WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden's campaign manager recently sent out a fundraising email aimed at reassuring supporters worried about the Democrat's reelection chances, urging them to take a “quick walk down memory lane.”
Julie Chavez Rodriguez noted that 12 years ago, many Democrats wondered whether President Barack Obama would win a second term. Biden was Obama's vice president.
“Flash forward to November 6, 2012. I think you might remember that day,” she wrote. Below that was a photo of the Obamas and Bidens celebrating their election victory.
That sentiment is not only a nostalgic message, but is also increasingly reflected in Biden's strategy to win in 2024.
Biden is trying to focus the campaign on former President Donald Trump's comments and policy proposals, sometimes more than his own. It is a time-tested strategy for incumbents in the White House to negatively define their rivals in the eyes of the public. In 2012, Obama and his allies did it together with Republican Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and current senator of Utah. In 2004, President George W. Bush was successful against Democratic candidate John Kerry, then a senator in Massachusetts.
But Trump, the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination, is already better defined than perhaps any figure in American politics. And even as Trump's promises to seek retaliation and references to his enemies as “vermin” energize many Democrats, Biden faces low approval ratings and questions about his age and his handling of the economy and foreign affairs.
“You can't really build a playbook for the last election, or for what worked before,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who was Romney's senior adviser and spokesman in 2012. “I think Trump is a very different, non-linear opponent compared to Obama versus Romney.”
Some prominent Democrats have suggested the danger lies in making the race too much about Trump. They say Biden should play up parts of his own record and focus on abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Abortion was an issue that helped the party exceed expectations in last year's midterms and several races this year.
After refusing to mention Trump by name for much of his presidency, Biden has stepped up his warnings about his predecessor. Biden's campaign in recent weeks has rejected Trump's suggestions that he would not rule as a dictator “except on Day 1,” that he would again seek a repeal of Obama's health care reform, and that he would stage mass raids to to try to deport millions of people. from people.
Biden recently told a crowd of donors in Massachusetts, “We have to get it done. Not because of me.”
“If Trump wasn't running, I'm not sure I would be running,” Biden said. “We can't let him win.”
Trump's campaign did not respond to messages seeking comment. Biden's campaign says defining clear contrasts between the president and Trump is key to its strategy.
“Next year's election will be a choice between President Biden's proven track record of lowering costs and delivering results for middle-class families and the bleak vision of Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans to divide us,” Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. “We're going to do the work to make sure voters understand the enormous stakes of next year's elections.”
Obama's 2012 campaign relied heavily on grassroots organizing and television advertising spending to motivate voters. However, Biden is trying to prioritize unconventional ways to reach voters, in line with significant shifts in American media consumption habits, especially when it comes to political issues.
The dynamics of the 2024 race are also different from 2012. Biden has a track record of legislative performance on popular issues such as infrastructure. In 2012, Americans were sharply divided over Obama's signature achievement, the health care law often called “Obamacare,” although it is now viewed more positively.
Biden's aides also point to low unemployment and other signs of economic strength, though polls show Americans don't think the economy is strong and rate Biden poorly on this issue.
Obama campaign veterans play key roles in Biden's political operation, from White House senior adviser Anita Dunn, who worked in the Obama White House, to Chavez Rodriguez, a former campaign volunteer and Obama administration official.
Another, Kate Bedingfield, deputy campaign manager for Biden's 2020 campaign and then White House communications director, said presidents “always want to make the campaign about their opponent and not about their own record.” That's because governing means making compromises that can sometimes be harder to communicate in a way that resonates with voters, she said.
“They want to change the dynamic of the race so that it revolves around the threat their opponent poses,” Bedingfield said. “For the Biden campaign, they have an almost existential threat in Donald Trump.”
Obama built his winning campaign around attacking Romney months before Romney was formally the Republican nominee, defining him as a corporate raider willing to cut jobs to boost profits.
In 2004, Bush won reelection despite the growing unpopularity of the Iraq War by portraying Kerry as a flip-flopper, while pro-Bush groups ran a series of ads raising questions about Kerry's record as a fast boat commander in Vietnam.
Biden has kept a relatively light schedule of campaign rallies; he held only one in the first four months after launching his re-election campaign. He has held dozens of private fundraisers and has raised money in the past week in Boston, Washington and Los Angeles.
Obama did not hold his first re-election campaign until May 2012.
One of the most memorable pro-Obama ads featured a factory worker in Indiana describing being asked to help build a stage where the factory's workers were told they were being fired. The factory worker accused Romney and his private investment firm of making more than $100 million from closing the factory, a claim that fact-checking site Politifact labeled as “mostly untrue.”
Efforts to smear Romney only intensified when a video emerged in which he said 47% of people would vote for Obama because they were “dependent on the government” and “believe they are victims.”
Biden's team has similarly picked up economic themes to condemn Trump, including pushing the electronics giant Foxconn's story. As president, Trump promised that the company would build a major factory that would create thousands of jobs in the critical swing state of Wisconsin. Those jobs never came.
However, a year before the 2012 election, polls suggested that Romney's public image could be shaped by negative advertising in a way that Trump's cannot.
A Quinnipiac University poll taken in late 2011 found that voters were slightly more likely to have a favorable than unfavorable opinion of Romney, 36% to 31%. Notably, another 31% said they had not heard enough about Romney to form an opinion.
A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 42% of registered voters said they had a favorable opinion of Trump and 55% said they had an unfavorable opinion. The same poll found that only 37% had a favorable opinion of Biden, while 59% had an unfavorable opinion.
Bedingfield agreed that many voters have already made up their minds about Trump. But she said Biden could use Trump's clearly defined political brand against him in 2020 and could do the same next year.
“People looked at what he had done and said, 'We don't want any more of this,'” she said of Trump. “That gives the Biden campaign a very strong road map.”
Stuart Stevens, Romney's chief strategist, said the country is much more polarized now than in 2012 and that the focus on Biden's low voting numbers is “in the context of a pre-Trump era.”
“I think we're really in a very different world,” Stevens said, adding that 2024 is “inevitably going to be more of a referendum on Trump.”
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AP White House Correspondent Zeke Miller and AP Director of Public Opinion Research Emily Swanson contributed to this report.