(Trends Wide) — Advisers to US President Joe Biden are moving quickly to finalize the operational and personnel details of his re-election campaign ahead of what is expected to be a grueling 19-month effort to convince the public of his accomplishments and ability to serve well into his eighties.
Biden returned to the White House Sunday night after a weekend at Camp David designed to serve as an intensive review of campaign and staff planning, including issues that still require his final approval, people familiar with the matter said. The issue.
But even as officials made the final edits to an announcement video likely to be released this Tuesday, marking four years since Biden declared himself a candidate in the 2020 presidential election, the challenges of the upcoming race became more apparent.
An NBC News poll released Sunday found that just 26% of Americans think Biden should run for a second term as president, while 70% say he shouldn’t. Among Democrats, 51% say Biden should not run for a second term. That mirrors the findings of other recent polls showing tepid support for Biden’s re-election, including an AP-NORC poll released Friday and a Trends Wide poll released earlier this month.
In the NBC poll, nearly half of those opposed to Biden’s candidacy say his age is a major reason for that opinion.
Advisers are confident those numbers will mean little in the long run. Republicans, and the candidacy of former President Donald Trump in particular, have “a pretty good record of bringing our people back home and going out to vote,” said a senior Democratic official close to the White House.
Biden’s advisers also believe his age represents decades of experience, which they say has fueled legislative victories that have delivered tangible economic dividends across the country.
“He has a steady hand, when you look at what’s going on right now with Donald Trump and what we’re hearing again. People don’t want to go back to that chaos,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, said when asked by Trends Wide’s Dana Bash about Biden’s age on “State of the Union.”
Still, at 80, Biden’s age is sure to act as a central issue in the upcoming campaign, a fact even many of his Democratic allies privately acknowledge.
An accelerated timetable to seek re-election
News that Biden had decided to launch his re-election campaign this week came as a surprise to a host of Democratic officials who had been led to believe in recent weeks that Biden was more likely to wait until summer to announce his campaign.
For weeks, Biden aides and others close to the White House had insisted that the president felt no pressure to announce this spring and was willing to allow an increasingly contentious Republican primary to play out without being in the mix as a candidate. official.
But other factors also weighed on Biden’s advisers. A messy fight over the debt ceiling, anticipated this summer, would not be the ideal time to announce a re-election campaign. The president will travel abroad next month for summits in Japan and Australia, and he plans to travel abroad again in July for a NATO summit in Lithuania, shortening the schedule.
And high-value fundraising tends to be slower during the summer months, which could affect the desire of Democratic officials to achieve a good first-quarter fundraiser for the re-election campaign.
Advisers continued to warn that last-minute changes were possible. And while Biden has finished recording a video declaring his candidacy and outlining his pitch for a second term, according to people familiar with the matter, his advisers have warned that the timing of his launch could change.
campaign manager
As the planning for the re-election launch came to light in recent days, the number of candidates for campaign manager quickly dwindled from more than half a dozen to just one name.
Biden is about to name Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a senior White House adviser, to oversee the campaign, two senior Democratic aides told Trends Wide on Sunday. The choice of campaign manager was one of many pending decisions Biden and his team were making as they prepared for the potentially imminent announcement.
Rodriguez, a senior adviser to the president and director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, has seen her career rise in the Biden White House.
Biden elevated Rodriguez to the position of senior adviser last summer, adding her to the small circle of his top aides.
Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Senior Advisor to the President and Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
While Rodriguez will formally manage the campaign, the effort will also be largely guided from the West Wing, where senior advisers Anita Dunn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti will also play central roles.
Rodríguez, the granddaughter of labor icon César Chávez, has been a longtime Democratic adviser and close to Biden.
CBS News was the first to report the long-awaited decision.
Biden’s day to day
Biden’s last weekend before the expected announcement served as a window into the balancing act to come as he and his top national security officials navigated the complexity of a potentially dangerous evacuation of government personnel from the US embassy. US in war-torn Sudan.
Biden has privately maintained that his main focus is carrying out the functions of the job he was elected to in 2020.
He gave the order Saturday to deploy approximately 100 US special operations soldiers to secure and complete the evacuation of US personnel in Sudan. The operation was successful and no US military or diplomatic personnel were injured in the approximately one hour process.
It served as a real-time demonstration of how the next 19 months can unfold for the incumbent White House candidate, where there is no shortage of crises that can change a message or campaign seemingly overnight.
It also provided a window into another Biden reality, people familiar with the matter said. He will have the final say in the direction of things, even if that word takes longer than some in the party would prefer. That led some on Biden’s team to warn allies that Tuesday’s announcement was not closed until Biden gave the green light.
The video had been filmed, they noted, and close advisers had sped up their communications with party officials and donors in the run-up to the announcement. But Biden didn’t like the leaks, and he still had a lot to ponder and discuss about the shape of his fledgling campaign over the course of the weekend.
