It could be true, as David Faris argues in The Week, that the only way to prevent Joe Biden from capturing the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination is for either Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders to drop out. But, strangely, he reaches that conclusion and then says that neither of them should leave the race anytime soon.

Of course, having invested time, money and soul into the effort to win the nomination, neither Warren nor Sanders will be dropping out anytime soon, especially not with hours of free media coming to them as part of the endless debate process, and with the Iowa caucuses still more than eight tedious months away. Nor should they. Both candidates and their supporters deserve a long chance to take the case directly to the primary electorate, to build momentum and to cut into Biden’s lead.

There’s something odd about another part of Faris’s argument. He lays out some of the reasons both Warren and Sanders would, if elected, be the most progressive presidents in the nation’s history, and says that “we are now much closer to the basic moderate-progressive schism that many predicted and that we’ve seen in previous cycles.” By this he means that Biden represents the “moderate” position while Warren and Sanders represent the “progressive” position, and that the contest between them will open a fault line on the left.  Yet, Biden is running as an Obama Democrat. He is polling best with minority voters and strong supporters of the former president. A plurality of progressive Democrats are supporting Biden, and that would probably remain true even if we combined the support for Warren and Sanders.  Faris obliquely acknowledges that there’s a  problem with the progressive/moderate dichotomy he’s constructing when he looks at voters’ second choices:

To be clear, Biden’s lead is so big right now that even just adding the vote shares of Sanders and Warren together wouldn’t catch him. And given what we know about second-choice data for each candidate, Biden would capture a significant share of either candidate’s core supporters. The most recent Morning Consult poll suggests Biden would get 37 percent of Sanders voters and 20 percent of Warren voters if they dropped out, a reminder that there is no such thing as a “lane” in presidential primaries and voters consider much more than policy preferences when choosing candidates.

Indeed, if there is no clearly demarcated ideological “lane” in the primaries, then how can there be a “basic moderate-progressive schism”?

When I look at social media and read columns and blogs written by mostly white college-educated liberals (like myself), I can see this schism quite clearly, but it seems like more of an act of will than solid analysis. White liberals want a schism. They want to define Joe Biden as some kind of Blue Dog neoliberal shill. They relentlessly highlight things in his political career, sometimes drifting as far back as the mid-1970’s to do so, that they believe will demonstrate that Biden is an unacceptable option for progressives. They don’t want to talk about the eight years that Biden spent as Obama’s sidekick. They don’t want anyone to contemplate that Biden might govern much the same way that Obama did precisely because he has the same basic core of supporters and because he learned from Obama’s example.  They’re also generally too savvy to openly attack Obama’s record for fear of alienating a man who some say is more popular than Jesus with the rank and file.

What defines Obama’s style of governance is pragmatism rather than ideological commitment. With some limits and exceptions, Obama pursued the most leftward options available given the confines and constraints of the environment in which he was acting.   When provided large Democratic majorities, he moved as far as the moderate Democrats would allow him to move. A more ideologically progressive Congress would have produced a more ideologically progressive health care bill, for example, and more robust banking reforms.

Biden is unlikely to be much different in this respect. He isn’t running to pull the party to the right, and he’s adaptable to changing times and mores. In some instances, like gay marriage, he’s actually goaded Obama to move more quickly than he was prepared to do.

A lot of the criticisms of Biden don’t take this into account. After representing Delaware- a credit card company masquerading as a state- in the Senate for decades, it’s no surprise that his record on consumer debt is for shit. That would be true for any Delaware representative, just as every New Jersey Democrat (Hello, Cory Booker!) is too cozy with the financial services industry and every Louisiana Democrat is a pal to off-shore drillers. When Kirsten Gillibrand was an upstate representative, she joined the Blue Dog coalition and had a lousy record on guns, but when she became a senator her voting record turned solidly liberal. Politicians represent the coalitions that get them elected, and when those coalitions change, so do their politics.

I shouldn’t have to remind people that Poppy Bush was pro-choice until he wanted to succeed Ronald Reagan, and Al Gore was an anti-choice senator from Tennessee until he decided to run for president in 1988.  We may not like that kind of malleability, but if we’re in the business of predicting the future we cannot ignore that it’s a regular feature of presidential politics.

Not everyone opposed to Biden’s candidacy is concerned first and foremost about ideology. Many people just don’t want another old white dude in the Oval Office. That wouldn’t explain anyone’s preference for Bernie Sanders, but it might shape part of Elizabeth Warren’s appeal. If you want a woman or a minority or a gay man or someone under fifty, then that’s your right. The country could certainly use some new perspectives.  I think it’s fair to argue that Biden would not provide any kind of radical change. Yet, a schism over perspective if a different thing from a schism over ideology.  White liberals can try to define this race in ideological terms, but the voters don’t seem inclined to go along with them.

So, it could be true that denying Biden the nomination will require either Warren or Sanders to drop out, but there’s another way to get more progressive governance. If they stay in and keep pushing the debate to the left, Biden will have to move to the left to match them. When he makes up his cabinet, he’ll be more likely to choose people that will help round out the ideological reach of the party. In other words, move the party to the left, and you’ll move a possible Biden presidency to the left.

Just as important, no matter who wins the nomination, they’ll be limited in what they can do by the makeup of Congress. Give them a Senate majority, and they’ll get more things done and on better terms. Give them a more progressive House, and they’ll have a freer hand to pursue radical change. The way to really change things is to have control of both the White House and the legislature, and that’s more important than which of the eleventy billion Democratic candidates comes out on top.

In any case, you have to be in it to win it. Warren and Sanders are not out of the running yet, and Biden has not been the most stellar national candidate when he’s tried to do it solo, so there’s reason to believe that he can be beaten.

He’s not the ogre of the white progressive left’s imagination, but he’s by no means the most progressive option available, so there’s no good reason for people to stand down.  It does get tiresome, though, listening to people treat him as some monster. He’s ahead in the polls because Democrats really like him, including most progressives.