Call it Fear and Loathing in Wilmington, the next great chapter of the Biden White House.
According to CNN, in a lengthy piece published on Thursday of last week, the orbit within high-ranking Democratic circles is having some fear and anxiety over the way President Joe Biden has been approaching his re-election campaign.
Whether it’s the limited exposure to voters, lagging fundraising, endless gaffes, or a lack of staffing in competitive swing states, the Biden 2024 campaign is off to a rough start:
The conversations keep happening – quiet whispers on the sidelines of events, texts, emails, furtive phone calls – as top Democrats and donors reach out to those seen as possible replacement presidential candidates.
Get ready, they urge, in conversations that aides to several of the people involved have described to CNN: Despite what he has said, despite the campaign that has been announced, President Joe Biden won’t actually be running for reelection.
They feel like time is already running out and that the lack of the more robust campaign activity they want to see is a sign that his heart isn’t really in it.
The feeling is that the Biden 2024 campaign is really more of a campaign on paper than it is in practice.
For example, many insiders and Democratic strategists are getting worried that time is actually wearing thin to start staffing up in swing states. Furthermore, there is still no campaign headquarters:
Biden has famously blown through every political timeline he has set for himself over the past eight years, but for an incumbent putting together what he and supporters feel is a campaign that is existential for the country, many leading Democrats feel time is running shorter than ever.
The headquarters in Wilmington discussed to be open by mid-July still isn’t. No staff is currently on the ground in competitive states, and names of potential hires have only started to be collected for review by the president and top advisers. The dozen people who are working for Biden-Harris 2024 full-time are mostly camped out at desks in the Democratic National Committee near Capitol Hill in Washington, with some griping about the delays in hiring staff and others still grumbling about how long it took to get on the payroll themselves. There is still no campaign finance director.
It’s true, Joe Biden is nothing if not a procrastinator when it comes to making career decisions. He took his sweet time earlier this year before announcing a re-election campaign and it seems like he’s taking even more time to decide if he’s really serious about it.
If he is truly serious, maybe some of this is just normal Biden confusion and mismanagement and things will settle in within a few months. It is only July 2023 after all and Biden is not facing a truly competitive primary next year.
The real story underneath is insiders grumbling about whether Biden will actually finish this race or, at some point, he’ll be stepping aside.
Given his low approval ratings and ongoing desire to rebrand the Biden administration into something other than abject failure, some are wondering if maybe they should get started on that rebranding sooner rather than later:
For a president whose approval ratings remain in the low 40s and has tended to suffer from low voter enthusiasm, the challenge may prove different, and multiple experienced Democratic campaign operatives argue that should encourage Biden to start doing more of that engagement work immediately.
There’s another aspect CNN doesn’t touch on but that’s the real possibility Democrats have become lulled into a false of electoral superiority. With states passing new voting laws intent on making Election Day turn into Election Month, of Election Months, do they even need to try as hard in areas where the “machine” works to harvest ballots and ensure victory one way or another? It’s a strategy that worked for Biden’s basement campaign in 2020 when election laws intended to prevent vote tampering and fraud were relaxed or suspended in the name of Covid-19.
In other words, is the typical strategy of mingling with voters and making appearances, a path that seems impossible for Biden’s work schedule of four hours a day, no longer the course needed for a Democratic re-election campaign? Can Biden stay in the basement while the minions do all the legwork and ballot gathering?
Whatever the case is, Joe Biden seems intent to hide in the basement again in 2024 and some Democrats are wondering if it’s time for him to step aside and head back to Delaware.
