How the Biden campaign hopes to make 2024 less about Biden and more about a contrast with Trump

(CNN) — The 2024 campaign year for President Joe Biden’s inner circle will largely be about carefully ratcheting up the intensity against Donald Trump, wary of voters becoming dulled to what they expect to be the former president’s ever wilder rhetoric and promises about what he would do if back in power.

Or, as some of the younger aides on Biden’s reelection campaign have been grimly joking, it’s about when to go “full Hitler” – when the leading Republican candidate’s speeches and actions go so far that the Biden team goes all the way to a direct comparison to the Nazi leader rather than couching their attacks by saying Trump “parroted” him.

The campaign so far, these aides believe, has essentially been Biden running against himself, and losing – with his approval ratings under 40%, anxiety about his age and the Democratic divide over his handling of the war the Israel-Hamas war. But they see the next few weeks of the Republican primary campaigns as an opportunity to persuade influencers and media into thinking about the race on their terms.

“You have this moment in the first quarter where he is continuing to go full MAGA extremist now in order to shore up support in his own base,” a senior campaign aide told CNN about Trump, asking for anonymity to discuss internal strategy. “While he may be successful in that effort, if we do our job, we’ll point out that everything he’s saying is extreme and unpopular.”

Biden campaign aides will be doing that as White House aides finalize the president’s State of the Union address, expected for early February, aiming to capitalize on his largest national audience of the year to lay out an agenda that he can quickly take out on the campaign trail – including protecting Obamacare, expanding efforts to relieve student debt and housing costs, and tax measures such as a 25% minimum tax for billionaires and quadrupling the stock buyback tax.

And while official campaigning beyond fundraising events is still months away for Biden, events are being planned to conveniently take the president to battleground states for official speeches about his accomplishments.

But Democratic allies have been eager to hear Biden make more of a case for himself – and for a second term – now. Ask many Democratic members of Congress to identify what Biden’s second term agenda is and they admit they’re stumped. They tend to fall back on insisting that Democrats just have to do better talking about what they’ve done. Some go with “finish the job,” the pat slogan from Biden’s campaign launch that even he has all but abandoned.

To Rep. Steven Horsford, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus and was an early Biden supporter in the 2020 race, part of the pitch needs to be making the anti-Trump argument feel immediate, and not academic – but he does not think that will be anywhere near enough. The Nevada Democrat has met with White House and reelection campaign leaders – including top Biden adviser Anita Dunn – to press them into moving off using “Bidenomics,” arguing that the phrase is too centered on the president rather than on appealing to voters.

Horsford said that even though Biden does not have significant primary opposition, the fact that voting is about to start means he is overdue in laying out a clearer second-term agenda: “It’s time to talk about it.”

Though multiple people involved tell CNN that many campaign operations remain bottlenecked, in the White House and in Wilmington, aides insist that interlocking plans have been taking shape for months. They push back on top donors, who griped to aides gathered at a pricey DC hotel in mid-December that the campaign does not seem to have a strategy beyond waiting to respond to Trump – and that it does not have a strategy at all if another candidate grabs the nomination. And they dismiss the many advocates and members of Congress who say they cannot pinpoint specifics about Biden’s agenda for a second term.

To kick off the year, Biden will spend the anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol in Philadelphia. And Vice President Kamala Harris will kick off a national tour talking about abortion rights in Wisconsin on January 22, the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, in what Democrats believe will be a defining theme of the campaign.

Meanwhile, leaders of the campaign to write Biden in for the New Hampshire primary on January 23 – where he opted not to be on the ballot because of a technical dispute – tell CNN they expect a cavalcade of Democrats with future presidential ambitions to start appearing on his behalf there.

Drawing contrasts with Trump and his party

If Trump does become the Republican nominee, Biden aides say they will capitalize on the unique situation of a former president trying to return to the White House by putting the spotlight on parts of his record they believe voters find repulsive, as well as on promises he failed to deliver on in office. The word “receipts” comes up a lot. And if another of the Republicans emerges, Biden and his aides will argue that candidate is indistinguishable from Trump in allegiance to what the president likes to call MAGA Republican extremism.

“There’s zero distance between these folks on the insane and dangerous worldview for which they’re advocating,” the senior campaign aide said. “Our ability to develop a contrast does not change based on who has the nomination at this point.”

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s fumbled answer about slavery as the cause of the Civil War, these aides argue, is the latest demonstration of how even the purported leading Trump alternative can be lumped in as another MAGA Republican.

Still, with primary polls convincing Biden aides that Trump is almost certain to be the nominee, a top priority for them will be urging Americans – and particularly mainstream media outlets – to see 2024, which is already packed with Trump legal dates stemming from 91 criminal charges, not as a “trial of the century” and Trump circus. Instead, they want people to see what Biden has taken to calling an “inflection point” election, with glaringly different visions for the presidency and the future in front of the country.

“(Trump) does take up a lot of oxygen right now. But most of that oxygen right now is about the stakes for him – what may or may not happen to Donald Trump, and very little about how that is going to impact the American people,” the senior campaign aide said. “We have to make sure it’s about the harm he’s going to inflict on the American people.”

Though Biden aides expect to spend some time contrasting the characters of the candidates – for example, they point to Biden’s Christmas message quoting Scripture and Trump’s listing off people who should “rot in hell” – they say their main focus won’t be on Trump’s behavior, but on his record as president and what he is saying he will do if president again.

They believe they have even more opportunity for point-to-point comparisons with Biden’s record of accomplishing things Trump said he would do, including passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill that has started hundreds of new projects, cutting drug prices and creating jobs.

Or there are the Trump tax cuts, which the Biden campaign marked the sixth anniversary of just before Christmas. “Americans were presented with and sold a version of what this bill could accomplish, and the economy and middle-class families received something very different,” Brian Deese, Biden’s first director of the National Economic Council, said in a call with reporters, adding later that the promise that the tax cuts would pay for themselves was “unrealistic at the point it was uttered, and it has not been what has come to pass.”

White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed pointed to recent events when Biden has asked audience members to raise their hands if they think the tax code is fair. Going into 2024, Reed said, Biden “really wants to have a national debate on tax fairness.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the leading progressive from New York, said addressing economic issues is crucial but urged Biden not to get cornered into only talking about that.

“This is not just about reducing costs and tackling inflation for everyday Americans, but also having a bigger vision on climate, health care,” she said.

Some of the heat is off Biden, Ocasio-Cortez argued, since he can point to action he wanted but that Congress has not supported to make the argument that Democrats should control more House and Senate seats.

“Right now is still a great opportunity to clarify, deepen and also revive a lot of that,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN, because “we have to win these elections to make it happen.”

Joel Benenson – a top adviser to the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, which did not succeed in getting voters to see Trump as toxic and out of sync with American values – compared the task ahead for the Biden campaign to writing a symphony that does not fade into background noise.

“You certainly don’t want to dump it all at once – you want to create this cacophony that he can’t escape from,” Benenson told CNN.

Drafting a State of the Union with the campaign in mind

Policy proposals for any incumbent president running for reelection tend to be driven out of the White House. For Biden, with the same top advisers directing both the West Wing and the campaign, that is even more true.

Maybe they will even pass some bills, Biden advisers say, insisting that the unexpected wins they scored in the summer of 2022 could be a model for how the pressure of looming elections gets Congress to act. More likely, though, they will be shaming Congress for not doing more, both on his more partisan agenda and the “unity agenda” they say will once again be in this year’s State of the Union. Biden will call on Republicans and Democrats to finally act on issues they should be able to agree on: tackling the fentanyl crisis, increasing assistance for veterans, addressing mental health, expanding data privacy and searching for a cure for cancer.

Biden will also be hoping for moments like those in 2023’s speech when he got Republicans to applaud as he demanded no cuts to Medicare and Social Security, or when Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stood up in a jacket with white furry trim to shout “Liar!” – both of which Biden aides said afterward were not rehearsed, but delighted them by how much they seemed to work to the president’s benefit.

Reed, who oversees much of the domestic policy agenda in the White House, told CNN that the mentality going into 2024 is to think simultaneously about executing a year-four agenda and setting up a second-term agenda, despite a January defined by converging congressional stalemates over providing more aid to Ukraine and Israel, addressing the surging migrant crisis at the border, and preventing yet another government shutdown.

“We have a lot we hope to get done this year, and much more to do in the years ahead,” Reed said.

While he and others on the government payroll won’t respond to or attempt to bracket Trump directly, Reed said, certain events and statements from the Republican candidates will continue to drive official responses and proposals from Biden.

“The president will continue to show that he’s the president for all Americans, and he will continue to do everything in his power to unite the country and restore the soul of the country,” Reed said. “That means standing up to divisive extreme policies as well as divisive, hateful rhetoric.”

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