In 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden’s presidential campaign kept him mostly under the radar with virtual speeches as the coronavirus pandemic peaked. But now, in what is promising to be a bruising reelection campaign in 2024, President Biden has been forced to come out of the basement.
Impact of COVID-19
“Joe Biden was frankly a COVID winner in 2020. He was able to hide, he did not have to campaign, he did not have to speak to voters. He did not have to run on his record,” Republican strategist Brian Seitchik told The Epoch Times. “That is not the case now. Biden is clearly an old frail man and that is evident. It is also evident he is not in charge.”
Seitchik believes that voters are going to be turned off when they see Biden doing more public events, where he has been known to make many gaffes.
But supporters of the president say the opposite.
“He’s finally going out to meet the voters this time around, and he’s doing great. I thought it was historic and amazing when he walked the picket line with members of the United Auto Workers,” Pamela Everhart, a Democrat, told The Epoch Times. “[Biden] is showing he has the same energy as Trump, and I think he’s got more spunk in him than before.”
President Biden has indeed been going across the country now that his reelection campaign is moving to the next level, but for the most part, he has been skipping big rallies that are typically favored by former President Donald Trump and instead focusing on smaller gatherings.
The president’s intimate meetings with American voters are then polished into sharp campaign videos, where gaffes can be eliminated and turned into TikTok posts, or videos on X that are viewed by millions. It is a stark difference to the way Mr. Trump has engaged with voters.
“So far [Biden] is better at it this time. Biden is steady, informed, and accomplished on substance, which contrasts with Trump’s incompetence and repeated failure,” Matt Angle, a national Democratic strategist and founder of the Texas Lonestar Project, told The Epoch Times. “Biden is going straight at Trump’s attack on liberty, democracy, and character.”
More Money More Problems
President Biden has proven to be a fundraising juggernaut, raising enormous amounts of money in an election-year strategy that aims to spend more—and spend faster.
Last month, former presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and some big names from the entertainment world teamed up to deliver a rousing New York embrace of President Biden that hauled in a record-setting $26 million-plus for his reelection campaign. And most surveys of President Biden’s popularity among battleground states suggest he will need every penny.
The eye-popping fundraising haul was a major show of Democratic support for the president at a time of persistently low poll numbers. The president will test the power of his campaign cash as he faces off with Mr. Trump, who proved with his 2016 win over Democrat Hillary Clinton that he didn’t need to raise the most money to seize the presidency.
A recent poll by The Wall Street Journal shows that Mr. Trump is leading President Biden by two and eight percentage points in six of the seven most competitive states in the 2024 election, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. The only outlier is Wisconsin, where the two candidates are tied in a head-to-head matchup.
That means President Biden is going to need oodles of cash to blanket battleground states where a few thousand votes could mean the difference between victory or defeat. Add to that the challenge of reaching millennials, as well as even younger voters, who formed an important part of his 2020 coalition, in a far more fractured media ecosystem that skews toward streaming services over conventional broadcast and cable.
Immigration and Border Security
Throughout his 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden promised a complete shift from the Trump administration on immigration policies.
Mr. Biden pledged a 100-day moratorium on deportations once he became president, promised to defend sanctuary cities, and said that the United States had the ability to “absorb people” who were coming into the United States at the southern border, and encouraged asylum seekers to come to America.
“We could afford to take in a heartbeat, another four million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre, absolutely bizarre,” Mr. Biden said during a speech in Iowa in 2019.
Since then, an estimated 2.3 million illegal immigrants have been encountered at the U.S-Mexico border and released into the United States, and that does not include “got-aways,” according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security. Millions more have been detained at the border during that same period of time.
The surge in illegal immigration has forced President Biden to take a hard right turn on the issue of border security, abandoning his promises made to Democratic voters during his 2020 campaign.
During a recent interview with Univision, the president hinted that he might shut down the southern border by the end of the month.
“Well, it’s suggested that we’re examining whether or not I have that power,” President Biden said. “I would have that power under the legislation when … when the border has over five, 500,000 people, 25,000 people a day trying to cross the border because you can’t manage it, slow it up,” he said. “There’s no … there’s no guarantee that I have that power all by myself without legislation. And some have suggested I should just go ahead and try it. And if I get shut down by the court, I get shut down by the court. But we’re trying to work that work through that right now.”
It’s a shift in position that even some of President Biden’s more die-hard supporters oppose.
“If he shuts down the border, he loses my vote,” Katherine Vargas, a Democrat, told The Epoch Times. “He’s as much a liar as Donald Trump, in my opinion.”
A recent poll conducted by Ipsos and Noticias Telemundo shows that more Latino Americans are viewing President Biden unfavorably on the issue of immigration.
