A White House incumbent with no serious primary opposition and the election still far away spending sound money on a self-promotional ad campaign would make no sense… unless he’s really unpopular.

We’ve seen this pattern before with presidential reelection campaigns getting frantic over poor poll numbers.

And Biden has good reason to worry. Democrats have only very reluctantly come around to support him. His approval rating is terrible and most of the country doesn’t want him coming back.

I doubt this is gonna change their minds.

The Biden team and the Democratic National Committee are launching a six-figure ad campaign Monday touting the bipartisan agreement that the president reached with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last month to lift the debt ceiling in exchange for some spending restraints and restrictions on food aid eligibility.

The spots, which were first shared with POLITICO, make the case that Biden managed to protect essential government programs as well as his own accomplishments in the face of far-right Republicans who wanted to strip them away during the high-stakes talks over the debt ceiling. And that he did it all while avoiding a devastating outcome that would have hampered the economy.

The advertisements also tout Biden’s handling of the economy overall, pointing to the country’s low unemployment rate and millions of jobs that have been created during his presidency. The spots will run digitally and on billboards over the next week in battleground states and Washington, D.C.

What battleground states? The DNC has rigged the election for Biden by manipulating the primary calendar and even without it, he’s been blessed with no serious opposition with any kind of real financial or party support. Had Newsom or a Sanders-backed candidate gone in, Biden be prepping the moving vans. Instead, he’s up against what amounts to third-party candidates like Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr. operating outside the party lines.

The ad campaign isn’t going to impact the general election in any real way, but Biden is struggling to reassure his own party that he can do this, that’s why the ads are running in D.C. Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr aren’t a threat to him, but if enough elements of the DNC or the donor base move to force him to drop out, he’ll have to do so or face the humiliating prospect of becoming the outside candidate and losing anyway.

Biden is spending six figures just pleading with his own backers not to drop him. And it’s only the spring of 2023.