President Biden will recycle many of the same themes he used to win the White House in 2020 as he seeks to win a second term in 2024, his campaign revealed this week.
In a strategy memo put out Thursday and seen by The Post, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez acknowledged that her team anticipates a “very close” election, but underscored that “[t]he message Joe Biden ran on in 2020 remains popular with voters and central to this campaign.”
That message, according to Rodriguez, includes “protecting democracy and the soul of the nation, making the economy work for the middle class [and] fighting for more rights not fewer.”
“The same core issues President Biden and Vice President Harris ran on in 2020 helped deliver the best midterm performance for a sitting president in decades,” she added.
The 80-year-old president’s early campaign events have focused on his economic agenda, which the White House has dubbed “Bidenomics,” and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act has been afforded prominent placement in Biden-supporting TV ads.
Polls show the incumbent would face a tight race in a hypothetical matchup against former President Donald Trump, with some surveys indicating Biden would lose in a head-to-head battle.
A Harvard/CAPS-Harris poll released in September found Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott would all beat Biden in a general election.
Various polls also indicate a clear majority of voters are disappointed in Biden’s economic record, have concerns about his age and are not impressed with his overall performance while in office.
To defeat the GOP’s nominee, whoever it may be, the Biden campaign says it will show voters they have a “clear choice” between Trump’s Make America Great Again movement and Biden’s “historic record of accomplishment.”
Rodriguez’s memo also argues that the “toxicity” of GOP positions on abortion, the economy, and entitlements like Social Security and Medicare will turn off general election voters.
Biden ran a notoriously low-profile campaign in 2020, often going days without holding in-person events — citing the COVID-19 pandemic while nursing a consistent polling lead over Trump.
Veteran GOP political strategists doubted the Biden campaign’s ability to pull off a similar trick again.
“I think they’re trying to pull out their greatest hits because they were popular at one point, but sometimes old records are just old records,” Axiom Strategies founder Jeff Roe told The Post Friday.
“I don’t know how record inflation, record gas prices and record housing prices are good for the middle class.”
Another, Republican strategist, John Thomas, said of Biden’s argument: “I think it’ll fail. That was fine in 2020 when the economy was stable and the world was peaceful, relatively.”
Democratic strategist Brad Bannon predicted the economy will be the most important issue in 2024, but added the president has to find a new avenue for his messaging.
“Biden has done a lot to improve the economy. It was a mess when he took over. The problem is he doesn’t get enough credit for it,” Bannon said. “I think they have to focus their messaging and advertising on the economy to the micro-level.”