One year out from Election Day, US President Joe Biden ’s re-election campaign is outlining a plan to retain the White House by framing the 2024 race around many of the same themes it used in 2020 – presenting a contrast with Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement stark enough to re-energise its winning coalition of supporters.
In a strategy memo obtained by Associated Press, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said her team is already looking beyond the Republican presidential primary to a general election “that will be very close”. But “the message Joe Biden ran on in 2020 remains popular with voters and central to this campaign”.
“The president and vice-president have a strong message that resonates with voters, a clear contrast with whoever the MAGA Republican Party nominates,” Rodriguez wrote. “This campaign will win by doing the work and ignoring the outside chatter – just like we did in 2020.”
The memo is striking in how it reflects a president who has repeatedly asked voters to allow him to “finish the job” but is also waging a campaign that is just as focused on presenting the race as a referendum on stopping Trump.
The MAGA movement is still strong despite the former president being indicted in four separate cases and facing 91 total criminal counts.
National polls indicate that, if the race were held today, a rematch between Biden and Trump would be exceedingly close. The election will occur one year from Sunday.
One is 81, the other is 80. Are America’s leaders too old?
One is 81, the other is 80. Are America’s leaders too old?
One issue the memo omits is voters’ concerns about the 80-year-old Biden’s age. An August AP-NORC poll found that 77 per cent of US adults – including 69 per cent of Democrats – viewed Biden as too old to be effective for four more years
Rodriguez stresses that the administration’s calls to protect the nation’s core democratic values and abortion rights, as well as programmes aiming to improve the economy to strengthen the middle class, helped Democrats defy historical odds during last year’s midterms, holding the Senate and only narrowly ceding the House majority to the Republican Party.
Ahead of 2024, “our early research shows the president’s message of building on our progress to finish the job remains a winning one for mobilising our base and persuading undecided voters,” Rodriguez wrote.
The memo argues that next year’s race “will be a clear choice for the American people” and predicts voters will reject “MAGA extremism” and be swayed by the administration’s legislative accomplishments, including a massive public works law and sweeping healthcare and green energy package.
Polls, though, show Biden may not be getting credit for such initiatives.
Only about 4 in 10 US adults approve of the president’s job performance, according to regular polling from the Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research. And two-thirds disapprove of his handing of the economy.
An AP-NORC poll conducted in September showed that a Biden-championed policy allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices was overwhelmingly popular, with three-quarters of Americans favouring the policy change. But they were overall split on Biden’s handling of the issue of prescription drug prices.
And a June survey found that 58 per cent of Americans disapproved of how Biden was handling abortion policy. Only about 4 in 10 approved.
The campaign began trying to reverse such perceptions in September, with a 16-week, US$25 million advertising campaign targeting what Chavez called “voters across battleground states – including earlier-than-ever investments in Hispanic and African-American media” and testing “the messaging contrast that will be core to this election”.
Trump promises to restore ‘travel ban’ targeting Muslim countries if re-elected
Trump promises to restore ‘travel ban’ targeting Muslim countries if re-elected
Trump, meanwhile, has built a commanding early 2024 Republican Party primary lead despite his legal entanglements. But even beyond him, the memo argues, “the MAGA extremism that now defines the Republican Party is a significant barrier to victory for the GOP in key battleground states”.
Biden spent months prior to the midterms warning that Trump and his movement could undermine American democracy. Rodriguez writes that 2024 could look like 2022’s midterms, when Democrats won tight Senate races in Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania – all states key to winning the White House.
“Every time voters are confronted with this choice they continue to vote with Democrats,” said Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler.
Democratic strategist Tim Hogan said the Biden campaign needs to combat “a complacency that people fall into when they feel like there’s a rematch,” Hogan said. To counter that, he said, Biden should promote his administration’s achievements while reminding voters what everyday life was like under Trump.
Setting up the contrast, he said: “It’s a stability and chaos question for voters”.
Based in Wilmington, Delaware, where Biden has a home away from the White House, the campaign is working jointly with the Democratic National Committee in Washington, which spent US$95 million bolstering state parties ahead of the midterms and plans more investment this cycle.
They had a joint war chest of US$91 million as of October 1, which Rodriguez called “the most ever for a Democratic candidate at this point in the race”.
Republican strategist Rick Tyler cautioned against reviving too many 2020 themes.
“It’d be malpractice to suggest you can win the same race in the same way you won it before,” said Tyler, who said many voters have forgotten that Trump left the White House with the pandemic raging and the economy declining. “Winning election is always about the future. It’s never about the past.”