Rematch? Biden is quick to anoint Trump as his 2024 rival
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is zeroing in on an expected rematch against Donald Trump after this week’s New Hampshire primaries, eager to sharpen the contrast with his predecessor.
Ten months from Election Day, Biden’s write-in victory in a New Hampshire race he didn’t formally contest put a fork in any plausible path to deny him a second turn at the Democratic nomination. Now Biden and his team want to clarify the choice voters will face, believing that the stakes of the election, and Trump’s solidifying grip on the GOP, will appeal to voters in the center and reinvigorate his base.
While many in the country have hoped for different choices in November, Biden decidedly is not one of them. He sees a rematch with Trump as both his easiest path to reelection and a validation of his decision, at 81, to seek another four-year term.
Biden wasted no time trying to anoint Trump as his head-on rival after the Republican’s decisive victory in the New Hampshire primary, which came on the heels of a romp in the Iowa caucuses a week earlier.
Presidential historian Julian Zelizer of Princeton University said the Biden campaign believes it can paint Trump as a very real threat because of the Republican’s past record in the Oval Office.
“He’s not an incumbent, but he was president,” said Zelizer. “You have a traditional incumbent saying Opponent X is dangerous for the country, it’s all theoretical. Here, you’re talking about someone who’s been in the White House.”
Biden faces no shortage of headwinds going into the general election season — low approval ratings, widespread concern about his age, multiplying tensions abroad and plenty of discontent at home, including from disenchanted young people and minorities who were key to his first victory. But his campaign has crafted a rejoinder to each count — the answers often circling back to Trump himself.
Indeed, Biden’s team has long anticipated that the upcoming contest would be an even more bruising rematch of the 2020 race and they have largely ignored other GOP White House aspirants. On Tuesday, he shifted two key aides from the White House to the campaign to oversee the effort against Trump and scored an endorsement from the United Auto Workers union Wednesday with no shortage of jabs at his predecessor.
They’ve launched campaign ads and raised money heavily off the prospect of another Trump presidency, and aides say that’s only a preview of an even more intensive effort to come to remind Americans of what life was like under Trump’s presidency and what he would do with another four years.
Biden campaign officials are confident that Trump will not win back voters he lost last time, particularly as the former president continues to deny the results of the 2020 election, defends those who perpetrated violence against police officers during the Jan. 6 insurrection and advocates what Democrats have framed as extremist tendencies and rhetoric.
“His agenda is toxic and voters aren’t buying what he’s selling,” Biden deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said Wednesday. “Trump performed worse among suburban and college-educated Republicans, the group of voters that have been pivotal to Democratic victories in 2020, 2022 and 2023. He failed to increase his vote share among voters under 30, a group that will be key to the outcome in November.”
While Biden’s team sees Trump’s coalition as fraying, they’re focused on stitching together their own coalition around issues like abortion access, health care and gun control. They’re also hoping that fears about Trump returning to power will paper over real differences on issues like Biden’s support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
Asking how he would maintain Arab-American support in light of his staunch support for Israel, Biden told reporters last week: “The former president wants to put a ban on Arabs coming into the country.” He added that the campaign will make sure people “understand who cares about the Arab population.”
The Biden campaign has spent much of its early energy working out how to motivate what it has termed its “sporadic” voters — those who are traditionally supportive of Democrats in a presidential year yet at this point in the contest, have not been focused on day-to-day political news and machinations.