‘We will defeat Trump’: Biden sets sights on old rival after New Hampshire
Joe Biden appears to have set his sights on an almost inevitable rematch with Donald Trump for the White House in November’s election, after the former president’s decisive win in the New Hampshire primary, on his sprint to the Republican nomination.
Biden’s campaign believes the presidential election has officially begun, Politico reported, with Trump’s victory over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire on Tuesday officially kicking off what the outlet described as “the longest and most grueling general election campaign in modern American political history”.
Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, told reporters on Wednesday morning the New Hampshire results showed Trump “all but locked up the GOP nomination”.
With that simple fact established, the choice that American voters will face in November is coming into sharp focus. “It’ll be a choice between two visions for this country that couldn’t be more different,” she said. “Donald Trump is running a campaign of revenge and retribution that threatens American democracy and our fundamental freedoms, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are running to move the country forward and make life better for working people.”
It’s a dynamic that underscores the unusual nature of the 2024 campaign. Usually, the results from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary have marked just the beginning of the nominating contest, with a long slog of an intra-party fight into the spring.
In 2024, Trump’s victories in both have affirmed his stranglehold on the GOP nomination. Nikki Haley, the last remaining Republican rival in the race, has signaled she will stay in the race at least through the 24 February primary in South Carolina, her home state. She trails Trump by 30 points in the polls there.
Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign’s communications director, told reporters the campaign had determined the former South Carolina governor had no path to the nomination “just looking at the reality of the data in front of us”.
“Coming off of Iowa and New Hampshire, you have Donald Trump, who’s fully consolidated the extreme Maga [Make America Great Again] base of the party and is marching towards the nomination,” he said. “This campaign is now laser focused on presenting that direct choice to the American people because it’s real at this point in time.”
Biden’s campaign is shifting into general election mode, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. Those preparations include a change in leadership structure. The Democratic US president announced on Tuesday that two top White House aides – Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Mike Donilon – will take over leadership of his campaign.
The campaign also released a new line of merchandise with the slogan “Together, we will defeat Donald Trump. Again” playing off Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” theme.
As Trump gave a winding and unhinged victory speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday, complete with lies that he won New Hampshire in the 2016 and 2020 elections when, in fact, he was beaten by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, respectively, a Biden aide texted a Politico reporter: “That’s the guy we will beat.”
The Biden campaign has also begun attacking Trump, 77, more aggressively over his verbal slips, using X, formerly Twitter, to point out the former president’s frequent nonsensical comments.
Both Biden and Trump have significant obstacles to winning and the race is expected to be close. Biden narrowly defeated Trump by just a combined 44,000 votes in 2020 in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. Nearly 60% of Americans said in a recent Decision Desk HQ poll they were not excited about the possibility of another rematch between Trump and Biden.
The Biden campaign said on Wednesday it was unfazed by polls showing a tight race with Trump.
“To put simply, Trump’s party is divided, and now he’s about to face the only politician who has ever beaten him and who did so with more votes than any presidential candidate in history: President Joe Biden,” Quentin Fulks, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said on Wednesday.
Cedric Richmond, the former Louisiana congressman who is a Biden campaign co-chair, also waved off the polls.
“If I had a dollar for every time somebody counted Joe Biden out based on polls or something else, then I’d be independently wealthy,” he said.
Biden called out Trump personally on ahead of the third anniversary of the 6 January Capitol attack by his supporters.“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him – not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future,” Biden said in the speech.