One year from now, President Joe Biden will either be a victorious first-term president preparing for his second and final four years in office, or a defeated one-termer presiding over a transition for a man who tried to prevent him from taking office four years earlier and spent the last four years undermining him and denying his very legitimacy, all with the aim of reshaping the American government into an instrument of personal revenge.
At the moment, it’s not clear at all which of those outcomes will come to pass. But with the days until next year’s general election passing with what seems to be increasing speed each month, Mr Biden’s team appears confident in their plan to win the coming rematch which their putative opponent — former president Donald Trump — has called “the final battle” for the country itself.
And despite the more than 90 felony charges he faces as he runs to be the first ex-president to reclaim the White House since Grover Cleveland accomplished that unprecedented feat more than a century ago, the team behind Mr Trump has reason to smile as the year comes to a close.
According to RealClearPolitics’ aggregation of prominent opinion polls, the disgraced former president holds a 2.3 per cent lead over Mr Biden in the site’s average of surveys, with Mr Trump garnering as much as a 10-point advantage in some polls. And in the weeks since Israel began its military response to the 7 October terrorist attacks by Hamas, Mr Biden’s support among Muslim and Arab-Americans — two key voting blocs in must-win swing states such as Michigan — has plummeted.
With a GOP structural advantage in the US electoral college that essentially forces any Democratic presidential candidate to overperform in terms of turnout and a popular vote advantage if he or she harbours any hope of winning the presidency, one might think Mr Biden’s inner circle would be alarmed, particularly given Mr Trump’s designs on using the executive branch as a cudgel against his real or perceived enemies — and their families.
But Mr Biden’s camp isn’t wringing their hands just yet.
In public, the president’s most visible lieutenants have made a point to avoid invoking this year’s election or crossing the line into partisan politics, lest they run afoul of a New Deal-era law known as the Hatch Act.
But in private conversations with The Independent and in publicly released documents, both the Biden White House and the Biden re-election campaign are confident that next year will bring a reversal of fortune in the 46th president’s poll results, particularly since it is almost certain that Mr Trump, the man who Mr Biden bested nearly four years ago, will once again be his opponent next November.
A memorandum from Mr Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, lays out what Mr Biden’s political apparatus views as the stakes for next year’s contest.
Ms Rodriguez writes: “The choice for the American people in November 2024 will be about protecting American democracy and the very individual freedoms we enjoy as Americans.”
Continuing, she says Mr Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will use next year to draw contrasts between them and Mr Trump, who she describes as an “existential threat to democracy” who is currently “running a campaign on revenge and retribution – and at the expense of Americans’ freedoms”.
“There are deep fears about our freedoms being eroded and our democracy being dismantled – election denialism, efforts to undermine our country’s democratic institutions, and forces that aim to restrict the right to vote itself. All at the direction of Donald Trump, who remains a real and credible threat to our democracy,” she writes, adding later that Americans “should expect to hear more from President Biden, Vice President Harris, and our campaign drawing this important and sharp contrast – but also about how this fundamental difference between the candidates impacts our future”.
And in a conference call with reporters held on Tuesday, the Biden-Harris campaign manager made even more clear that the president’s brain trust believes this year’s campaign will be “about protecting our democracy and every American's fundamental freedoms” rather than a contest “between competing philosophies of governing”.
“When Joe Biden ran for president four years ago, he said we are in the battle for the soul of America. And as we look towards November 2024, we still are,” she said. “The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire”.
Another top Biden campaign aide, deputy campaign manager Quinton Fulks, told reporters that Mr Biden will use upcoming appearances this month — including one on the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol — to highlight the threat posed by Mr Trump and hammer home how the defeated former president has become yet more dangerous as a challenger to the sitting president.
Mr Biden, he said, will mark that grim anniversary at the Valley Forge historical site in Pennsylvania, by contrasting Mr Trump’s refusal to accept defeat and relinquish power nearly four years ago to the example of George Washington, the Revolutionary War commander turned first President of the United States, who voluntarily gave up the immense power bestowed on him and set a precedent that would hold for more than two centuries.
“President Biden will lay out the stakes of this election near Valley Forge —the same spot where nearly 250 years ago, our nation's forefathers transformed a disorganized alliance of colonial militias to a cohesive coalition united in their fight for our democracy, where General Washington united American willpower and went on to lead this nation as commander and as president before relinquishing power, the ultimate precedent in the experiment of American democracy,” he said.
Mr Fulks also said the president would “make the case directly that democracy and freedom, two powerful ideas that united the 13 colonies and that generations throughout our nation's history fought and died for ... remain central to the fight we are in today”.
“Every single day Donald Trump tells us point blank if he wins a second term, he will do everything he can to dismantle American democracy and strip Americans of their ... fundamental freedoms. He's promised to be a dictator on day one ... we should take him at his word,” he added.
The shift in the tempo of Mr Biden’s thus-far sleepy re-election bid comes as Mr Trump appears poised to lock up more than a majority’s share of support from his party, and for some in the president’s orbit, the new pace is coming not a moment too soon.
Donald Trump has called the next election the ‘final battle’ for America itself— (AFP via Getty Images)
While many of the veterans of Bidenworld in his inner circle have willingly submitted to his desire to spend the last three years being seen as a president at work, rather than as a candidate for re-election, others in his employ have privately chafed at the 46th chief executive’s reluctance to go on offence, either by more directly going after Mr Trump over the multiple criminal cases against him, or by using his successes on the world stage to draw contrasts between himself and his anti-Nato, pro-authoritarian opponent.
One ex-Biden 2020 staffer pointed to Mr Biden’s performance at the November Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, where he served as host and successfully rolled out a new trade framework and supply-chain agreement encompassing 15 Indo-Pacific nations, as well as a host of other international engagements that have ended with positive results for the US, as the sort of thing his re-election campaign should have been crowing about from the start.
“Trump will spend the next year screaming ‘America first,’ lying about his record on trade and Nato, and bragging about raising taxes on Americans through tariffs like a complete ignoramus. Our guy hasn’t shoved a single world leader, but people see Trump as ‘strong’ because he brags non-stop. He needs to start bragging,” the staffer said.
Indeed, as the year drew to a close, the White House press operation began sending out releases touting the president’s successes here and abroad, while hitting out at the GOP for hurting US national security by leaving town for the holidays without having passed the supplemental defence funding bill Mr Biden asked for months ago.
One memo from Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates released just before Christmas spelled out the stakes and slammed House and Senate Republicans for “actively undermining our national security interests– both domestically and the world – because they’d rather go on vacation than do their jobs”.
“Months ago, President Biden released a concrete plan to address critical national security issues – including standing with Israel against the Hamas terrorists that just committed the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, continuing to help Ukraine defend its freedom and democracy against Russian tyranny, protecting our interests in the Indo-Pacific, and making our border more secure,” he wrote, adding later that the GOP is “blocking those national security proposals, all of which will make American families safer – and all of which are infinitely more affordable than the cost of dithering” because they’d “rather have a 3-week vacation than buckle down and meet the moment”.
One Democratic operative with experience over the last few presidential cycles said Mr Bates’ memo hit all the right notes. But the veteran campaign hand wondered why Mr Biden’s staff is “spitting fire” in written form instead of putting their boss out there to “throw hands” on the stump.
“One reason Trump is polling better than he should be is because the president isn’t getting seen. He’s not campaigning, and if he doesn’t get out there, the cake is going to get baked without him”.
But other operatives close to Mr Biden’s campaign told The Independent that the hand-wringing and bedwetting being exhibited in some Democratic circles is overblown and premature.
They noted that Mr Biden’s strategy since he took office has been to build up Democratic National Committee infrastructure and bolster the various state Democratic parties, rather than keep his own organisation in place.
And while they acknowledged that some of Mr Biden’s polling has been lacklustre in the face of a resurgent campaign by Mr Trump, multiple Bidenworlders pointed to unprecedented successes in multiple elections since the 2022 midterms, including special elections and referenda in key states, as well as off-year results showing Democratic voters turning out in support of reproductive rights.
The result, they say, is a show of strength for the party in power that portends a positive result in next year’s general, as long as Mr Biden and his team do the work.
One Democratic strategist who has been an evangelist for this positive view, Simon Rosenberg, recently expressed this exact brand of optimism in an MSNBC op-ed.
He wrote that key economic indicators, including consumer sentiment, wage growth, labour force participation rates and new business formation have been at “historically elevated levels,” while gas prices, rent rates and crime rates are dropping.
He also pointed out that the Democratic Party “prevented the historical down ballot struggle of the party in power and had two remarkably successful elections” over the last two years, and garnered margins in statewide elections in last year’s midterms that exceeded Mr Biden’s margins of victory in the last presidential contest.
Mr Rosenberg summed up his thoughts on the state of the race during an appearance on MSNBC when asked about his column.
“I would much rather be us than them,” he said.
