President Biden and his team are hoping to turn this year’s election into a referendum on his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. Photo / Kenny Holston, The New York Times
Watching Donald Trump ascend, the newly energised Biden campaign is aiming to make the general election all about him. It’s also hoping for some big endorsements.
As former President Donald Trump speeds toward the Republican nomination, President Joe Biden is moving quickly to pump energy into his reelection bid, kicking off what is likely to be an ugly, dispiriting and historically long slog to November between two unpopular nominees.
After months of languid buildup in which he held only a single public campaign event, Biden has thrown a series of rallies across battleground states, warning that democracy itself is at stake in 2024.
He sent two of his most trusted White House operatives to take the helm of his reelection campaign in Wilmington, Delaware, after Trump seized control of the Republican primary race more rapidly than Biden’s advisers had initially expected.
And other Biden aides are drafting wish lists of potential surrogates, including elected officials, social media influencers and the endorsement of their wildest dreams: global superstar Taylor Swift.
“It’s game on, the beginning of the general election,” said Representative Ann McLane Kuster of New Hampshire, chair of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of 97 centrist House Democrats. “We’ve got to win this.”
In a race without historical parallel — a contest between two presidents, one of them facing 91 criminal charges — Biden is making an extraordinary gamble, betting that Trump remains such an animating force in American life that the nation’s current leader can turn the 2024 election into a referendum not on himself but on his predecessor.
Resurrecting a version of the argument that worked for them in 2020, Biden’s team and his top allies plan to paint Trump as a mortal threat to American government and civil society, and are banking that fears of another turbulent Trump administration will outweigh worries about Biden’s age and vitality. Polls have shown Biden trailing Trump in a head-to-head contest, with many Democratic voters reluctant to back him again.
The president’s aides plan to couple a direct assault on Trump with a heavy focus on abortion rights, casting the issue as symbolic of larger conservative efforts to restrict personal freedoms.
They believe that the more the public sees and hears Trump, the less people will be inclined to vote for him, and the more the Biden campaign will be able to use his words on issues like abortion and health care against him.
Biden’s aides argue that voters remember the events of January 6, 2021, all too well, making the day a touchstone akin to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They think an anti-Trump message about democracy can persuade Democratic voters to line up behind Biden and win over independents who backed Trump in 2020 but disapprove of his behaviour since.
The January 6 attack hangs over the Biden campaign in another way as well: Unlike in 2020, the president and his team believe that the end of the election will not be in November but on January 6, 2025, when Congress will count the Electoral College votes.
Biden’s team is building out a legal strike force in battleground states to prepare for a range of challenges — including matters of basic voting rights but extending to the certification of the election under the Electoral Count Reform Act, the 2022 federal law that was meant to stave off any repeat of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Democrats have successfully wielded a Trump-centric message even with the former president out of office, including in the 2022 midterms and more than two dozen elections last year. Now that he looks likely to return to a presidential ticket — and as he continues to shape the direction of Republican politics — top Biden allies see an opening to draw a sharp contrast.
“Once again,” said Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, chair of the Democratic Governors Association, there is a “binary choice: democracy, freedom versus extremism and chaos. Real kitchen-table issues that affect people or just nonsense things that they dream up.”
Yet the election will not be about Trump in a vacuum.
Many Democrats continue to worry that training their attention on him will fail to energise voters who are already pessimistic about Biden. Polling shows that some of the Black, Latino, young and suburban voters who lifted him to victory in 2020 have since turned on him, in part over misgivings about his age, economic record and support for Israel.
Campaign aides and top officials largely brush off those concerns, believing that attitudes on the economy, at least, will change as it shows more signs of improvement.
To rally the growing number of voters who do not consume news through traditional media, the campaign is trying to reach them on social media, with videos from influencers and even those with smaller followings.
During a stop in North Carolina this month, Biden made an hourlong visit to the home of a supporter who had his student loans cancelled through a federal program. The man’s son later posted a video of Biden’s visit on TikTok, which drew millions of views — a template for how the campaign hopes to reach voters in new ways.
The campaign has begun discussions with celebrities and social media stars about promoting Biden on Instagram and TikTok. When Biden took a fundraising swing through Southern California in December, the campaign carved out time to meet with influencers to pitch them on posting pro-Biden content. There are also plans, first reported Sunday by NBC News, to hold a fundraiser with two Democratic former presidents: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The biggest and most influential endorsement target is Swift, 34, the pop sensation and NFL enthusiast, who can move millions of supporters with an Instagram post or a mid-concert aside. She endorsed Biden in 2020 and, last year, a single Instagram post of hers led to 35,000 new voter registrations. Fundraising appeals from Swift could be worth millions of dollars for Biden.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California, a top Biden surrogate, all but begged Swift to become more involved in Biden’s campaign when he spoke to reporters after a Republican primary debate in September.
“Taylor Swift stands tall and unique,” he said. “What she was able to accomplish just in getting young people activated to consider that they have a voice and that they should have a choice in the next election, I think, is profoundly powerful.”
The chatter around Swift and the potential of reaching her 279 million Instagram followers reached such intensity that the Biden team urged applicants in a job posting for a social media position not to describe their Taylor Swift strategy — the campaign had enough suggestions already. One idea that has been tossed around, a bit in jest: sending the president to a stop on Swift’s Eras Tour.
Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, a key Biden ally, said Democrats needed to press an affirmative case for the president, reminding voters that tangible changes to their lives — a cap on insulin costs, a road or bridge repaired for the first time — could be tied to the administration’s accomplishments.
In the 2020 campaign, Clyburn said, “people were voting against Trump. Our job this time is to convince people to vote for Biden.”
“We just can’t rely on this anti-Trump stuff because Trump’s supporters are going to turn out big, because they are emotionally tied to Trump,” he went on. “We’ve got to get our voters emotionally tied to Biden.”
And Representative Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., who is running for the Senate, said candidates must demonstrate that they grasp voters’ pocketbook anxiety.
“The lesson of the last seven years for us in Michigan after Trump won was, a Democrat with outrage is fine — a Democrat with a plan is powerful,” Slotkin said. “You need to understand the mood of people on the ground.”
Other Biden supporters argue that voters want to hear not only about his record but also about what he would do if reelected.
Representative Chris Pappas, D-N.H., urged the campaign to lay out a “forward-looking vision” of how Biden would tackle concerns about housing affordability, child care costs and immigration.
“It can’t just be about relitigating the past. It can’t just be talking about bills we passed,” he said. “It has to be about responding to the immediate concerns people have in their day-to-day lives.”
To help assuage those Democratic anxieties, Biden dispatched Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Mike Donilon, two top White House aides, to Wilmington to devote their entire focus to the campaign. For months, donors and other allies had expressed frustration with an arrangement in which the top decision-makers in Biden’s campaign were still in their White House roles while top officials in Wilmington were left to carry out orders.
The campaign has also answered gripes about its slow pace of hiring by bringing on a slew of new staff members. It now has more than 100 staff members, with teams on the ground in six battleground states and South Carolina, which will hold the first recognized Democratic primary Saturday.
Yet many new hires are working jobs roughly similar to what they did at their state parties.
In Wisconsin, the six new Biden campaign staff members all came from the state’s Democratic Party, and they are all still working in the same offices and conference rooms. The spokesperson for a super political action committee behind the push to write in Biden’s name on Democratic primary ballots in New Hampshire will be the campaign manager for Biden in the state.
O’Malley Dillon, who managed Biden’s 2020 campaign, is widely viewed as a stabilising force and will arrive in Wilmington with decision-making authority that was not afforded to the campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez.
Kirk Wagar, a Democratic donor who served as ambassador to Singapore during the Obama administration, said, “Having 100 per cent of a mind like Jen O’Malley’s thinking about the campaign can’t be anything other than a great thing.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Reid J. Epstein, Lisa Lerer, Katie Glueck and Katie Rogers
Photographs by: Sophie Park, Pete Marovich and Kenny Holston
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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