‘We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it, because it does,’ says Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager.
The president’s campaign aides are already making clear that in the new year, they will characterize the 2024 election as a rehashing of 2020: A choice, they say, between preserving democratic institutions under Joe Biden and the chaos and retribution of indicted former President Donald Trump, his likely 2024 GOP rival.
“We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it, because it does,” Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez told reporters Tuesday.
The president’s campaign team will kick off the new year by hiring staff this month in battleground states, investing in more paid media, and campaigning in a number of swing states that will likely decide the 2024 presidential election, his staffers say.
Ramping up the president’s travel schedule and characterizing the 2024 election as a referendum on Trump is a clear effort by his aides to distract from Biden’s abysmal approval rating, and to dispel long-running concerns from voters that the 81-year-old incumbent’s advanced age may prevent him from running a demanding reelection campaign. As National Review recently reported, even members of his own party have spent months privately venting that the president’s reliance on a teleprompter makes him look old, and that he often appears fatigued at public events.
Speaking with reporters Tuesday, Biden aides repeatedly invoked the storming of the U.S. Capitol ahead of Biden’s planned speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on Saturday to mark three years since the events of January 6, 2021. He will then head to Charleston, South Carolina on Monday to visit the historically black Mother Emanuel AME Church, the site of the deadly mass shooting in 2015. Vice President Kamala Harris, the White House’s lead abortion-rights messenger, will also head to South Carolina this weekend before traveling to Wisconsin later this month to commemorate the anniversary of the overturned landmark abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.
Staffers maintain the White House will continue in the new year to prioritize messaging about preserving access to abortion, voting rights, and what one campaign aide described as the “existential threat to democracy that Donald Trump represents.” Aides notably declined to address in Tuesday’s call voters’ concerns about crime and record-breaking illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. They made only passing references to the economy — one that, in Chavez Rodriguez’s words, “grows from the middle out and the bottom up instead of the top down” — an issue voters consistently rate as one of their most important priorities.
“A return to Trump or any of the MAGA Republicans in the White House means a return to the trickle-down policies that rigged the economy for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations at the expense of the middle class and destroy the bedrock principle of Americans’ economic freedoms, the idea that everyone deserves a fair shot to succeed in this country,” said Michael Tyler, Biden’s communications director. “So what’s that mean? It means higher costs for middle class families, more jobs offshore, and a big win for Big Pharma.”
Also on Tuesday, North Carolina Democrats announced that only Biden will appear on the state’s presidential primary ballot, enraging the president’s longshot primary challengers, Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips and self help author Marianne Williamson. Phillips went so far as to compare the Democratic parties of North Carolina and Florida — which is also only featuring Biden on its primary ballot — to Iran for declining to offer more choices to Democratic primary voters.
That issue did not come up on the call, nor did aides make any mention of the stunning decisions by the Colorado supreme court and Maine secretary of state last month to remove Trump from their presidential ballots in 2024, citing his conduct relating to the storming of the U.S. Capitol three years ago as making him ineligible for the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Lawyers for Trump appealed the Maine decision and are expected to appeal the Colorado ruling soon.