President Joe Biden will enter full campaign mode when he returns from his St. Croix vacation, including hosting events on Saturday, Jan. 6, in which campaign officials say he will specifically outline former President Donald Trump‘s plans to “dismantle and destroy our democracy.”
Biden trails Trump, the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee, by more than 2 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Campaign officials told reporters Tuesday that in the coming weeks, the president and Vice President Kamala Harris will “lay out the stakes” of the general election in November.
TRUMP HOLDS FOX NEWS TOWN HALL TO COUNTER CNN IOWA DEBATE WITH DESANTIS AND HALEY
The president ended 2023 by slowly shifting his core campaign focus away from “Bidenomics,” the summation of his economic policies, and back toward Trump. Democratic lawmakers and activists had pressured him for the better part of the year to revisit his winning 2020 campaign formula, where he framed that election as a choice between good and evil.
Biden’s first foray back to the campaign trail will come Saturday, the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in a speech delivered near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, “the same spot where nearly 250 years ago, our nation’s forefathers transformed a disorganized alliance of colonial militias to a cohesive coalition united in their fight for our democracy,” Biden campaign principal manager Quinton Fulks said Tuesday evening.
“There, the president will make the case directly that democracy and freedom, two powerful ideas that united the 13 colonies and that generations throughout our nation’s history have fought and died for,” Fulks continued. “A stone’s throw from where he’ll be Saturday remains central to the fight we’re in today.”
Biden and Harris will also campaign in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday and deliver remarks at Mother Emanuel AME Church, the site of a 2015 racially motivated mass shooting.
“The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez added on the call. “There’s less than two weeks until GOP primary voters begin casting ballots in Iowa, and former President Donald Trump’s extreme and dangerous MAGA agenda continues to define the Republican Party.”
Later in the month, Harris will also launch a nationwide abortion rights tour, with the first events coming on Jan. 22, the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling.
Furthermore, the campaign is expediting building out its state and grassroots organizing teams and launching new paid media campaigns coinciding with Biden’s Jan. 6 speech at Valley Forge.
Still, Biden is facing many obstacles on his path toward reelection. A poll published Monday by USA Today showed support for the president among young, black, and Latino voters cratering over the past three years.
The Biden campaign pushed off the idea that Monday’s trip to South Carolina was scheduled in response to Biden’s slipping polling among black voters.
“I think that the president and the vice president’s trips to South Carolina, they aren’t from a place of worry. They’re a place of practicing what we preach,” Fulks told reporters when pressed on Biden’s support among black voters. “We’re not just going to parachute into these communities at the last minute and ask them for their vote. We’re going to earn their vote.”
Biden’s isn’t the only campaign framing the 2024 election as a fight to protect democracy.
Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles claimed in a Tuesday memo that “Joe Biden and his allies are a real and compelling threat to our Democracy.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The memo, emailed to supporters and relevant parties on Tuesday, continues Trump’s trend of positioning Biden as a threat to democracy, as opposed to the former president’s past attacks on the president’s age and liberal policies.
“Biden and his radical left allies like to pose as standing up as allies of democracy,” the former president proclaimed at a December rally in Iowa. “Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy; Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”
