WORLD NEWS | Biden and his 2024 campaign: Some big decisions await

WASHINGTON, April 1 (AP) — President Joe Biden has all but announced he will run for re-election, but a key question remains about the 2024 race: Who will run it? Where will it be located? When will he make an official announcement?

Advisers have long said he plans to wait until after March, when the first fundraising period of the year wraps up. It’s an effort to help manage expectations as many of the donors who gave generously to Democratic causes in last fall’s election are seeking a break.

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But aides have insisted that an announcement would not be immediate, even now, and likely at least until Biden returns from his expected visit to Ireland in mid-April.

Working on his own schedule can deal with Biden’s low approval ratings and questions about his age — the 80-year-old will turn 86 before the end of his second term. It also means that Biden will not be held hostage by former President Donald Trump, who has announced his 2024 campaign, or other top Republicans who may run, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or former Vice President Mike Pence. act hastily under pressure.

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“He’s earned the luxury of setting a timetable,” said Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist in Washington. “The longer he can focus this on his duties in the White House, rather than campaigning back and forth, the better off he will be.”

That said, Biden aides, mindful of Trump being sued for hush money payments to porn actors, say Biden would consider timing the announcement at a time when he won’t be sharing the political spotlight with others . The people he defeated in the 2020 election.

Biden’s inner political circle is ready to execute his campaign strategy from day one and sees no downside to the president’s unhurriedness. Biden faces no significant Democratic challenger for the nomination.

Self-help guru Marianne Williamson is currently the only contender in the primary.

It will also be up to Biden to decide where next year’s Democratic National Convention will be held in the three shortlisted cities of Atlanta, Chicago and New York. But organizers said there was little pressure to make the decision until the president was ready to make it, as the logistical groundwork was largely laid.

Much of the re-election work will be done in the White House, where Biden’s top advisers are expected to stay on. Still, campaign managers and senior staff will be responsible for raising huge sums of money, reaching millions of voters and defending Biden on American doors and online while he remains busy in office.

A senior Biden adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the yet-to-be-announced re-election campaign noted that Biden’s 2020 campaign is a $1.7 billion effort and that this time the effort will be bigger.

The key, the adviser said, is to find “validators,” or non-Washington voices, who can spread the campaign’s message at a time when many are losing faith in everything political.

Aides and allies are discussing how to create an appropriate 2024 race infrastructure. The situation for Biden is different than in 2020, when his campaign took place while the country was largely shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The political environment is also different, as technological and cultural shifts continue to change the way people communicate. Biden’s advisers are preparing a new campaign format fit for the moment to activate his base and identify and engage persuasive centers — essentially a communications strategy tailored to each target voter.

Aba Blankson, the NAACP’s chief marketing and communications officer, said her organization is nonpartisan but was successful in mobilizing black voters — an important part of Biden’s base — ahead of last November’s election using a similarly targeted political message. component. This includes text messages, radio ads, and door-knocking campaigns to promote “peer-to-peer” organizing in areas that can sway key ethnicities.

“I think his timing is his timing,” Bankson said. “But, for us, it’s an annual reality.”

The choices for Biden’s campaign headquarters have been narrowed down to 2020 sites in Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, his home and where the president spends many weekends at the White House.

While Biden tends to favor Delaware on all issues, some top Democrats worry that recruiting top campaign talent to Wilmington will be difficult.

Biden waited until weeks into his 2020 campaign to announce he had settled in Philadelphia, making a commitment to the key battleground state.

Even more challenging is filling the position of campaign manager. Some potential candidates see this as a thankless task because much of the decision-making power rests with the White House. Biden’s 2020 campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, is the White House deputy chief of staff and plans to stay on.

The shortlist includes Julie Chavez Rodriguez, director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and deputy campaign manager for Biden’s 2020 campaign, and Sam Cornell, executive director of the Democratic National Committee. Quentin Fulks, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock’s campaign manager who won re-election last fall, was mentioned.

Biden has led Democrats to a stronger-than-expected midterm run in 2022 by urging voters to reject the “extreme” followers of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign. So it’s possible to bring in an outsider who ran a successful Democratic campaign last fall. But party leaders acknowledged that breaking into Biden’s notoriously tight-knit inner circle has sometimes been challenging.

One exception is O’Malley Dillon, who entered Biden’s orbit in late 2020 after leading former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s failed presidential bid.

Despite announcing his candidacy months ago, Trump has yet to name a campaign manager. But others are not waiting to be staffed.

Trump’s U.N. ambassador and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, picked Betsy Ankney, executive director of Haley’s American Stand PAC, to run her presidency political campaign. The super PAC tied to DeSantis has brought in former Trump aide Matt Walkin and strategist Jeff Roy, who was a frontrunner for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign and Republican Glenn Trump. Jankin is the designer who won the Virginia gubernatorial race in 2021.

While questions about the structure of his campaign remain unanswered, the contours of Biden’s pitch to voters are taking shape.

From his State of the Union address in February to his speech to donors, the president has begun to show that Americans should let him “finish what he started.”

He’s also trying to see the contest as a choice between himself and “MAGA Republicans,” which he believes will undermine the nation’s core values.

Biden has been traveling in recent months to tout what he sees as his administration’s key policy achievements, including a bipartisan public works program, and plans to do more of the same in the future. That will allow him to use this year to test which political messages will resonate best in 2024, aides said.

“He’s not going to win re-election or lose re-election based on what happened in the campaign,” Bannon predicted. (AP)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)