Back in 2020, I wrote a personal essay for a grad school course about what was, essentially, my political coming of age. Reading it again just over four years later, it’s fascinating to see how much my political identity changed, in both subtle and significant ways.

In the essay, I described how I spent most of my childhood as a Republican, a party identity I inherited from my parents, until my distaste for the Obama administration was matched by my revulsion from the Tea Party, at which point I became a sort of radical centrist. As the 2016 election wore on, that radical centrism became fervent anti-Trumpism, and I haven’t voted for a Republican in a competitive race since I supported the reelection of Chris Christie in 2015 (we were living in a very different world then, weren’t we?). 

I concluded at the end of that piece that I still didn’t feel comfortable placing myself firmly on the political spectrum, but, thanks to Trump, I recognized that “knowing what you don’t want can be as crucial as knowing what you do want.” In other words, I was motivated entirely by negative partisanship, still groping around for a political home to call my own. Well, in 2025, I can finally say that I did find that in the Democratic Party. And unlike many Americans, I can say that Joe Biden is the one who brought me there. 

The Battle for the Soul

My first real attempt at engaging with the party came when I was a freshman in college, when me and a group of people on my floor went to an informal general interest meeting of the College Democrats. I couldn’t tell you exactly who said what in that meeting, but I can tell you that I left it with a bad taste in my mouth, turned off by the smug demeanor of the club members and the general air of superiority they carried themselves with. Even though, at that moment, I was sure that I wasn’t a Republican, I was also certain that I wasn’t a Democrat.

To be clear, I’m not trying to tell some boring JD Vance-style “I didn’t know which fork was the salad fork”-style story about why I felt alienated from progressive elites – by almost any definition, I am very much an elite myself. But this was 2012, only a few years after the peak of Bill Maher’s influence, and right in the thick of Rachel Maddow’s. For as condescending as some conservatives may claim liberals are today, I would argue that they were much worse in between 2006 and 2016. Obama’s 2008 victory was so large, and the rejection of George W. Bush and the neoconservatives so total, that the impression I got from many liberals wasn’t that they held contempt for people who thought like my family, per se, but that they didn’t think conservatives mattered – they were a relic of an earlier, more ignorant era, destined to die out in a few election cycles and be replaced by the “emerging Democratic majority” which, at the time, felt like it may never lose control of the White House. 

The cult-of-personality-like treatment of figures like Obama and Hillary Clinton also turned me off. One of the first political arguments I had in college came during the first debate between Obama and Mitt Romney, in which the president downplayed Romney’s concerns about the size of the Navy’s fleet by telling him that “we also have fewer horses and bayonets.” Some of my dormmates celebrated it. I thought it was arrogant and dismissive, and that it encapsulated everything I disliked about Obama and the way that Democrats talked to and about conservatives. It didn’t feel like they saw the election as a debate between ideologies, but rather a debate between intelligence and stupidity.

I didn’t like Romney either – I thought he was too pliant to the whims of the rightmost fringes of the Republican Party, and I became confident that a candidate who still held on to outdated ideas about abortion and gay rights would never win the White House again. The product of these dueling doubts was an embittered cynicism that stuck with me for most of my college years. I enjoyed politics as a subject to study but not as something to participate in, and even as my social circle became more and more liberal, I still identified with the Republicans reflexively and out of a sense of contrarianism. That was easy to do at a liberal school in Washington, DC – when most people in a classroom take one side of an issue, it’s actually quite fun to take the other. But “fun” is all it was; my actual engagement with politics and policy was purely hypothetical and intellectual. 

Once 2016 rolled around, that surface level engagement didn’t seem like an option anymore. Like many others, Trump’s candidacy genuinely scared me, and I held out hope that one of his Republican opponents would take him out in the primary. Once he secured the nomination, I knew I would have no option but to vote for Hillary Clinton, and to vote Democratic down ballot to punish the Republican Party for allowing Trump to run roughshod over it. That resolve only strengthened when Trump actually won, but – even though I celebrated Democrats winning back the House in 2018 by taking shots of blue curacao with my friends – the Democratic Party was still a mere vessel for anti-Trumpism for me. I voted for them because they were the only viable option, and because they promised to oppose Trump at all costs. 

My supply-and-confidence relationship with the Democrats lasted into 2020. I intently watched that year’s primary, but I knew that I would vote for anyone who won the nomination, even if they held positions that were well to the left of mine. After Bernie Sanders seemed to have the upper hand following the Nevada caucuses, I toyed with the idea of writing an op-ed arguing that anyone who opposed Trump, even if they weren’t sold on Sanders’ particular brand of democratic socialism, should still bite the ballot and vote for Bernie – a stance I held to more firmly than some of my friends who were lifelong Democrats. I was a single issue voter that year, and my single issue was getting Trump out of office. 

Compare Me to the Alternative

Of course, Sanders didn’t win the nomination – Joe Biden did. Prior to 2020, I had bought into the image of Biden as a gaffe-prone fool, and all I really cared about was whether or not he had enough crossover appeal to win over swing voters. But I had underestimated, and was ultimately surprised by, how much I ended up connecting with him as the campaign wore on. 

Some of this is related to the (somewhat) superficial reasons that had led me to resist the Democrats earlier in my life. Biden is a devout Irish Catholic from the Mid-Atlantic who tries to go to mass every Sunday – qualities he shares with most members of my mother’s side of the family. I didn’t have to worry about him having contempt for my family, because it felt like he was practically a member of it. 

He also eschewed the pretension and – dare I say – entitlement that I had come to associate with Hillary and Barack. Sure, the degree to which he felt the need to remind people that he was born in Scranton felt absurd, but he was effective in conveying the idea that he felt more comfortable talking to regular people than the movers and shakers in Washington. Disagree with his policies all you want, but no one could credibly argue in 2020 that Biden was talking down to voters. Instead, it felt like he was talking with them – blaming and shaming Republican politicians, but never the swing voters who didn’t share Democrats’ contempt for the party. 

Perhaps any candidate would have been able to make hay out of the Trump Administration’s insensitive and chaotic response to both the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, but I do think the degree to which Biden was able to stitch together a coalition that included both disaffected Republicans and left populists who supported figures like Sanders is still underappreciated. I also think it speaks to the understated and – at least, initially – selfless approach Biden took to his role as both a candidate and eventually as president. In 2020, the winds were shifting left, and Biden was keen to shift with them. 

In Reaganland, Rick Perlstein writes about how Biden and other Watergate-era Democrats moved the party to the center by opposing the full-employment policies of New Deal throwbacks like Hubert Humphrey, who Biden said was not “cognizant of the limited, finite ability government has to deal with people’s problems.” That it’s impossible to imagine Biden the president delivering that same quote strikes me as a virtue. “Consistent” is the most overrated thing a politician can be – the very nature of governing requires leaders to react to events they did not plan on occurring, and sticking to one’s preconceived notions of how things should be done is a recipe for disaster. Just ask Liz Truss how it worked out for her (or ask Biden, who’d be happy to tell you all about it).

Keep the Faith

Cynics may accuse me of providing cover for Biden’s slipperiness and penchant to tell whoever he’s speaking to what they want to hear. But Biden actually backed up his rhetorical evolution with tangible action, embracing industrial policy and pursuing the most ambitious government spending plan of my lifetime. What’s more, he was only able to get that legislation passed because of compromises he made with conservative members of the Democratic caucus like Joe Manchin. Call it a lack of conviction if you must, but I see it as the refusal to let ideology stand in the way of actual progress. 

When the choice was between getting nothing and getting something, Biden knew how to get something, and which levers to pull to put things in motion. There’s a reason why progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who once said that she and Biden would be in separate parties in most other countries, became one of his largest defenders when calls for withdrawal from the 2024 race first cropped up. Biden could have thrown the left wing of the party under the bus and blamed them for inflation. Instead, he chose to try and make the case that, in the long run, Americans would feel the benefits of these policies. That case fell on deaf ears, but it’s representative of the principles Biden’s otherwise fungible position on the left-right spectrum could sometimes conceal. 

I would never argue that Biden was a perfect president (he wasn’t), that he would have won reelection (he almost certainly wouldn’t have), or that he handled the last few months of his term with much humility or tact (he didn’t). But by embracing a pragmatic liberal vision rooted in not just a concern for, but an affinity for, the average American, Joe Biden has given me a reason to support the Democratic Party long after both he and Trump leave the political stage. 

Regardless of how Biden’s legacy is evaluated, how his policies are remembered, or how much blame he’ll receive for the party’s losses in November, I at least hope that future Democratic leaders adopt his optimistic disposition, his ideological flexibility, and his recognition that the politics of the everyday can outshine partisan smoke and mirrors. It’s an approach that persuaded me, and one that I’d like to believe – I have to believe – will win out in the end.