I asked Gray this week whether activists on the left sacrifice their influence by being unwilling to compromise with other Democrats, especially with the 2020 election just seven months away. Absolutely not, she told me. “Pretending like the scraps that are being thrown are meaningful concessions is an insult,” she said. “Accepting those scraps without pushing for more is extremely detrimental to the cause.” While many Democrats are focused on doing whatever it takes to beat Trump, Gray believes that now is precisely the right moment for the Democratic Party to take bold, progressive stances. This is both ideological and strategic, she maintains: Sanders’s policies are not only morally correct, she argues, but also wildly popular among voters. While she would never vote for Trump, she told me, Biden will have to win her vote with meaningful policy shifts. The question is how many Sanders voters like her are out there: People who aren’t persuaded by Biden’s platform, and who won’t vote for any Democrat just to beat Trump.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Emma Green: I am sorry to say this, but I want to talk about Noam Chomsky.

Briahna Joy Gray: Ha ha, okay.

Green: He recently told The Intercept, your former employer, that “the failure to vote for Biden in a swing state amounts to voting for Trump.” He likened this to voting for the “destruction of organized human life on Earth, the sharp increase in the threat of nuclear war, [and] stacking the judiciary with young lawyers who will make it impossible to do anything for a generation.”

Agree or disagree?

Gray: The question doesn’t acknowledge the fact that Biden is still only the presumptive nominee, and not the actual nominee. There is still room to move his positions without actually jeopardizing the candidate in a general-election contest. Pushing Biden to the left makes him more electable. If he’s banking on securing independent voters, then he should be aware that a majority of independents are for Medicare for All, a wealth tax, a number of other so-called progressive policies that Biden has, up until this point, strongly resisted.

Green: Bernie Sanders has endorsed Joe Biden’s run for president, and obviously he did that before this summer’s Democratic convention. You tweeted that this was the wrong move. Why do you think he should not have endorsed Joe Biden at this point?

Gray: It was the wrong move for me—I personally was not endorsing Joe Biden. Bernie Sanders has considerations of his own: He is a sitting senator who has a lot of possible concerns about getting along with his colleagues and legislating and all kinds of internal pressures I can’t even begin to imagine.

I personally don’t think it is politically beneficial or, frankly, ethically appropriate for me to endorse Joe Biden, particularly at this stage, not that anyone is clamoring for my endorsement. The point of my tweet was to say that it is frustrating for a lot of supporters of progressive politics to see leaders in our movement seemingly fall in line with establishment politics without extracting any concessions on issues like a wealth tax, free child care, and Medicare for All. If these are in fact existential issues, then we need to behave that way, and not stop fighting.