It is starting to be heard, even among historians I respect, such as labor historian, Erik Loomis, that FDR did not campaign on the New Deal. This is an argument that will be marshaled on behalf of Biden to justify his non-committal to anything specific that may sound like he is agreeing with anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Worse, it will be used to justify Biden not saying much of anything at all, other than "Get rid of Trump and restore our nation's sanity."
Here is Eric Rauchway to help us begin to understand why this belief about FDR's 1932 campaign remains so embedded among historians who should know better, and pundits who are just lackey employees for corporate executives' world views. As I have viewed the evidence, when FDR talked about balancing budgets, it was primarily spoken before a couple of business groups, which was a time when politicians could say one thing one place and another thing another place--meaning before instant worldwide communication. FDR had his Brains (later shortened to Brain) Trust of largely more pro-business regulation and pro-works program in place well before his nomination, and the ideas being proposed had been percolating for quite some time. Yes, it is true the 1932 Democratic Party platform had balancing the budget as a priority, but that plank always struck me as a leftover from the 1924 John W. Davis candidacy for president, the most conservative Democratic nominee for president since before Grover Cleveland, and which led to a third-party campaign in 1924 from the saintly Robert LaFollette, a Republican progressive.
I think it is important to push back against this historians' and pundits' error early and often.
