President Biden’s advisers are looking forward to the upcoming general election race and are counting on voters to start paying more attention to Donald J. Trump, with the president himself suggesting and releasing videos to ridicule the things his Republican opponent says.
Mr. Trump relishes the opportunity to pit himself against Biden, as he did on the Texas-Mexico border last week, and believes Mr. Biden has the hardest job: convincing voters that their views on how the country goes. wrong.
With the former president expected to win big on Super Tuesday and Mr. Biden set to deliver his State of the Union address on Thursday, this week is expected to clarify the upcoming choice for an American public that in many ways disbelief remains that 2024 is headed for a 2020 rematch.
Both campaigns see the next few days as a critical period that will set the tone and define the first contours of the presidential campaign.
By most reports, Mr. Biden is starting back.
A New York Times/Siena College poll over the weekend showed Mr. Trump leading 48 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. Mr. Biden is hampered by widespread concerns about his age and his handling of the job, rifts in the Democratic coalition over Israel and a general bitterness about the state of the nation.
But Mr. Biden also enters the expected general election contest with a number of key structural advantages, including a sizable financial advantage and the lack of distractions on the scale of Mr. Trump’s four criminal trials.
Quentin Fulks, Biden’s principal deputy campaign manager, said the campaign was preparing for a week that would functionally serve as “the opening of the general election.”
“The problem we’re having is a lot of people are telling us they don’t know it’s a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump,” Mr Fulks said. “March will be our time to make that choice clear.”
The month begins with Super Tuesday and is set to end with jury selection in Mr. Trump’s first criminal trial, in New York, over hush money payments secretly made to a porn star in the heat of the 2016 campaign. Meanwhile , Mr. Trump is expected to effectively win the nomination and complete a takeover that would give him operational control of the Republican National Committee.
“Whatever advantage they have in terms of timing, we will be far outstripped by the passion of our supporters and our ability to organize them,” said Chris LaCivita, one of two co-directors of the Trump campaign whom Mr. Trump plans to place in charge. RNC official Polls show that Mr. Trump is so far putting together his 2020 coalition better than Mr. Biden. “They have a motivation problem,” Mr. LaCivita said. “We don’t.”
Mr. Trump, however, has legal problems.
His team was excited last week when the US Supreme Court set a timetable for hearing Mr Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution for his actions after losing the 2020 election to try to stay in office. The Supreme Court’s schedule is pushing into late summer in Mr. Trump’s first federal trial.
Nikki Haley is still a contender in the Republican primary, but polls predict an elimination on Super Tuesday, with 15 states in play. Mr Trump’s team believes he could sweep a majority of delegates and secure the nomination as early as March 12. On Friday, the Republican National Committee meets in Texas and is expected to endorse Mr. Trump’s new pick to lead the party, Michael Whatley.
“We will have control of 100 percent of the engineers we need,” Mr. LaCivita said.
The Biden team has long circled Thursday’s State of the Union address as a centerpiece, knowing it will be the president’s biggest audience likely until the summer convention and an opportunity to sell a skeptical American public on his accomplishments and complement a second-term agenda that has so far been sparse on detail.
After the speech, Mr. Fulks said, the Biden campaign will launch a “show of force,” with Mr. Biden’s first two stops already announced as events in Atlanta and Philadelphia.
Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and First Lady Jill Biden are all expected to be fans on the campaign trail. A sign of the Biden campaign’s early organizational edge: He plans, along with the party, to open 31 general election offices in the next 30 days in the key battleground state of Wisconsin alone.
Mr. Trump has yet to announce any general election staff in the state.
The first lady’s appearance Saturday in downtown Tucson, Ariz., offered a warning sign of the protests likely to greet administration leaders on the trail. Her Women for Biden event was was discontinued four times in 15 minutes by dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters opposing her husband’s support for Israel in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
The Biden team has staged events to avoid such outbursts.
Mr Trump arranged his own presidential photo shoot at the border to coincide with Mr Biden’s official visit. Mr Trump’s trip was announced days before Mr Biden’s. In two Texas border towns, both men spoke with law enforcement officers, Mr. Biden inside, Mr. Trump outside overlooking the Rio Grande — and Mr. Trump’s team said it was pleased with the outcome.
“In an age where visuals matter, it’s probably a race they won’t pick again,” Mr. LaCivita said.
But in a twist, many Democrats are now hoping for increased coverage of Mr. Trump. The current thinking of the Biden team is that the more Trump the better, in order to remind voters what they didn’t like about him in the first place. Some Biden officials welcomed national television networks carrying the Super Tuesday results with special coverage because more voters would face the reality of a Biden vs. Trump contest.
Mr. Trump’s advisers see a benefit to his time away from the public eye. The decision by social media platforms to ban him following the 6 January 2021 uprising meant that his all-caps writing is now limited to his Truth Social website. This has kept some of his more raw and incendiary comments confined to the conservative ecosystem, where only his supporters consume it.
To highlight some of Mr. Trump’s more incendiary statements, the Biden team has begun producing split-screen videos of the president watching on an iPad and then delivering a scathing response. The president is said to enjoy producing those videos, according to three people familiar with the matter. Mr. Biden himself, on a recent fund-raising swing, posted the particular video in response to Mr. Trump comparing himself to Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who died in prison, two of the people said.
A concern that Mr. Trump’s allies have had for months is that the Biden campaign, the Democratic Party and allied groups were overspending — and therefore overspending.
The main super PAC aligned with Mr. Biden has already announced a $250 million TV and digital ad booking since August. Mr. Trump’s super PAC had less than $20 million on hand at the time of entry in February and returned $5 million each month to an account that paid for Mr. Trump’s mammoth legal fees.
Taylor Budowich, the executive director of the Trump super PAC, which is giving briefings to several of his top donors at Mar-a-Lago on Super Tuesday, said his group had the easiest political task despite the economic disparity.
“He has the job of convincing people that what they believe and feel is not true,” Mr. Budowich said of Mr. Biden and voter dissatisfaction with the direction of the nation. “We have the job of convincing people that it’s true – and the guy in charge is in charge of it.”
Mr. Trump will continue to talk about the economy, immigration, energy and, as he says, “weaponizing the government” against him through four charges.
Mr. Biden’s team sees abortion and Mr. Trump’s appointment of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade — and the recent Alabama court ruling on IVF — as powerful messages. The president’s State of the Union address is expected to include an economic agenda at odds with Mr Trump’s.
Mr. Trump’s team sees immigration as a particularly high-profile issue to sway black voters in major cities where there have been influxes of immigrants from the southern border.
The super PAC backing Mr. Trump will begin airing ads Monday on black radio stations in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania emphasizing the immigration crisis and Mr. Biden’s support for transgender protections. Despite a long history of racist remarks, Mr. Trump is doing better in polls with black voters than in his previous campaigns. The Biden campaign is trying to shore up its support among black voters with its own ad.
Mr Trump’s legal report is likely to dominate the news in the coming weeks, with his trial in New York starting on March 25. Privately, several of Trump’s allies marveled at the time breaks he had throughout the process. The Manhattan trial could be the only pre-election trial he faces.
The case, however, is expected to drag on for six weeks, taking him out of the campaign for days at a time. A person familiar with the internal discussions, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr Trump would likely campaign on weekends and use Wednesdays – when the trial is expected to be adjourned each week – for fundraising or meetings with advisors.
No presidential candidate has ever campaigned under such conditions.
Kellen Browning contributed to the report from Tucson, Ariz., and Michael Gold from Eagle Pass, Texas.
