NYRB writes that Biden’s electoral victory was due to “an informal network of grassroots groups such as the Women’s March and Indivisible and Swing Left and Run for Something, almost all of them powered by the small-dollar donation platform ActBlue. These groups were the visible features of a vast progressive organism that came into being over the course of 2017 and then kept growing. At the smallest level, it consisted of countless private social interactions and pro bono deeds that were informally unified by a shared purpose: the electoral defeat, locally and nationally, of President Trump and his party. The organism grew and became self-aware. It sometimes called itself the Resistance. It turned into the most effective, and most undervalued, liberal grassroots movement since the civil rights era [...] It has, however, figured out something special: if hundreds of thousands of passionate, talkative, well-informed liberals—a large number of them middle-aged women—purposefully circulate in their communities, they not only spread the word but, by their presence and example, change the vibes and the milieu. They make liberal politics seem dynamic, meaningful, and doable. From early 2018 onward, newly politicized and organized Americans have ensured that Democrats have overperformed at the ballot box—especially in the special elections, midterms, and ballot measures that for years had been dominated by GOP voters.”
In return, however: “Biden and his team failed to understand or acknowledge this. The ActBlue movement—its energy, its boldness, its up-to-date political knowhow—had no part in the Biden entourage. Instead the president surrounded himself with old Washington hands whose political playbooks, like his own, relied on the received wisdom of the 1990s, when it was viewed as politically savvy for a Democratic president to distance himself from his base to win over ‘moderate’ voters. This school of thought holds that America needs a strong Republican Party, young people don’t vote, Israel must be supported at any cost, good policy takes care of politics, and the party grassroots are not to be trusted.”