BIDEN’S 2024 PLAN SIMILAR TO 2020’S
Strategy is to frame race as a contest, not a referendum
Forget the Wilmington, Del., basement. This time, he will have a Rose Garden. And Air Force One and a big white mansion and all the other advantages of incumbency in a year when he is not forced by a pandemic to stick to streaming from downstairs.
But as President Joe Biden prepares to run for a second term, his team is mapping out a strategy for 2024 that in many other ways resembles that of 2020. Whether he faces Donald Trump again or another Republican trying to be like Trump, the president plans a campaign message that still boils down to three words: Competent beats crazy.
Whether he can sell that theme again represents a singular challenge given surveys showing that the public has not exactly rallied behind him and harbors deep doubts about his age. When Biden kicks off his re-election campaign this spring, as is widely expected, he will be presiding over an economy that is improving but unsettled and leading a party publicly behind him but privately angst-ridden.
The goal, according to interviews with White House officials, outside advisers, key allies and party strategists, is to frame the race as a contest, not a referendum on Biden. On one side, in this narrative, will be a mature, seasoned leader with a raft
of legislation on his record aimed at winning back working-class Democrats. On the other will be an ideologically driven, conspiracy-minded opposition consumed by its own internal power struggles and tethered to a leader facing multiple investigations for trying to overturn a democratic election.
“It’s incumbent on the president and his team to make sure the election is a choice,” said Lis Smith, a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign. “It’s not going to be Joe Biden versus some mythical Democratic candidate. It’s going to be between Joe Biden and whoever the
Republican nominee is.”
Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, said a rematch between Biden and Trump would be the best scenario for the president. “At this point, President Biden just needs to seem like he is still very much with it and able to do the job, and at that point, his fate is largely out of his hands,” Ayres said. “He’s got to pray the Republicans blow themselves up again.”
Biden previewed his approach in his State of the Union address this month when he baited Republicans into a debate over Social Security and Medicare, then pressed his argument during appearances in Wisconsin
and Florida. He used the speech before Congress to highlight his legislative successes while focusing on pocketbook issues,
The trips that followed illustrated one important difference from 2020. No longer tied to the basement of his home in Delaware, the way he was by COVID-19 in 2020, Biden will travel frequently this year to deliver his message, aides said. As projects from the 2021 infrastructure package break ground, the president intends to cut a lot of ribbons around the country to take credit.
Republican strategists are gambling that the physical toll of a full-scale, nonpandemic campaign effort
will wear on an 80-year-old president. They plan to portray him as an aging, failed leader and a big-spending captive of the political left who drove up inflation and did little to defend the border against a record wave of illegal immigration.
“Joe Biden’s campaign team doesn’t have a strategic problem; they have a candidate problem,” said Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign consultant. “Americans have now watched Joe Biden wreck our economy, and he’ll have to answer for it. Biden won’t be able to hide in his basement like last time.”
Although Biden seems eager for a rematch, it is hardly certain that he can replicate the 2020 outcome. Not only is his approval rating hovering at 43 percent, but two recent surveys, the Washington Post-ABC News poll and the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll, found Trump leading by several points. Moreover, despite Biden’s legislative victories, 62 percent told the Post and ABC that he had accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing.”
Biden aides scorn such surveys, saying that the polling system is broken, as proved by the midterm elections when Democrats did better than expected.
Although Biden has yet to formally announce his campaign, the decision is taken as a given within his circle. The next step, advisers said, will come in March when Democrats announce which city will host their nominating convention next year; the finalists are Atlanta, Chicago and New York.
Democrats expect Biden to make his bid official no earlier than April to put off scrutiny of his fundraising until the next reporting deadline in July. Although Biden has appeared at fundraising events for the Democratic National Committee, he has yet to mount a major effort to raise cash for his reelection bid. But aides said the president was driven less by such considerations and as a tested incumbent had the luxury of time.
An April kickoff would be consistent with Biden’s 2020 campaign, which formally got under way in April 2019, and President Barack Obama’s re-election bid, which formally began in April 2011.