Listening to some Sanders voters respond to their preferred candidate’s defeat shows that Gray is not an outlier. If Biden wants to win more solid support from Sanders’s wing on the left, he may have to adopt more of their positions.

“I would love to see the vice president clarify and deepen his policy stances on certain issues,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a former Sanders surrogate, said during an interview with Politico on Wednesday.

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She added: “There are very real, tangible areas where Democrats even fell short perhaps during the Obama administration, that I think I would like for us to have a plan to improve — particularly when it comes to Puerto Rico, when it comes to immigration, when it comes to health care . . . and climate change.”

Biden — now with the support of Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other politicians respected by the left flank of the party — is trying to make Sanders supporters who aren’t backing him the exception and not the rule. Warren made it clear in her endorsement that she wants to help Biden defeat Trump. Sanders said his team and Biden’s camp are developing task forces that would appeal to his supporters, focusing on the economy, education, health care, criminal justice, immigration and climate change. And former president Barack Obama also endorsed Biden, saying he hopes to connect with voters on the campaign trail.

Though most Sanders supporters voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 after she became the Democratic nominee, some — as many as 12 percent, according to a Harvard study — backed Trump. The Sanders supporters who voted against the Democratic nominee tended not to be Democrats and weren’t particularly fond of Obama, wrote the Monkey Cage blog’s John Sides, a Vanderbilt University political science professor. Sanders wound up backing the presumptive nominee a few months earlier in this cycle; he endorsed Clinton in July of 2016.

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That’s why there has always been fear among some establishment Democrats that a meaningful number of Sanders supporters would sit out the November election if the lawmaker was not the nominee.

In a Tuesday interview with the Associated Press, Sanders argued that becoming uninvolved in the election now that he’s no longer running was “irresponsible":

“Do we be as active as we can in electing Joe Biden and doing everything we can to move Joe and his campaign in a more progressive direction? Or do we choose to sit it out and allow the most dangerous president in modern American history to get reelected?” “I believe that it’s irresponsible for anybody to say, ‘Well, I disagree with Joe Biden — I disagree with Joe Biden! — and therefore I’m not going to be involved.’ ”

But the fight to push Biden left will inevitably face a wall. Winning those who favored Sanders in 2016 and 2020 was never Biden’s sole focus. He has long positioned himself as able to pick up voters who previously voted for Trump.

And Obama highlighted Biden’s ability to attract both sides in his Tuesday endorsement of his former vice president. He said:

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Right now, we need Americans of goodwill to unite in a great awakening against a politics that too often has been characterized by corruption, carelessness, self-dealing, disinformation, ignorance and just plain meanness, and to change that, we need Americans of all political stripes to get involved in our politics and our public life like never before.

Given that, to expect Biden to embrace a very liberal platform is to misunderstand why he won and how he hopes to defeat Trump: as a centrist capable of building wide-reaching coalitions.

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Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist who worked on Clinton’s campaign, said that while there is room for Biden to move leftward, the former vice president is likely to keep his moderate, independent and former Trump supporters in mind when he entertains these topics.

“Some of those cultural issues — abortion, LGBT issues, etc. — that the Biden folks will be looking out for are the wedge issues that the Republicans tend to be pretty opportunistic about,” Payne told The Fix. “So I think the Biden campaign will have to be careful with how they engage on those issues.”

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“But he’s got tremendous power in that he’s going to be able to make a historic vice presidential selection and someone who’s going to be exciting to progressives,” added Payne, who worked on black voter outreach.

Many Democratic voters backed Biden over Sanders because they disagreed with some of Sanders’s ideas or his broader vision of America. Biden knew this and ran as the centrist he is, believing that the number of voters interested in a moderate alternative to Trump was greater than the number attracted to Sanders’s revolution.

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