Addressing a crowd of supporters in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, just one day shy of the third anniversary of the Capitol riot, President Biden provided an early glimpse of his reelection strategy: Offering himself as the only alternative to the chaos that former president Donald Trump helped unleash that day.
“Today we are here to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Biden told supporters Friday afternoon. “This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. And it’s what the 2024 election is all about.”
The pro-democracy speech in Pennsylvania is part of a broader effort by the president and his aides to reassure voters and elected Democrats that Biden will commit to a demanding 2024 schedule that looks nothing like the pandemic-era “basement campaign strategy” he ran in 2020.
His remarks were light on policy, harping instead on abstract themes like “dignity,” “honesty,” “duty,” and “democracy” — yet another reminder that the campaign is still weighing how to pitch voters on Biden’s second-term policy agenda.
Astute political observers note that this far out from Election Day, the president may have a more pressing imperative than winning over the independent and Republican-leaning centrists who will be crucial to his 2024 coalition. To secure another term, the 81-year-old incumbent must first boost enthusiasm among the disaffected base voters who may still be eager for a younger, fresher Democrat to replace him on the ticket, even if there are no obvious or high-polling alternatives at the moment.
“The mask-wearing crowd is not very happy with him. And this is one way to appeal to them and remind them how terrible Trump is,” New Hampshire-based GOP strategist Dave Carney tells National Review. “It just goes to the weakness of his polling and the recognition that they understand that’s a problem.”
At this stage in the race, the theory goes, any reminder of Trump’s 2020 election-related lies will help juice Democratic support at a time when Biden’s approval rating hovers below 40 percent ahead of his likely rematch against Trump. Early state polls suggest that barring a miracle, the former president looks poised to sail to lock up the GOP nomination again in 2024.
“The choice is clear: Donald Trump’s campaign is about him. Not America, not you,” Biden said in his remarks, in which he reflected on Trump’s behavior in the lead-up to January 6, 2021. “It was among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history.”
Meanwhile Republicans argue that this pro-democracy tightrope is getting trickier for Biden’s campaign aides to walk with each passing day. Friday’s speech comes just weeks after the Colorado supreme court and Maine secretary of state booted Trump from their states’ 2024 ballots, arguing that Trump’s actions relating to January 6, 2021, disqualify the former president from holding public office under section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
GOP voters, lawmakers, and even Trump’s GOP presidential rivals have uniformly characterized both ballot efforts — not to mention the four criminal indictments against the former president — as concerted efforts on the part of Democrats to slant the 2024 playing field in their favor. Even the Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is crying foul.
“People ought to be able to vote for who they want to vote for,” Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activists and ex-environmental lawyer, told a crowd of supporters in Utah on Wednesday during a ballot access-related press conference. “I don’t want to have an election where you get rid of a guy who a large percentage of the American public want as their leader, and you’re going to leave those people feeling angry and frustrated and justifiably so.”
Biden is expected to lean in on this democracy-versus-dictatorship rhetoric in upcoming campaign stops, including on Monday in South Carolina. Vice President Kamala Harris is also kicking off her “Reproductive Freedoms Tour” in Wisconsin on January 22, the anniversary of the since-overturned landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade.
But Republicans warn this pro-democracy strategy will only get Biden and his team so far. “They’re gonna have to, at some point, get what they get out of the base and go towards the middle,” says Carney, the New Hampshire GOP strategist. “They’re gonna have to talk about issues that really impact people, which is the economy and the border.”