Trump, Biden pivot quickly to campaign many voters dread
The presidential campaign matchup most Americans oppose is becoming a reality.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel dropped her vow of neutrality after Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary to call for her party to “unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump.”
Republican fundraisers have been racing to line up major donors to back the former president in a spring advertising offensive against President Joe Biden, and the Republican National Committee is putting finishing touches on a joint fundraising agreement that will allow its nominee to tap wealthy donors for checks larger than $800,000.
Biden, for his part, has announced that two of his top White House aides will move to his campaign operation, a sudden shift that his staffers attribute the accelerating pace of the GOP nomination process.
Biden’s advisers have also sharpened their attacks on Trump, accusing him of running a campaign of “revenge and retribution,” while declaring publicly Wednesday that the Republican nomination fight is over.
“We are just looking at the reality of the data,” said Michael Tyler, the communications director of the Biden campaign. “This campaign is now laser-focused on presenting that direct choice to the American people.”
Never in modern history have two less-popular choices than Trump and Biden faced off on the November ballot.
Public and internal polling for months have found an electorate strongly averse to a 2020 campaign do-over, unwilling to accept the choice before it. Yet the next nine months are likely to feature these two unpopular figures forcefully attacking each other and trading accusations of mental incompetence.
The Trump and Biden teams both have reasons to want the general election campaign to begin. Trump is eager to stop spending money and attention on his Republican rivals so he can fully focus on the president.
Biden has long viewed a one-toone comparison with Trump as his strongest asset, and that dynamic is muddied so long as other Republicans remain in the race.
For now, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley continues to campaign against Trump, despite her double-digit losses in Iowa and New Hampshire. Haley’s closing message in New Hampshire — that most Americans do not want a Trump-vs.-Biden matchup — failed to lift her campaign to victory.
More than half of Americans have unfavorable views of Trump, 77, and Biden, 81, in public polls. More than half say they are “dissatisfied” by the choice, and even larger majorities say they do not want each man to run.
In one December Monmouth University poll, nearly half of respondents said they would “definitely not” vote for either man — 49% for Biden and 48% for Trump.
An additional 7% will “probably not” vote for Biden, while 8% will “probably not” vote for Trump.
Both the Trump and Biden campaigns, aware of this dynamic, see redemption in driving home their opponent’s unpopularity.
Trump has taken to calling his opponent’s camp “crooked Joe Biden and his radical band of lunatics.” He refers to the federal and state prosecutions against him as an effort by “Biden and his thugs,” though there is no evidence that Biden has been involved in the decisions to charge Trump with an array of crimes. He has made mocking Biden’s mental competence a standard part of his stump speech.
Biden avoided mentioning Trump by name early in his presidency, but that has changed dramatically this year. “Donald Trump’s campaign is about him — not America, not you,” Biden said in a recent Pennsylvania speech that blamed Trump’s words for the death of police officers in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
On Tuesday, Biden attacked Trump multiple times by name during an abortion rights rally in Manassas, Va., saying the former president was responsible for the termination of Roe v. Wade.
Biden and his allies believe abortion rights and protecting democracy will be key issues for voters, often saying that Democrats’ focus on those areas in 2022 paid dividends in the midterm elections.
“The longer these abortion bans are in place in the 21 states and counting that have bans, the more salient and compelling the issue gets,” said Mini Timmaraju, head of Reproductive Freedom for All.
“I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence that it’s slowing down, and I think anecdotally the horror stories are just going to get worse.”