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But as they envision what Biden's agenda as president would look like amid historic national crises, many are less optimistic. Some question his commitment to the transformational Franklin D. Roosevelt-style presidency he says he aspires to, pointing to a lack of specifics and an abundance of caution on certain policies. Others feel his intense focus on Trump will undercut his ability to build a political mandate for sweeping reforms.
"If I am to accept him as being a transformative leader, then I need to see evidence of his own transformation, and I haven't," said LaTosha Brown, the head of the civil rights group Black Voters Matter. Brown said she is unsure what a Biden presidency would look like beyond "Trump is gone."
The concerns come as Biden's "unity task forces," which include liberal and moderate Democrats, issued policy recommendations on health care, immigration and climate change Wednesday. And Thursday, Biden will release long-awaited economic ideas, which will serve as a test of his commitment to the "revolutionary institutional changes" he says are necessary. Biden will deliver a speech Thursday in Pennsylvania on his plan to boost jobs and wages and "help America build back better," according to his campaign.
Even as he has talked of more sweeping change, the presumptive Democratic nominee is running as a broadly acceptable alternative to Trump, refusing to adopt polarizing positions such as defunding the police or removing statues of the Founding Fathers that the activist wing of his party has championed. While he supports expanding the Affordable Care Act, he does not favor Medicare-for-all. And his plans to battle the novel coronavirus have stopped short of the ideas advanced by left-leaning members of Congress.
This posture has helped him build a lead over Trump in the polls and frustrated Republicans seeking to tag Democrats as extremists, but it has also stoked confusion about how he would govern.
Aiming to meet these concerns, Biden is aggressively building the foundation of a new government he would seek to install and is sketching a clearer picture of his earliest days in office. He is preparing policy rollouts and plotting his first legislative steps with advisers.
Beyond that, Biden aides are canvassing Democrats in Congress for ideas, according to aides and lawmakers; compiling a list of black women he could nominate to the Supreme Court and enlisting a close confidant to assemble a transition team.
But Biden's pitch is missing some major details that activists want to see sooner. He vowed in early May to unveil the blueprint for economic recovery in "the coming weeks" and has promised to send Congress legislation on his first day in office to open a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. "I already have a bill written," he said recently, but his campaign declined to provide further information or any draft text.
To some, Biden's plans for his presidency often feel like secondary themes. At a pair of recent speeches in Pennsylvania and Delaware, Biden devoted much of his time to blistering attacks on Trump's leadership. And in the video that launched his campaign, Biden focused sharply on the president, pointing to Trump's comments that there were "very fine people" on both sides of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
"While it's true that Trump is destroying himself, so it's tempting to just let him do that, it is important to give hope to working families and be more specific about how government stimulus can put people back to work in sustainable ways," said Larry Cohen, the chairman of Our Revolution, a liberal group aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
"I think it's dangerous to set as the main protagonist of your campaign somebody other than yourself," said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, a liberal organization.
Biden's defenders note that he has presented policy proposals dating back to the primary, and that he has underlined his ideas a central part of his contrast with Trump. And Trump has plunged into historic levels of unpopularity for an incumbent, giving Biden an opening to run an effective campaign that taps into opposition to his rival.
"To the extent it's a referendum on Donald Trump, Donald Trump has made it a referendum," said Anita Dunn, a senior Biden adviser who accused the president of "disastrous leadership."
She added, "What Joe Biden has done from the beginning of his campaign is lay out his vision for what America can be."
In a welcome sign for the Biden campaign, Ady Barkan, a prominent liberal activist who has ALS and supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in the primary, endorsed Biden on Wednesday. Barkan said on Twitter that Biden is "everything Trump is not," and although "he & I have different perspectives on the world, winning this election is essential."
Biden's strategy is also an acknowledgment that even Democratic voters see this election as a referendum on Trump. Just 33 percent of Biden voters said they view their vote more as an expression of support for him, while 67 percent said they view it as a vote against Trump, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. Seventy-six percent of voters supporting Trump said they view their ballot primarily as a vote for the president.
Many Democrats said the urgency of defeating Trump is the glue binding together a party with a history of internal warfare and messy disputes.
If Trump is out of the picture come January, the old ideological disputes are expected to come roaring back, they said, further complicating the challenge Biden would face.
"Unquestionably, there will be dissension and disagreement because we are Democrats and that's what we do," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). "And it will be open and sometimes heated because again, that's what we do. And Biden will, I think, accept the disagreement, because that's who he is."
Biden's team is keenly aware of this challenge, which would only compound what would be an already daunting task: taking the reins of a country riven by divisions that deepened over the past four years and reeling from economic and public health emergencies as well as a difficult reckoning with racism and police brutality.
"Does it seem like there's earlier planning than in previous cycles?" said Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del., a close Biden friend. "It feels like it's more urgent to have answers to those questions, because there won't be a period of relative calm and prosperity to say, 'Well, let's have some big discussions, let's do a policy retreat.' "
Less clear is his strategy for expanding the Affordable Care Act with an optional public insurance program, a likely massive undertaking that could require immense political capital and months of negotiation. Campaign officials have said this is a priority but have not set a specific timetable.
The Biden camp has already begun to think about how to bring together the Democrats' liberal and moderate wings. In May, the Biden and Sanders campaigns announced "unity task forces" to issue recommendations on health care, immigration and other topics. Those teams issued a 110-page report on Wednesday recommending that Biden and the party's platform committee adopt specific positions on climate change, criminal justice reform, the economy, education, health care and immigration -- the latest signal of their collaboration.
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