President Joe Biden isn’t changing his reelection campaign strategy, even in the face of numerous setbacks over the past month.
In recent weeks, the president has been saddled with a viral challenger on the Left, Robert Kennedy Jr., a trio of significant losses at the Supreme Court, surging support for his top Republican competitor, former President Donald Trump, and a drug scandal more likely to appear on Netflix than C-SPAN.
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Nevertheless, Biden continues to tout his “Bidenomics” messaging in states critical to his 2020 general election victory, which senior Democratic officials say shows the president is “committed” to his 2024 strategy: drawing a contrast between his policy agenda and that of the “ultra-MAGA” wing of the Republican Party.
On Thursday, the president again made the case for his economic bonafides at an event in Columbia, South Carolina, a state that all but saved his White House hopes during the past election.
Biden even appeared alongside Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), his top surrogate in the state in 2020, during the Thursday event at a Flex LTD manufacturing plant.
During his remarks, the president focused heavily on how, despite voting against his policies, a number of Republican lawmakers have openly embraced funding for new infrastructure projects, clean energy investments, and manufacturing jobs brought about through the Inflation Reduction Act and Biden’s other spending bills.
“I didn’t get much help from the other team, but that didn’t stop us from getting it done,” Biden said. “My view is, wherever the need is most, that’s the place we should be helping, and that’s what we’re doing.”
“I can understand why they want to take credit,” Clyburn said. “Bidenomics is good for their constituents.”
South Carolina holds a critical place in the “Biden coalition,” so much so that the Democratic National Committee opted to upset the electoral voting order, which saw the Palmetto State leapfrog all the way from Super Tuesday to the first state to vote in the 2024 primary.
Biden’s visit comes just days after Trump also traveled to the state for a speech in Pickens, South Carolina, near the Georgia border. Those remarks focused on the former president’s 2020 election grievances and his own legal setbacks.
Despite his commitment to the brand, Biden is facing major political turmoil. Democratic officials discounted the uptick in support for both Kennedy and Trump as typical or “fleeting” and suggested that a string of losses at the Supreme Court (which saw conservative majorities hand down rulings against affirmative action in college admissions, for a web designer who sued Colorado over protections for LGBT residents, and dismantling Biden’s efforts to extend debt relief to student loan borrowers) would ultimately blow back on the GOP.
Though Republicans celebrated all of these decisions, Democrats believe they will have a similar rallying effect to the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion ruling last year, which heavily contributed to the party maintaining its Senate majority and minimizing losses in the House during the 2022 midterm elections.
“Our voters can sense the moment,” one senior Democrat told the Washington Examiner. “Republicans are trying to rip away the rights of marginalized groups and deny aid to Americans that need it most. That’s what President Biden is running against, and you’ll continue to see him make his case throughout the election cycle.”
Democratic officials and the White House are even using the West Wing drug scandal, in which a bag of cocaine was discovered by the Secret Service heading into the July Fourth holiday weekend, as an opportunity to attack Trump and Republicans.
Trump has openly suggested that the bag belongs to Hunter Biden, the president’s recovering addict son who frequently visits the White House, or even the president himself, but White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said Thursday that those attacks indicate a degree of anxiety from the former president.
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“There does seem to be some increasing frustration coming from that corner, in general, and I think it is probably rooted in the contrast between their substantive policy records,” Bates told reporters traveling with Biden to South Carolina. “There is a long list of areas where this administration succeeded for the middle class where our predecessor did not — for example, infrastructure is no longer a punch line, and now, the biggest infrastructure investments in 70 years are rebuilding America.”
“So, it would be unsurprising if there’s a little bit of frustration on the part of people who worked in the last administration,” Bates said.
