Dem
51
GOP
49
A lot of Democrats have been wondering: "Where's Joe?" Biden hasn't campaigned at all and they are wondering if he is up to it. Turns out he is and was just waiting for 2024 to roll around to hit the trail. To start with, Biden actually has a strategy. He doesn't want to make the campaign about himself or whether voters like him or not. The question he will pose to voters over and over is: "Do you want me or Donald Trump as your president?" With his approval rating round 40%, this is clearly the right question. Many people dislike him, but if they dislike Trump even more, Biden wins. He knows that. So it will be "I support democracy and America. He supports Hitler." And the more Trump talks about "vermin" and "poisoning the blood of America," the more Biden will harp on this, knowing full well that this kind of talk does not go over well in the suburbs or with independents. Trump's base is lost to Biden, but there are still voters up for grabs.
Biden will open his campaign on Jan. 6, 2024, 3 years after Trump attempted a coup, with a speech at Valley Forge, PA, where George Washington camped out with his troops almost 250 years ago. The President will talk about how Washington led an army to throw out a king who was dictatorial and how fighting for democracy has been a dominant theme in the country's history for 2½ centuries. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, are likely to come up a couple of times.
The next event will be in Charleston, SC, at the Mother Emanuel AME Church, a historically significant Black church where a gunman killed nine people in a Bible study group in 2015. No doubt Biden will bring up the issue to the Black congregants of who is on their side and who is against them, and maybe mention which president fought for and signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, and what party that president was a member of. Remember, it was the Black voters of South Carolina who saved Joe's bacon in 2020 and he wants to make it clear that they are not forgotten. With Biden's support slipping among Black voters, this is the place to make it clear that he is grateful to them and what he plans to do to help them in a second term.
Kamala Harris will make her own trip to South Carolina later. Her focus there, in Wisconsin, and elsewhere will be reproductive freedom. The Biden campaign needs to deal with her general unpopularity, and one way to do it is to make her the spokesperson for reproductive rights. She's not expected to win over any MAGA base voters, but women, Black voters, and young people are together a much bigger group than the MAGA base. That's who she is going to aim her pitch at. The unsaid message is: "If Biden were to die, then you would get a president whose #1 priority is protecting reproductive rights." This way, instead of being a millstone around Biden's neck, she could become a real positive for many voters in her own right.
Another thing Biden is doing is trying to turn the border issue on its head. Republicans are hammering him on it and may try to impeach him about it. He submitted a budget request to Congress for $106 billion for aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and securing the southern border. House Republicans so far have refused to even take a vote on the bill. Biden is going to hit them over the head with the bill, claiming that he wants to spend billions to shore up border security and Trump and the Republicans are against that. What's Trump going to say: "Yeah, but voting for border security also gives money to Ukraine and my buddy Putin told me to oppose that"? Most Americans support helping Ukraine, so that won't work. Biden will just keep hitting Trump and the Republicans on their failure to beef up border security, something he wants. If he says it often enough and loudly enough, some people are going to think the problem with the border is that Republicans are refusing to spend money to hire more Border Patrol officers and give them the equipment they need.
So, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) can solve the problem and deny Biden a talking point by just putting the bill up for a vote and letting it pass with largely Democratic votes, right? Wrong. Trump's signature issue is immigration and the border and he is never going to approve letting Biden get a win on it, even if the win is about hardening the border. For Trump, the world is a zero-sum game. If Biden wins, then Trump loses. He is not capable of saying: "I forced Biden to adopt my position so I won this one." Can't be done.
So Trump is going to oppose the bill because: (1) His buddy in Moscow doesn't like the Ukraine funding and (2) He doesn't want to give Biden a win on anything, certainly not on being able to claim he tightened the border because Trump failed to do so when he was president. So if Johnson is scared of offending Trump, he's not going to bring the bill to a vote, which will give Biden even longer to pound the Republicans on failing to secure the border. At a certain point, millions of voters will think the border problem is due to the Republicans' refusal to spend money on it—especially if Biden frames their refusal as being due to their obsession with the debt ceiling, something the voters don't even understand. Hell, even the staff mathematician doesn't understand it because the debt-ceiling law is an attempt to repeal mathematics.
One huge opportunity Biden has—and Trump doesn't—is the State of the Union address. It will be the biggest audience of the year and will dominate the news cycle for at least one day. That can't be an hour-long attack on Trump, which would be off-putting, but he can say America is doing great due to all his achievements as president, which he can talk about at some length. These include strengthening Obamacare, reducing drug prices, beating inflation down, bringing manufacturing jobs back to America (the CHIPS Act), improving the national infrastructure (while creating good jobs), dealing with climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act, enacting a 25% minimum tax on billionaires, and more. Many people will be hearing this for the first time.
One of the many things Biden will likely point out is that the Inflation Reduction Act caps the out-of-pocket costs for insulin at $35/mo. for Medicare recipients. Lilly and Novo Nordisk voluntarily agreed to the same limit starting Jan. 1, for everyone. Now the third major insulin producer, Sanofi, has also agreed to an out-of-pocket cost of $35/mo. This means that almost all the roughly eight million Americans with insulin-dependent diabetes can now get their insulin for $35/mo. This is going to make a huge change in some of these people's lives and it is directly attributable to Biden's actions. When someone now asks him: "What have you done for me lately?" he can now answer: "Do you or does anyone you know have diabetes?"
Biden can also use the speech to hammer Trump for opposing the bill to fund more Border Patrol officers because he is obsessed with the debt ceiling. That's not the real reason, but it sounds plausible since Republicans have often shut down the government over the debt ceiling, so people will believe it. So if Biden plays his cards right and gets a bit of help from Trump, he could neutralize one of the Republicans' biggest issues. The 2024 SOTU hasn't been scheduled yet, but Biden's first two were on March 1, 2022, and February 7, 2023. So, that gives some rough indication of when the 2024 edition will be. (V)