the “most progressive administration since Roosevelt” — if elected.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.