Just after 10 a.m. on Tuesday, a few hours after Donald Trump cruised through Iowa’s Republican caucuses, the Democratic Party’s top surrogates got an email full of suggested talking points. The top-line message from the Democratic National Committee was not all that surprising, nor was it all that different from the argument many of them have been making for months: “As we saw last night in Iowa, Donald Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda continues to define the race for the Republican presidential nomination.” The email suggested they zero in on the remaining GOP candidates’ support for nationwide abortion bans, on their denial of the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and on their interest in cutting Social Security and Medicare.
But it also asked for help amplifying a very simple message tweeted out by Joe Biden’s account about 12 hours earlier: “Looks like Donald Trump just won Iowa,” his tweet began. “He’s the clear front runner on the other side at this point.”
Biden’s message continued, suggesting that he stood against “extreme MAGA Republicans” no matter who they nominated. Yet his main point — that it’s almost certainly him versus Trump — has been true for at least a year. The issue is that, to hear Democrats close to Biden tell it, voters still don’t believe it. Now that Republicans have started making Trump’s ascension official, however, top Democrats have clearly calculated that it’s time Americans start to finally internalize the choice they’ll soon have to make: Trump or Biden.
The shift is a long time coming. For months, senior strategists and pollsters aligned with Biden have answered fretful questions about his grim political standing with a simple answer: Most likely, voters aren’t paying attention to politics right now and simply don’t believe that Trump will be nominated again. When I was trying to understand Team Biden’s plan late last year, one senior Bidenite pointed me to a poll showing just one-fifth of voters believed Trump was poised to be his party’s nominee again. Last week, campaign officials leaked internal research to CNN showing three-quarters of undecided voters doubt Trump’s return, and soon after deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks repeated that finding out loud on MSNBC, arguing, “There is a matter of when people pay attention and when people decide to tune in.”
Their argument has been that once these voters reckon with this binary choice — and the implications of Trump’s return, like the amplification of his autocratic behavior — Biden’s prospects will brighten as Americans rally around him as the only realistic way of stopping Trump. What proponents of this theory have not made clear is when this shift in public sentiment is supposed to occur — Biden, after all, has been tied or trailing Trump in plenty of polls that propose just such a binary for months, and the notion that this will change organically sometime next summer or fall is little comfort to many of his worried dialed-in supporters. Now, with Republican voters finally voting, the Biden team’s bet is that the tuning-in process is starting — or that if it’s not, they must force it to begin.
Thus far unable to reverse his dismal ratings on the economy, Biden has started making his public case for reelection more of an argument about Trump, especially by focusing on his antidemocratic and extremist tendencies in a pair of speeches this month. He made explicit an argument about the dangers of Trump that he previously shared most forcefully in private fundraising events and in some small White House chats with donors organized by film tycoon and campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. Behind the scenes, the case has been persuasive enough for the campaign to raise $100 million in the last three months of 2023.
Shifting to this message only slowly has partially been a matter of basic political prudence, since Trump’s nomination is likely but not fait accompli. As such, Democrats have been continuing the tactic that worked so well in 2022 — tying other Republicans to Trump’s least popular stances. Shortly before the caucuses, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker, a Biden booster, told reporters “Tonight’s contest is simply a question of whether you like your MAGA Trump agenda wrapped in the original packaging or with high heels or with lifts in their boots,” referring to Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. (Biden is basically tied with each of them in theoretical general-election matchups.) Before the Iowa results landed, DNC chairman Jaime Harrison circulated a memo insisting that “Republicans’ race for the MAGA base has left them saddled with unpopular policy positions that will weigh them down in a general election, and be a liability for down-ballot Republican candidates.”
Yet once the ex-president was declared the easy winner in Iowa, the effort to hammer home the “Trump is back” message was on.
Biden campaign supporters were greeted with an early email on Tuesday asking for cash with the message, “The Iowa results are in, and it’s clear: Donald Trump is the official frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.” Not long after, Biden’s surrogates got their marching orders. The DNC’s private email didn’t focus entirely on Trump — it re-circulated Pritzker’s comments — but made sure they had seen a tweet from Minnesota senator Tina Smith contrasting Biden’s and Trump’s economic records and reminding voters that Trump had taken credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
By Tuesday afternoon, there was little subtlety left in the pivot. Another Biden campaign fundraising email to Democrats came with the subject line, “Pitch in now so we never have to go back to how you felt when Trump was elected.” And by early evening, Biden himself had gone straight to camera. “You know, it’s kind of funny,” he said in a video posted to X. “All these Republican candidates in the primary are trying to beat Donald Trump. I’m still the only person to ever beat Donald Trump, and I’m looking forward to doing it again, for the good of this country.”
