President Biden has formally moved from campaign waiting to campaign waiting.
Despite his highly anticipated re-election announcement on Tuesday, Mr Biden has no immediate plans to storm key battlefields. Decorative garlands are nowhere to be found and major rallies will come later.
Instead, Mr. Biden’s next moves are much like his recent ones: using the White House to burnish his record with cuts, and willingly ceding the stage to a Republican presidential primaries already descending into a dogfight between Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, even before he entered the race.
The first 24 hours, a heavily scripted period in each campaign, serve as Biden’s roadmap for months to come: a video announcement and series of text messages to encourage online donations; behind-the-scenes hiring of his campaign team; an official White House event that doubled as a campaign opportunity; and a rally focused on abortion rights, headlined by the vice president, at a historically black university.
“This is not a time to be complacent,” Biden says in the video, who spends more time warning of threats from Republicans — to abortion rights, rights programs and democracy — than formulating a policy vision for a second term.
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked on Mr Biden’s 2020 campaign, said the two public appearances on Tuesday by the president and vice president — at a union conference where he spoke about his economic agenda for the middle class and at the rally for abortion rights – captured “two pillars of the coming campaign”.
At the same time, she predicted that there would soon be few public campaigns for the 80-year-old president.
“It’s about getting staff, it’s about raising money, it’s about stopping the ridiculous questions if he’s running,” Ms Lake said. “That’s the antidote to whether he has the energy to run, to questions about his age.”
Biden advisers say his entry was motivated more by the internal demands of mounting a presidential campaign than the external need to communicate with voters, which he can do from the White House, though his team has begun producing potential ads. The Democratic National Committee has been buying ad time on MSNBC and on local stations in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as of Wednesday, according to AdImpact, a media tracking service.
On Tuesday, Mr. Biden announced a campaign manager and her chief deputy, along with seven national co-chairs. It is no coincidence that instead of immediately traveling to a state on the battlefield, Mr. Biden is gathering in the capital on Friday with some of his biggest donors.
At times, the campaign rollout felt like a nostalgic tour, like an old band trying to recapture the magic of the past. The announcement was timed to the exact day of Mr Biden’s kickoff four years earlier. His first speech, then and now, was for a union. And just like now, Jill Biden, the first lady, snapped a photo in front of the same building at Northern Virginia Community College where she teaches English.
The 2024 presidential race is expected to revolve around half a dozen highly competitive states.
The epicenter will be the two Sun Belt states, Georgia and Arizona, which Mr. Biden placed in the Democratic column in 2020 for the first time since the 1990s, as well as the three industrial states touching the Great Lakes that are eternal battlefields: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Nevada and North Carolina, which have been just out of reach for Democrats in recent years, are also expected to have high spending.
Biden held a video call Tuesday with about a dozen Democratic governors to discuss messaging in states on the battlefield and execute the administration’s agenda, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversation. The call included the governors of Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
In Mr. Biden’s labor conference speech, he gave a lengthy recitation of the policy results of his first two years in office, interrupted briefly by the chant of “four more years” familiar to any presidential re-election campaign. He talked about signing trillions in stimulus and infrastructure spending and, as in his announcement video, warned of “MAGA” Republicans who he said threatened to destroy the country’s fabric.
“The speaker, the former president, the MAGA extremists, they are cut from a different cloth,” Biden said. “The threat MAGA Republicans pose is to take us to a place we’ve never been.”
For a re-election bid, Mr Biden’s campaign introduction presented a curiously dark vision for the country.
In his video, he said his 2020 fight to restore the “soul of the nation” was still incomplete and at risk. During his speech, the biggest lines of applause were his vows to defend the country against various dangers, not remarks that presented an uplifting vision for the future.
“It’s been one crisis after another,” said Cristóbal Alex, who worked on Biden’s 2020 run and in his White House. “The country remains on the cliff. And the election of Donald Trump or a similar MAGA type would push the country over the edge.”
Some elements of the campaign were only completed last weekend and the re-election staff is still being built. Representative Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from Texas, said she received a call from Mr. Biden on Sunday asking to become campaign co-chair.
“I’m not quite sure what’s in store for us,” she said. “I’ve never done this before.”
Mr. Biden’s team is sensitive to questions about his age and the strictness of his schedule, especially after he won in 2020 while campaigning from his home in Delaware for most of the year due to the pandemic. The White House has put together a map tracking his travels so far in 2023, and it shows that his number of trips exceeded former President Barack Obama’s during the same period in 2011.
With the widespread end of coronavirus precautions, Democrats are predicting a return to normalcy on the campaign trail. The 2020 race “will, I think, have turned out to be an atypical election,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, the president of the Democratic Governors Association.
But Mr Biden’s campaign is not aimed at letting him dominate the headlines. As he has recently toured the country promoting his legislative achievements, the country’s attention has often turned elsewhere, especially on the endless legal and political drama surrounding his predecessor.
In January, as Mr. Biden stood next to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the GOP leader, for the ribbon-cutting on a major Ohio River bridge project, Republicans in Washington were embroiled in a week-long spectacle over the next speaker of the House.
“Frankly, the best way to run for re-election as president is to be president,” said Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a longtime ally of Biden who was announced as co-chair of the national campaign.
The video of Mr Biden and Tuesday’s speech seemed to spark more Republican infighting, with a short clip of Mr Trump and Mr DeSantis shaking hands.
“Let the other side continue self-destructing,” said Alan Kessler, a Democratic bundler who has raised money for Mr. Biden.
“We all know that abortion — if not the most important issue — will be one of the most important issues for 2024,” said Mini Timmaraju, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, which sponsored Tuesday night’s abortion rights rally at Howard University. where Mrs. Harris would be the keynote speaker.
Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, said the president, like other Democrats, was aware of how the Supreme Court’s abortion decision had swayed voters in his party’s favor.
“He’s going to talk about protecting reproductive freedom, reproductive rights,” Klain said Tuesday.
Mr Biden did not say the word “abortion” in his kick-off video, although just four seconds later there is an image of a woman standing outside the Supreme Court holding a sign that reads, “Abortion is health care.”
The only footage prior to that shot was of the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
Mr Biden’s first word captures both scenes and is one that Democrats hope will frame the 2024 campaign: “Freedom.”
“The question we face,” he says in the video, “is whether we have more or less freedom in the years to come.”
Katie Gluck And Zolan Kanno-Youngs reporting contributed.
