Biden Should Withdraw Says Climate Activist Aru Shiney-Ajay

To save U.S. democracy and the earth, Joe Biden must withdraw from presidential race says Sunrise Movement’s Aru Shiney-Ajay

(Photo: Sunrise Movement march seeking Green New Deal.)

July 14, 2024

Joe Biden’s approval rating among U.S. voters was 40% before his June 27 televised debate against rival Donald Trump. Biden’s rating is lower than that of any other recent first-term president in the summer before their re-election, including Trump’s 41% in July 2020. The exception, notes NBC News, was George H.W. Bush, whose approval rating was 34% before he lost.

So, Biden’s chances of being re-elected President were slim even before his disastrous performance at the debate. The New York Times, Washington Post as well as late-night TV comics, who backed Biden before the debate, pointed out his incoherence at the debate and asked him to withdraw. For instance, a New York Times editorial noted that during the debate Biden “struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.”

Biden, 81-years-old, says he is staying in the race since he is the Democrat with the best chance of beating Republican Trump. He says his bad debate performance was due to a cold and lack of sleep.

So far, 19 moderate Democratic lawmakers, 18 members of Congress and one Senator, have publicly asked Biden to withdraw. Several major Democratic donors, including actor George Clooney, also want him to withdraw.  

In contrast, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other leftist Democratic lawmakers as well as leftist lobbies and activist groups are urging Biden to stay in the race.  

On July 12, Sunrise Movement broke from the ranks of the left groups. “Joe Biden’s next climate legacy-defining act must be to pass the torch to a new nominee,” Aru Shiney-Ajay, Executive Director of the climate activist group said in a statement.

“After speaking with young people around the country over the last few weeks, I’m concerned that Joe Biden isn’t positioned to mobilize young people and win in November. Since the debate, already low enthusiasm for Biden has continued to drop,” she added.

With another Democratic candidate who “energizes young volunteers, we could contact up to twice as many voters this fall” stated Shiney-Ajay. In the 2020 Presidential election, she says, Sunrise volunteers contacted 3.5 million young voters urging them to vote for Biden.

(Photo: Aru Shiney-Ajay. Source: LinkedIn.)

Founded in 2017, Sunrise Movement’s goal is “to force the government to end the era of fossil fuel elites, invest in Black, brown and working class communities, and create millions of good union jobs. We are on a mission to put everyday people back in charge…”

Sunrise’s policy proposal is a Green New Deal, “an economy with a robust public sector and low carbon jobs”: public transit, public housing, workplace democracy, and investment in nursing, care for the elderly and infirm, teaching, and community owned solar energy sources.

In 2018, Sunrise gained national attention by joining then newly elected House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in “a splashy protest” in fellow Democrat and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. “The resulting publicity added thousands of people to the group’s ranks of supporters and active volunteers,” according to Politico.

The sit-in in Pelosi’s office also boosted Sunrise’s annual funding and budget from $50,000 to over $10 million as well as brought attention to its Green New Deal, according to The New Yorker.

During the 2020 presidential election campaign, 16 of the Democrats running for president, including Joe Biden, endorsed Sunrise’s Green New Deal.

Sunrise’s early funding came largely from two liberal foundations, the Rockefeller Family Fund and Wallace Global Fund, and it’s 2022 annual budget was $15 million, according to TIME.

The group endorses liberal and far-left Democratic Party candidates for public office and campaigns with the Sierra Club, the Environment Defense Fund and other similar activist organizations.  

Sunrise has “brought new energy and new ambition to the climate community and made a big impact in a short period of time,” Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund told TIME in 2022. The fund has a staff of 1,000 and three million members and activists in more than 30 countries. In fiscal year 2023 expenses it spent $334 million.

Sunrise has an education fund which provides skills trainings, creative projects, and climate disaster response to its network of young people to take on “the climate crisis in their communities and push for bold solutions…” In 2022, the education arm, which does no political work, spent $9 million and had $13 million in net assets. In 2021 and 2023, the education fund won $500,000 awards for two-years from the MacArthur Foundation.  

Shiney-Ajay has been executive director of Sunrise, and based in Minneapolis, since 2023. Since 2020, she has also been the group’s strategic director. She joined the group in 2017 as a coordinator, trainer, and online organizer.  

In 2017, she was a fellow in the Pennsylvania Student Power Network, coordinating campaigns on campus on immigrant rights and fossil fuel divestment. In 2016, she was a fellow at NextGen Climate, running a voter registration and a Get Out The Vote program, with a focus on climate change.

From 2014-2016, Shiney-Ajay was on the organizing team of the International Peace Conference, Maastricht Area, Netherlands. During 2012-2013, she recruited and trained youth volunteers for Minnesotans United, originally founded to stop the definition of marriage from changing to 'one man and one woman'​ in Minnesota. During 2013-2014, she was a student activist coordinator for the civil liberties organization Amnesty International USA.

Shiney-Ajay was at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, 2016-2020, where she focused on global studies. She earned an International Baccalaureate at the United World College, Maastricht, 2014-2016.  Earlier, 2011-2014, she was a student at Nova Classical Academy, St. Paul, Minnesota, where she founded and led the Gay Straight Alliance. Shiney-Ajay was raised in Minneapolis, U.S., in an immigrant household from Kerala, India.

“Today, I’m thinking about my family in Minneapolis and Kerala” Shiney-Ajay says in her statement asking Biden to withdraw. “To be very clear, regardless of who the Democratic candidate is, our plan is the same: to persuade young voters to turn out for the Democratic nominee in order to defeat Trump,” she adds. “For the future of our democracy and our planet, we must defeat Trump this November.”

James Carville was the strategist for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 Presidential election win. He is a consultant to American Bridge, a super political action committee, which spent $85 million backing Biden and other Democrats in the 2020 election. Carville told CNN that Biden should withdraw since has no chance of winning. If Biden is allowed to stay in the race, Carville stated, “we’re just making a idiotic choice for the future of our country.”