Joe Biden has described himself on the 2020 campaign trail as one of the most liberal members of the Senate, but in reality he has spent much of his five decades in politics denouncing the left-wing of the Democratic Party.

As early as 1970, when he was a member of Delaware's New Castle County Council, the 27-year-old future vice president used the type of hyperbolic language that was to become his trademark. He lambasted the "far left" and the American Civil Liberties Union, a historic bastion of liberalism, on starkly racial grounds.

"I have some friends on the far left, and they can justify to me the murder of a white deaf mute for a nickel by five colored guys," he said in a Nov. 11, 1970, interview with the News Journal of Delaware. "They say the black men had been oppressed and so on. But they can't justify some Alabama farmers tar and feathering an old colored woman. I suspect the ACLU would leap to defend the five black guys. But no one would go down to help the ‘rednecks.'"

He added: "They are both products of an environment. The truth is somewhere between the two poles. And ‘rednecks’ are usually people with very real concerns, people who lack the education and skills to express themselves quietly and articulately."

While such sentiments from Biden, now 76, could appeal to centrist voters in the 21st century — in part they sound like a prescient counterpoint to Hillary Clinton's 2016 mocking of the Trump-supporting "basket of deplorables" — they are problematic in the Democratic Party of 2019.

Since entering the presidential race, Biden has struggled against criticism from the Left in an election cycle in which the party’s voters have shown they are increasingly open to socialist economic policies, expanding abortion rights, and dramatic environmental reform.

Biden’s historic positions on drug prohibition, the Iraq War, criminal justice reform, and abortion now put him to the Right of a political party that studies show has shifted to the Left over the past two decades. Recently, Biden has backed away from these policies, apologizing for his support for tough-on-crime laws and renouncing his opposition to federal abortion funding.

In a speech in March, Biden rounded on his progressive critics. “I’m told I get criticized by the New Left," he said. "I have the most progressive record of anybody running for the … anybody who would run,” he said.

But in 1973, the year he joined the Senate at age 30, Biden described himself as “really moderate to liberal and a social conservative” in an interview with the Morning News in Delaware. He compared some of the more liberal Democrats to lemmings, saying “every two years they jump off a cliff.”

When a “middle-aged applicant” who was interviewing for a job in Biden’s office told the young senator that he was eager to work for a politician who would “stand up and fight for consumers,” Biden scoffed at his idealism. “I’m not going to be an activist,” Biden told the man, according to the Morning News.

Early in his career Biden sought to portray himself as a moderate and a pragmatist, contrasting this view with those he described in 1975 and 1977 as “knee-jerk liberals.”

In another interview with the paper on the night of his 1972 Senate victory, Biden depicted himself as a centrist under attack from both sides of the political spectrum. “The liberals thought I was holding back,” said Biden. “Little did they know I’m not that liberal. The conservatives thought I was too liberal.”

Biden went further in a 1974 interview with the Washingtonian, saying he only considered himself a liberal on civil rights and civil liberties and was “quite conservative” on everything else.

"I don’t care how that damn Americans for Democratic Action rates me,” he said, referring to a liberal activist group that ranked members of Congress. “Those ADA ratings get us into so much trouble that a lot of us sit around thinking up ways to vote conservative just so we don’t come out with a liberal rating.”

By 1974, Biden’s civil rights credentials came under scrutiny as he became one of the leading Senate opponents of court-ordered busing to desegregate public schools, pitting him against civil rights leaders and many members of his own party.

In September 1975, Biden supported an anti-busing amendment introduced by Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, a segregationist until at least the 1960s. Helms, thrilled by Biden’s support, welcomed him “to the ranks of the enlightened” in a speech on the Senate floor.

Biden went on to propose his own anti-busing legislation. It was a “hard, hard thing” for him to oppose busing because, “in law school I was considered a raging liberal,” he said in a 1975 interview with NPR obtained by the Washington Examiner this year.

“There are those of we social planners who think somehow that if we just subrogate [sic] man’s individual characteristics and traits by making sure that a presently heterogeneous society becomes a totally homogeneous society, that somehow we’re going to solve our social ills," he said. “And quite to the contrary.”

Biden also broke with Democrats on criminal justice reform, dismissing the notion of prison rehabilitation.

“Liberals have rejected common sense,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer on Oct. 12, 1975. “Anyone who has studied in the area knows that we don't have a workable rehabilitation program. Yet we continue to insist that the function of prison is to rehabilitate, not to punish.”

“Why should we apologize for locking up criminals?” he asked.

Biden told the paper that the Democrats needed a “liberal George Wallace,” a reference to the segregationist Alabama governor.

"I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace — someone who's not afraid to stand up and offend people, someone who wouldn't pander but would say what the American people know in their gut is right,” said Biden.

He mocked left-wingers for assuming he was one of them: "Since I had been so active in the field of civil rights, all the knee-jerk liberals assumed I was a knee-jerk liberal on busing."

While running for Senate reelection in 1977, Biden openly took aim at the left-wing of his party and praised conservative icon and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

“I do a lot of things that Goldwater is doing,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer on May 22, 1977. “But for totally different reasons. I have a greater degree of skepticism about the perfectibility of mankind and the ability of government to provide all needs. But I think my motivations are the same as Hubert’s," he said, referring to the late Hubert Humphrey, who was Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president.

Biden said he was concerned about the high costs of government social programs, claiming that this view “always drives the knee-jerk liberals crazy.”

He criticized the “New Deal, New Frontier, Great Society mentality,” arguing that expanded social welfare programs could do more harm than good.

“We want people to make it and have the basic necessities,” said Biden in an interview with the Morning News in May 1977. “But when you end up having more tax-free income under unemployment than you had when you were working and paying taxes, it’s preposterous.”

In an editorial that month for the Morning News, Biden objected to then-President Jimmy Carter’s proposal to allow same-day voter registration, a policy that many Democratic Party activists now support.

Biden said he had “serious reservations” about the proposal and said it “could lead to a serious increase in voter fraud.” He proposed an alternative of a mail-in registration program.

In the late 1980s, while running for president, Biden highlighted his record of bucking liberal orthodoxy while speaking to Southern audiences.

The Detroit Free Press reported at the time: "For Biden, the problem is that he has presented inconsistent images of himself at different times and places." The article noted that Biden had said in 1983 that as a young man "my stomach turned upon hearing the voices of [Arkansas Gov. Orval] Faubus and [Alabama Gov. George] Wallace," both of whom had been segregationists.

“But campaigning in Alabama last April, Biden talked of his sympathy for the South, bragged of an award he had received from George Wallace in 1973, and said, 'we (Delawareans) were on the South’s side in the Civil War.'”