As President Joe Biden's approval rating continues to stay low, progressives are beginning to eye potential primary candidates for the 2024 presidential election.
According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden's approval rating currently stands at 43.3 percent as America faces inflation and a surge of COVID-19 cases.
Speaking with Politico, Jeff Weaver, former presidential campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders, said: "Will there be a progressive challenger? Yes."
While Weaver stressed that he is not advocating for a primary campaign against Biden, talks about such a primary challenge has grown in recent weeks since the end of Biden's Build Back Better Act in Congress.
"He's deeply unpopular. He's old as sh*t. He's largely been ineffective, unless we're counting judges or whatever the hell inside-baseball scorecard we’re using. And I think he'll probably get demolished in the midterms," said Corbin Trent, co-founder of the No Excuses PAC and former communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). "People will smell opportunity, and DC is filled with people who want to be president."
According to Politico, there are no serious prospects of primary campaign runners amongst those currently in office, or those that had previously taken on Biden in the last election, like Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
A challenger would instead come from lesser-known candidates, like former Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner or 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.
"Yes, but someone like Nina Turner or Marianne Williamson. Doubt anyone currently elected," one prominent progressive told Politico when asked the possibility of someone running against Biden.
"Weaver argued that a liberal challenge wouldn’t be a 'repudiation' of Biden but rather the result of the Democratic Party moving left: 'Progressives are ultimately ascendant. And if nothing else, a progressive running who gets a lot of support will demonstrate that the ideas that the progressive movement embraces are, in fact, popular,'" Politico wrote.
Anxiety has grown though that a progressive challenger would weaken Democrat's standings, potentially pointing to a weakened state of the left.
"I think it's pretty unlikely that a serious progressive challenger would emerge if Biden stays in the race," Max Berger, former director of progressive outreach for Warren's 2020 presidential campaign, told Politico. "It would so go against the sensibilities of rank-and-file Democrats that I don't think it would necessarily be a great service to the progressive cause to have our ideas seem so marginal."
Berger added that, while it would look bad for Biden if another challenger received 20 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, "the flip side of the 80-20 thing is I don't want us getting 20 percent."
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