Biden's 2024 Run Prep Shows Him Backtracking on 2020 Promises

I’m so sorry to do this to you in March 2023, but it’s time to talk about the 2024 presidential election for a sec. A February 2023 poll from Emerson College claimed that 71% of Democrats and 85% of 18-to-34 year old Dems want a President Joe Biden 2024 run. Less than a year ago, when we took our Teen Vogue Vibe Check, 61% of the young people who responded were unsatisfied with Biden’s presidential performance. Has anything changed enough to account for these numbers? 

Last summer, we had the rise of Dark Brandon, following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was touted as the strongest climate policy passed in the U.S. so far; then the midterms went much better than Democrats had thought. But that was 2022, and those were just the highlights – back before Biden approved a massive oil and gas project that could create as much carbon pollution as putting 2 million new cars on the road. 

The move flies in the face of the millions of Zoomers who opposed the plan, not to mention Biden’s own campaign promises. Advocacy organization Gen Z for Change’s Elise Joshi told me recently that Alaska’s Willow project, ultimately approved by Biden, “feels like a contradiction to all these young people” who approved of the IRA being signed into law. In a statement issued after Biden approved the project, Gen Z for Change announced, “As a group invited to the White House for the Inflation Reduction Act ceremony, Gen-Z for Change is gravely angered at this decision.”

“There is no deeper form of betrayal than watching a president who has claimed to value the voices of youth and to respect Indigenous sovereignty blatantly disregard one of our generation’s largest and clearest movements,” the statement concludes, promising to keep organizing around climate, “because our generation doesn’t have the luxury to watch while our future is sacrificed for short-term political gain.”

The condemnation hasn’t been relegated solely to the “activist” critiques that the media has attempted to flatten it into. “I’m very disappointed in the President for approving the Willow Project,” Teen Vogue January 2023 cover star Congressman Maxwell Frost (D-FL), 26, tweeted on March 14. “Youth voter turnout was at its highest in 2020 & young folks supported him because of commitments such as ‘no more drilling on federal land.’ That commitment has been broken. We deserve a livable future.”

What else has Biden gotten done – or failed to, or backtracked on – in his years in the presidential seat? His promised action on student debt has been declared dead on arrival by the mainstream media thanks to ongoing litigation pushing the matter to the conservative Supreme Court. As the Nation notes, Biden still has options on the table to try and get student debt cancelation, regardless of how SCOTUS responds.

Nonetheless, the federal government made time to bail out the depositors of Silicon Valley Bank over the weekend after closing the bank itself, satisfying the tech overlords who had meltdowns on Twitter over the weekend saying their financial ruin would be a national emergency. Unsurprisingly, Biden’s admin quickly came to the aid of those with deep pockets – while continuing to move in fits and starts for the 43.5 million Americans (including me) with student debt. 

The Biden administration has pointed the finger for the circumstances that led to the SVP situation on the Trump-era rollback of Dodd-Frank protections put in place following the 2008 recession. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, pointing out that Powell had supported the change in 2018 under Trump. “SVB and Signature accumulated risk and made dangerous decisions about how to manage that risk. They did so in part because of greed and incompetence – but were allowed to do so under faulty supervision and in a weakened regulatory environment that you helped to create,” Warren wrote. Biden re-appointed Powell after Trump initially put him in the chairman role.

Where else has Biden put money? He proposed $35 billion dollars in federal funding last year for policing, and used his March 2022 State of the Union to incite cheers to “fund the police.” Where has vast investment into policing gotten us? The $90 million “Cop City” project in Atlanta has led to the death of forest defender Tortugita – recent reports say they died with their hands raised in the air – and domestic terrorism charges for forest defenders and concert attendees.

This thing isn’t over yet, and to cover Biden’s 2024 ambitions without reminding voters of all his half-accomplishments and unfulfilled promises is journalistic malpractice. Media treated Donald Trump as a bizarre aberration, and maybe he was, who am I to say? But if that’s the case, where’s the outrage for the possibility of Biden reenacting Trump’s family detention policies at the border?  

And as an LGBTQ+ person in the U.S. right now, I am unwilling to cede that the Democrats have taken any sort of useful stance against the onslaught of Republican anti-LGBTQ+ copycat bills (with limited exceptions, before my mentions get lit up). Biden backing the languishing Equality Act and having words for a potential 2024 opponent on TV isn’t doing too much materially for queer and trans folks while we’re getting targeted with shootings at gay bars and attempted-legislated out of existence.

As it stands, Biden’s legacy outside of the IRA passage – already a flawed metric for climate progress, looking sillier by the day with the approval of the Willow Project – as of right now is ending COVID provisions and privatizing COVID care, and then talking about doing a whole bunch else. So before commentators get all warm and fuzzy about a Biden 2024 run, or start claiming that Gen Z is bought in on it, let’s be real about his record.

Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take.