Biden Offers Bernie Sanders’s Supporters An Olive Branch, Says ‘You’re Needed’ To Beat Trump

Former Vice President Joe Biden appealed to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters Wednesday to get behind his presidential campaign ahead of the November election.

The movement Sanders helped create will become an indispensable tool to help change in the future, Biden wrote in a Medium post, which was published after the senator dropped his White House bid. The olive branch represents a departure from what Biden was saying earlier in the primary.

“And to your supporters I make the same commitment: I see you, I hear you, and I understand the urgency of what it is we have to get done in this country,” Biden wrote, referring to self-avowed socialist’s loyal base. “I hope you will join us. You are more than welcome. You’re needed.”

He added: “Together we will defeat Donald Trump. And when we do that, we’ll not only do the hard work of rebuilding this nation — we’ll transform it.” Biden’s campaign and his surrogates spent most of the Democratic primary criticizing Sanders for his progressive ideas and economic reforms.

“The only thing, the only thing between the United States and the abyss is the Democratic Party,” Democratic strategist James Carville said on MSNBC in February before the coronavirus pandemic caused Biden and everyone else in the country for that matter to isolate themselves to prevent the spread.

“That’s it. If we go the way of the British Labour Party, if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days … so I’m scared to death,” said Carville, who has called Sanders a socialist in the past.

Sanders lost several primary states to Biden before the Vermont senator ended his campaign. Biden easily won Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan, which Sanders won in 2016. The former vice president also and came up big during Super Tuesday.

Biden is running up the numbers among older voters but is failing to capture the imagination of the younger people who flocked to Obama in 2008. His inability to energize the millennial generation and its peers has not gone unnoticed in Sanders’s camp.