Early campaign strategy at play as Biden hits road for first time since launching re-election bid

It’s been two weeks since President Joe Biden announced his re-election bid, but Wednesday will be his first time traveling outside Washington as a candidate.

The outing — one of many planned in the coming months — illustrates an early campaign strategy of highlighting Biden's job as president instead of fast-forwarding to an election that's still 545 days away.

At an event in a swing district in the suburbs of New York City, Biden will again use congressional Republicans as his main political sparring partner, arguing they’re putting hard-fought economic gains on his watch at risk by threatening default.

He’ll also hold the first in-person fundraisers of his re-election bid, beginning to stock a campaign war chest that advisers predict will surpass his record 2020 fundraising haul of just over $1 billion.

Similar one-day trips on Air Force One are expected into the summer months as Biden highlights new infrastructure projects, business expansion and reduced health care costs all, at official — that is, taxpayer-funded — events, biding his time until the GOP settles on its nominee and the general election campaign begins in earnest.

Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign itself is slowly and quietly adding staff members, with an eye toward building up the infrastructure needed for the long haul. And on Wednesday it is announcing a team of super-surrogates who will fan out across the country for more political events to help, as the campaign puts it, Biden keep his focus where it should be: being president of the United States.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Biden campaign co-chair, said that it’s akin to making sure LeBron James has a strong team around him.

“You will see a real team effort to support the president and to be able to convey his message out into the world, so everything doesn’t rely on him alone,” Katzenberg said in an interview.

The campaign Wednesday is launching a so-called National Advisory Board of 50 prominent Democrats who will do media interviews, help with fundraising and travel to battleground states to mobilize key voting groups.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the former House speaker, will be the chair of the group, which also includes well-known national Democrats like Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as well as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and rising stars like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is one of nine mayors in the group, which also includes freshman Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, the youngest member of Congress.

As for Biden’s events, he’s largely building on the strategy President Barack Obama used in 2011, when he also kicked off a re-election campaign in the middle of a fiscal battle with congressional Republicans — then it was a potential government shutdown followed months later by a debt limit standoff.

In the early stage of his 2012 bid, Obama gave remarks about his economic agenda and held town hall meetings across the country, helping sketch out a general contrast with Republicans that eventually zeroed in on Mitt Romney once he became the GOP nominee.

“The advantage of the debt limit fight, or the budget fight like we had, is there are stark differences between the two parties. And in the negotiations, those differences will become very clear,” said Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager. “In the absence of an opponent, that is really helpful.”

In Wednesday's trip to a district that elected a new Republican to Congress in November but also supported Biden in 2020, the president will be introduced by a seventh grade science teacher — illustrating a job that could be cut because of spending reductions called for in the House GOP’s recently passed debt-ceiling bill, a White House official said.

It’s a line of attack the campaign plans to build on more directly with an eye toward next year’s election.

“While President Biden lays out his proven record of accomplishment and results delivered for the American people, the MAGA Republicans running for president continue with their dangerous and unpopular agenda: preventing women from making their own health care decisions, banning books, gutting Social Security, and undermining America’s free and fair elections. Voters rejected that agenda in 2020, 2022, and they will again in 2024,” campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said in a statement.

Campaigns may not be won in the year before an election, but getting a strong foundation under the president’s 2024 effort is critical, Messina said.

“The off year is the most important year, because you don’t have an opponent punching you every day and the campaign can spend the year building,” he said. “For [Biden], he can continue to go out and talk about all the things he’s done and have people see the president doing stuff. Next year is harder, because everything is viewed in a political context.”

Biden huddled with campaign donors in Washington for a strategy session days after he formally launched his campaign. Wednesday, he’ll start collecting big-dollar checks — another early campaign imperative.

Katzenberg, a longtime prominent Democratic donor, predicts that Biden “will have all, if not more than, the resources that he needs to run a competitive campaign” and that fundraising won’t take up too much of his time in the near term.

“The fact is, as opposed to 2020, which was a sprint, this is a marathon,” Katzenberg said.

But he added that Biden being able to spend more time in person meeting with donors, after two years in which such gatherings were limited by Covid and the demands of governing, is already having a impact.

“They haven’t seen this president up close. They haven’t been able to shake hands and get a pat on the back for a couple years,” he said. “For those people who have gotten any face time whatsoever with him, it’s turned into genuine enthusiasm.”