Joe Biden's dysfunctional campaign risks handing the White House back to Donald Trump
Biden needs to get serious or step aside.
Now and then CNN has some interesting reporting — and a piece published Thursday about Joe Biden’s reelection campaign was particularly excellent.
The takeaway point from the article is that Biden and his closest aides are personally holding his campaign back from doing the necessary work to prevent a 2016 redux (emphasis mine):
In a race that many expect will likely come down to a few hundred thousand votes in a few states, the doubters argue that every day without a packed schedule on the stump will prove to voters that Biden’s age is as big a worry as they believe it is. Or that the president and people around him aren’t taking the threat of losing to Donald Trump or another Republican seriously enough, and they’re setting up for Election Night next year to be 2016 déjà vu.
“If Trump wins next November and everyone says, ‘How did that happen,’ one of the questions will be: what was the Biden campaign doing in the summer of 2023?” said a person who worked in a senior role on Biden’s 2020 campaign.
When I read this, my first thought is, “Where’s the lie?” Polling already shows Biden struggling against twice-indicted Trump in key swing states, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.
Meanwhile, Biden’s industrial policy is antagonizing organized labor in the Rust Belt states that Trump won in 2016.
“What Biden is doing is politically insane, environmentally bankrupt, and it’s poor economics,” Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America and board member of Our Revolution, told The Intercept. “The White House and my old friend John Podesta” — who is overseeing the federal government’s spending of climate incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act — “should have labor-centered guidelines about where these investments are going, whether it’s in purple states like Michigan, whether it’s in Philadelphia, whether it’s in Ohio, there are acres and acres of devastated industrial landscape that need new investment as opposed to cornfields. The total lack of consideration for workers could certainly make the difference in 2024.”
With alarming polls and a candidate seemingly more interested in South Carolina than competitive swing states that actually deliver electoral votes to Democratic candidates, it’s clear that a Biden victory against Trump is not a given, yet the CNN report suggests that Biden feels no sense of urgency. Does this sound like a candidate and campaign ready to go to war against a shameless demagogue with an energized and committed cult of followers? There is not even a campaign headquarters.
The headquarters in Wilmington discussed to be open by mid-July still isn’t. No staff is currently on the ground in competitive states, and names of potential hires have only started to be collected for review by the president and top advisers. The dozen people who are working for Biden-Harris 2024 full-time are mostly camped out at desks in the Democratic National Committee near Capitol Hill in Washington, with some griping about the delays in hiring staff and others still grumbling about how long it took to get on the payroll themselves. There is still no campaign finance director.
But, rather than empower his campaign staffers to move more quickly and address current shortcomings, Biden appears to be micromanaging them from the West Wing while simultaneously governing one of the most complicated countries on the planet. His political aides have sidelined his campaign staff. How is it possible that Biden — especially at his age — has the bandwidth to “meet personally with finalists for senior [campaign] roles”?
Though people around Biden still believe that Trump’s continued lead in the GOP primary polls sets up a stark contrast that will be helpful for the president, they are privately much more concerned with the possibility of losing to the former president than they tend to let on. His campaign planning is kept very closely held – and still almost entirely run out of the West Wing, so much so that the president himself has asked to meet personally with finalists for senior roles, all of which is slowing nearly every decision. Biden advisers have told allies they are following a tight, purposeful strategy which takes into account the vulnerabilities they recognize their candidate has, the strengths of his record they think they can tap into, and the particularities of America heading into 2024.
The 2016 disaster arguably happened because of (unpopular) Hillary Clinton’s dysfunctional campaign and inattention to the Rust Belt. Sound familiar?
One might imagine that, with all the things on Team Joe’s to-do list, Biden’s closest aides would be narrowly focused on the campaign, but former White House chief of staff Ronald Klain — Biden’s most trusted adviser — apparently has time to argue with randoms like me about his candidate’s problematic immigration policies.
While the campaign did its best to spin second-quarter fundraising results as excellent — contrasting their haul with lesser amounts collected by GOP candidates — the reality is that the $72 million Biden and the DNC collected from 394,000 donors compares unfavorably with the $86 million from 552,000 donors collected by Barack Obama and the DNC in the second quarter of 2011.
The Biden campaign would likely argue that this is more than enough to fund their “frugal approach” to his re-election, but a “frugal” campaign is also one that would command less energy and attention from Biden himself. Is this the campaign that the president needs to beat Trump? Or the only campaign that will work for a man who can barely marshal the energy to meet the commitments of his office let alone campaign? (Biden skipped dinners at recent G20 and NATO summits.) And will it be enough to energize voters who don’t even want him to run again?
“No matter what the White House wants to say, you take a survey and a huge plurality of Democratic voters don’t even want him to run again,” said a national Democratic strategist who was granted anonymity to speak frankly. “There’s really an enthusiasm gap that I think is their central challenge.”
To borrow language from Ronald Reagan, now is a “time for choosing.” Biden and his confidantes need to decide if they think they can marshal the energy, competence, and capacity necessary to beat Donald Trump next fall. Unlike the virtual 2020 campaign mostly managed from a comfortable basement, Biden will face a grueling in-person campaign in 2024.
At the moment, Biden simultaneously seems unwilling to find that energy for himself and unwilling to let others aggressively do the work on his behalf. If he thinks his decision to run again was a mistake — Biden’s original plan was a single term — he should be honest with himself and the country. The president could privately signal he will step aside in August, allowing other candidates to begin preparing their own campaigns, and then publicly announce his decision shortly after Labor Day. Jared Polis, Gretchen Whitmer, and many other Democrats would surely jump at the chance to take on Trump. And they just might have a better chance of actually beating him.