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      Voters Are Wary of Biden. Here’s Why He Might Win Anyway.

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      Diana Nguyen and Rachel Quester, Patricia Willens and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicPresident Biden has announced that he will seek another term in the Oval Office, despite the fact that he will be 81 on Election Day 2024.Not everyone is overjoyed about that prospect — more than half of Democrats don’t want him to run again. Nonetheless, the party’s leaders are increasingly confident about his chances. Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The Times, explains why.On today’s episodeJonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The New York Times.Although President Biden has to some extent lowered the temperature in Washington and worked at times with Republicans, the United States remains deeply polarized.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBackground readingMr. Biden has acknowledged that he has not accomplished all he wished to. But that, he maintains, is an argument for his re-election.Although his poll numbers remain low, structural advantages have Democrats insisting that Mr. Biden is better positioned than his Republican rivals.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Jonathan Weisman More

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      Biden’s 2024 Re-Election Campaign Begins. You Might Miss It at First.

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      The president has no immediate plans to barnstorm key states with large rallies. He will instead try to burnish his record, and hope Republican infighting continues.President Biden has formally moved from a campaign-in-waiting to a campaign of waiting.Despite his heavily anticipated re-election announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Biden has no immediate plans to barnstorm the key battlegrounds. Decorative bunting is nowhere to be found, and large rallies will come later.Instead, Mr. Biden’s next steps look much like his recent ones: leveraging the White House to burnish his record with ribbon-cuttings, and willingly ceding the stage to a Republican presidential primary that is already descending into a dogfight between Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, even before he has entered the race.The first 24 hours, a heavily scripted period in any campaign, serve as a Biden road map for the months to come: a video announcement and an array of text messages to spur online donations; the behind-the-scenes hiring of his campaign team; an official White House event that doubled as a campaign opportunity; and a rally focused on abortion rights, headlined by the vice president, at a historically Black university.“This is not a time to be complacent,” Mr. Biden says in the video, which spends more time warning of threats posed by Republicans — to abortion rights, entitlement programs and democracy — than articulating a policy vision for a second term.Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked on Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign, said the two public appearances on Tuesday by the president and vice president — at a labor union conference talking about his economic agenda for the middle class and at the abortion-rights rally — captured “two pillars of the campaign” to come.At the same time, she predicted little public campaigning anytime soon for the 80-year-old president.“It’s about getting staff, it’s about raising money, it’s about stopping the ridiculous questions of if he’s running,” Ms. Lake said. “That is the antidote to whether he has the energy to run, to questions about his age.”Biden advisers say his entry was driven more by the internal demands of constructing a presidential campaign rather than the external need to communicate with voters, which he can do from the White House, though his team has begun producing potential advertisements. The Democratic National Committee has bought advertising time beginning Wednesday on MSNBC and on local stations in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to AdImpact, a media tracking service.On Tuesday, Mr. Biden announced a campaign manager and her principal deputy, along with seven national co-chairs. It is no accident that instead of immediately traveling to a battleground state, Mr. Biden will huddle with some of his biggest donors on Friday in the capital.At moments, the campaign rollout had the feel of a nostalgia tour, like an old band trying to recapture the magic of the past. The announcement was timed to the exact day of Mr. Biden’s kickoff four years earlier. His first speech, then and now, was to a labor union. And then as now, Jill Biden, the first lady, snapped a photo in front of the same building at the Northern Virginia Community College where she teaches English.The 2024 presidential race is expected to revolve around about half a dozen highly competitive states.The epicenter will be the two Sun Belt states, Georgia and Arizona, that Mr. Biden in 2020 put into the Democratic column for the first time since the 1990s, as well as the three industrial states touching the Great Lakes that are perennial battlegrounds: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Nevada and North Carolina, which has been just out of Democrats’ grasp in recent years, are expected to have heavy spending, as well.Mr. Biden held a video call on Tuesday with roughly a dozen Democratic governors to discuss messaging in battleground states and carrying out the administration’s agenda, according to a person with direct knowledge of the call. The call included, among others, the governors of Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.In Mr. Biden’s labor conference speech, he delivered a lengthy recitation of the policy achievements of his first two years in office, and was briefly interrupted with the “four more years” chant familiar to every presidential re-election campaign. He spoke of signing trillions in stimulus and infrastructure spending and, as in his announcement video, warned of “MAGA” Republicans who he said threatened to destroy the fabric of the country.“The speaker, the former president, the MAGA extremists, they’re cut from a different cloth,” Mr. Biden said. “The threat that MAGA Republicans pose is to take us to a place we’ve never been.”Mr. Biden speaking in Wilmington, Del., in October 2020, when coronavirus restrictions and precautions greatly reduced in-person campaigning. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFor a re-election bid, Mr. Biden’s campaign introduction presented a curiously dark vision of the country.In his video, he said his fight in 2020 to restore the “soul of the nation” was still incomplete, and at risk. At his speech, the biggest applause lines were his vows to defend the country from various perils, not any remarks presenting an uplifting vision for the future.“It’s been one crisis after another,” said Cristóbal Alex, who worked on Mr. Biden’s 2020 run and in his White House. “The country remains on the cliff. And the election of Donald Trump or a similar MAGA type would push the country over the brink.”Some elements of the campaign were not completed until last weekend, and the re-election staff is still being built out. Representative Veronica Escobar, a Texas Democrat, said she had received a call from Mr. Biden on Sunday asking her to be a campaign co-chair.“I don’t quite know exactly what’s ahead,” she said. “I’ve never done this before.”Mr. Biden’s team is sensitive to questions about his age and the rigor of his schedule, especially after he won in 2020 while campaigning most of the year from his Delaware home because of the pandemic. The White House has compiled a chart tracking his travel so far in 2023, and it shows that his number of trips outpaced former President Barack Obama’s in the same time period in 2011.With the widespread end of coronavirus precautions, Democrats are predicting a return to normalcy on the campaign trail. The 2020 race “will have turned out to be, I think, an atypical election,” said Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.But Mr. Biden’s campaign is hardly seeking to have him dominate the headlines. As he has traveled the country recently to promote his legislative accomplishments, the nation’s attention has often focused elsewhere, especially on the never-ending legal and political drama encircling his predecessor.In January, when Mr. Biden stood beside Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the G.O.P. leader, for a ribbon-cutting on a major bridge project over the Ohio River, Republicans in Washington were engaged in a weeklong spectacle over the next House speaker.“Frankly, the best way to run for re-election as president is to be president,” said Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a longtime Biden ally who was announced as a national campaign co-chairman.Mr. Biden’s video and Tuesday speech seemed to goad more Republican infighting, featuring a short clip of Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis shaking hands.“Let the other side continue to self-destruct,” said Alan Kessler, a Democratic bundler who has raised money for Mr. Biden.As Mr. Biden has traveled the country in recent months to promote his legislative accomplishments, the nation’s political attention has often focused elsewhere.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThen there is the issue of abortion rights, on which Mr. Biden has his own long and complicated political history that he sought to avoid discussing in 2020. Since last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the issue has become a top Democratic motivator, powering some unexpected midterm victories and a sweeping triumph this month in a contest for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.“We all know abortion is going to be — if not the top issue — one of the top issues for 2024,” said Mini Timmaraju, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, which sponsored the abortion rights rally at Howard University on Tuesday night where Ms. Harris was set to be the headline speaker.Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s former chief of staff, said the president, like other Democrats, was aware of how the Supreme Court’s abortion decision had galvanized voters in his party’s favor.“He’s going to talk about protecting reproductive freedom, reproductive rights,” Mr. Klain said Tuesday.Mr. Biden did not say the word “abortion” in his kickoff video, though just four seconds in, there is an image of a woman standing outside the Supreme Court holding a sign that reads, “Abortion is health care.”The only images preceding that shot were of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.The first word uttered by Mr. Biden captures both scenes, and is one that Democrats hope will frame the 2024 campaign: “Freedom.”“The question we are facing,” he says in the video, “is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom.”Katie Glueck More

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      With Biden’s 2024 Bid, Kamala Harris Will Be Under More Scrutiny

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      The vice president will be central to President Biden’s re-election efforts, particularly on the issue of abortion access. Both critics and supporters say the increased spotlight is a good thing.WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris, the vice president, was featured heavily throughout a video that President Biden used to announce his 2024 campaign on Tuesday, a strong signal that she will be a central part of his re-election efforts.Somehow, both her harshest critics and her staunchest allies see this as a good thing.To her supporters, Ms. Harris, 58, represents broad swaths of the American electorate that Mr. Biden does not: She is a woman, she is biracial and she is decades younger than the 80-year-old president, who would be 86 at the end of a second term. She is seen as the administration’s most visible advocate on issues including voting rights, access to abortion and combating climate change.But her detractors — who include both Republicans and Democrats — say she is unprepared for the scrutiny that is sure to come her way as she positions herself as the potential heir apparent to a Biden presidency. And some do not think the issues in her portfolio will appeal to the independent and moderate voters who tend to decide presidential elections.“What swing voter wakes up and says, ‘Boy, Kamala Harris is going to move me?’” said Mike Murphy, a political strategist who was a longtime adviser to John McCain, the Republican senator and presidential candidate. Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are still betting that the case they are making to America — that their administration represents the protection of civil liberties and the return of stable governing — will have broad appeal. Hours after Mr. Biden announced his re-election bid on Tuesday, Ms. Harris participated in events that were designed to present her as an emissary of the president but also showcase the ways in which their roles will differ on the campaign trail.On Tuesday afternoon, she appeared alongside President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, who is in Washington this week for a state visit, at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center. There, the two promoted joint projects between the South Korean and U.S. governments and said they would work together to monitor the threat of climate change.Later in the evening, the vice president previewed a fiery and polished campaign style as she attended an event promoting abortion rights, an issue that is likely to define the 2024 race and one that Republicans are struggling to build a unified platform around.She spent her first night on the trail visiting Howard University, a historically Black college and her alma mater, to participate in a rally co-hosted by Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America. Howard students chanted “Four More Years” and gave Ms. Harris a standing ovation as she took the stage.“We are living, I do believe, in a moment in time where so many of our hard-won freedoms are under attack,” Ms. Harris said. “And this is a moment for us to stand and fight.”She criticized the Supreme Court for taking a constitutional right “from the women of America” and assailed “extremist” Republicans around the country for passing restrictive abortion laws, including those that outlaw the procedure in cases of rape and incest — “clearly, most of them don’t even know how a woman’s body works,” she remarked at one point.“Immoral, outrageous, that people who dare to walk around expecting you to respect them, and elect them, would do these kinds of things to other human beings and strip them of their right and entitlement to dignity and autonomy,” Ms. Harris said.An increased number of appearances by Ms. Harris will mean that conservative media outlets like Fox News will have more opportunities to scrutinize everything from the substance of her remarks to her body language, a practice that the vice president’s allies say is rooted in sexism and racism.Some conservative critics have tried to make the case that a vote for Mr. Biden is really a vote for President Harris. On Tuesday, a campaign ad released by the Republican National Committee juxtaposed an image of the president and vice president against artificially generated doomsday scenes.“Republicans will definitely try to make the race as much about her as possible because they see her as more vulnerable, more unpopular,” Tim Miller, a political strategist and communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign, said in an interview. But like Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris has low approval ratings: A recent poll found that 36 percent of Americans think she is doing a good job.“I think she’ll play a more significant role than another V.P. would in another situation,” Mr. Miller added.Vice President Kamala Harris hugging Justin J. Pearson at Fisk Memorial Chapel in Nashville, Tenn., earlier this month, after he was ousted as a state representative in a move that some saw as racially motivated. He was later reinstated. Jon Cherry for The New York TimesMs. Harris came into the Biden administration with an undefined portfolio and stepped into one of the trickiest roles in American politics. She has spent the past two years trying to establish her legacy amid frequent staff turnover and thorny assignments, including addressing the root cause of migration from Central America to the United States. During the first months of his presidency, Mr. Biden referred to her as a “work in progress,” according to Chris Whipple, who wrote a book on the Biden presidency.Several current and former aides said she began to find her footing when she requested to be the administration’s leader on voting rights — only to remain the public face of the issue as legislative efforts to expand ballot access died in Congress.In recent months, she has established herself as an advocate of police reform and as the standard-bearer for the administration on abortion rights since Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, was overturned by the Supreme Court last summer.In recent weeks, Ms. Harris has also traveled to help further Mr. Biden’s calls for stricter gun control measures amid a series of mass shootings. In early April, she made a last-minute trip to Nashville to meet with State Representatives Justin J. Pearson and Justin Jones, two Democratic lawmakers who were expelled for protesting for gun control on the Tennessee House floor and later reinstated. She also met with the two lawmakers, who are Black, alongside the president in Washington this week.“There’s an agenda at play,” Ms. Harris said at Howard. “They even went so far that they had to turn off the microphones on two young elected leaders in Nashville because they couldn’t even stand it. They couldn’t even handle it, these people who want to call themselves leaders.”Ms. Harris’s supporters say they see enormous potential for the vice president to bolster her reputation and further define her legacy as the campaign season approaches. Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis of California, who visited Ms. Harris last week in Washington, said the vice president had grown into her role. She added that Ms. Harris would be able to showcase more of her skills on the campaign trail this time than in 2020, during the height of the pandemic.“Particularly with the younger climate activist leaders in the room, and particularly with people of color, she is an inspirational champion,” Ms. Kounalakis said. “Connecting with real people on the campaign trail is very natural for her, and where she truly thrives.” More

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      Why Kamala Harris Matters So Much in 2024

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      A few weeks ago, one of France’s most famous public intellectuals, Bernard-Henri Lévy, gave an interview to The Times on his new documentary, “Slava Ukraini,” and he said something that helped me understand why, as I approach my 70th birthday, I still want to be a journalist.Asked why, at age 74, he dodged rockets in Ukraine to bring home the savagery of the Russian invasion, Lévy said, “In Ukraine, I had the feeling for the first time that the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren, might collapse.”I have that exact same fear.Which is why the focus of my columns these days has been very tight. There are three things that absolutely cannot be allowed to happen: Israel cannot be allowed to turn into an autocracy like Viktor Orban’s Hungary; Ukraine cannot be allowed to fall to Vladimir Putin; and Donald Trump cannot be allowed to occupy the White House ever again.If all three were to happen, the world that I want to leave my children and grandchildren could completely collapse.Israel, the only functioning pluralistic democracy in the Middle East, tempered by the rule of law, albeit imperfect, would be lost.The European Union — the United States of Europe, the world’s other great multiethnic center of free markets, free people and human rights — would be at Putin’s mercy.And the United States of America, with a vengeful Trump back in the White House, effectively pardoned for his many attacks on our democratic institutions and his assault on the integrity of our elections, would never be the same. Trump would be unchained — an utterly chilling thought.It’s through this lens that I want to talk about Joe Biden’s announcement on Tuesday that he is running for re-election, joined again by Kamala Harris. Biden’s ability to finish his current term and successfully navigate another one is critical to all three scenarios mentioned above. Which is why, now that Biden has declared that he is running, he absolutely has to win.But while you may think the 2024 election is very likely going to be a rerun of 2020, that is not the case for the Democrats. This time, Biden’s running mate will really matter.We are always told that, in the end, people vote for the candidate for president, not for vice president. But because Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term — and therefore the chance of his health failing is not small — people will be asked to vote as much for his vice president as for him, maybe more than in any other election in American history.The most recent FiveThirtyEight average of all the Biden-Harris approval polls found that 51.9 percent of Americans disapprove of Harris’s job performance and 40 percent approve, about the same numbers as Biden’s.Let me be clear: I voted for Joe Biden, and I do not want my money back. He is a good man, and he has been a good president, better than the polls give him credit for. The Western alliance that he put together, and has held together, to counter the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a master class in alliance management and defending the democratic order in Europe. Ask Putin.The way Biden has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he is not fooled by — and will not be indifferent to — Netanyahu’s judicial coup d’état masquerading as a “judicial reform” has been a tremendous source of encouragement for the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets to defend their democracy.And on the domestic issues I care about most — rebuilding America’s infrastructure, ensuring American leadership in the manufacture of the most advanced microchips that will power the age of artificial intelligence, and incentivizing market forces to deliver the huge scale of clean energy we need to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change — Biden has delivered beyond my highest hopes.Joe Biden would be my candidate, no matter what his age, as long he was physically and mentally able, because I see no other Democrat with his blend of political skills, his core belief in the necessity and possibility of national unity, his foreign policy savvy and his ability to disagree with Trump’s supporters without trying to humiliating them. He authentically wants to get the poison out of our political system.But … I am keenly aware that plenty of Americans don’t share my views. I realize that the roughly 30 percent of Republicans who are Trump devotees are most likely beyond reach — and nothing Biden can say will bring them around. However, they will not decide the next election.As Axios reported on April 17, Gallup polling in March “found that a record 49 percent of Americans see themselves as politically independent — the same as the two major parties put together.”This means that there are many moderate, principled conservatives and independents who will not, or prefer not to, vote for Trump again. Just enough of them demonstrated as much in the 2022 midterms to prevent virtually all of the major Trump election deniers running for state and national office from gaining power. Their votes helped to save our democracy.If the 2024 race comes down to Biden vs. Trump again, we are going to need those independents and moderate Republicans to show up again. But this time around, because of his age and the possibility that he might not be able to finish a second term, Biden’s vice president will be much more consequential in their minds.It’s no secret that Vice President Harris has not elevated her stature in the last two-plus years. I don’t know what the problem is — whether she was dealt an impossible set of issues to deal with, or is in over her head, or is contending with a mix of sexism and racism as the first woman of color to serve as vice president. All I know is that doubts among voters about her abilities to serve as president, which were significant enough for her to quit as a presidential candidate even before the Iowa caucuses in 2020, have not gone away.Given the stakes, Biden needs to make the case to his party — and, more important, to independents and moderate Republicans — why Harris is the best choice to succeed him, should he not be able to complete his term. He cannot ignore this issue, because that question will be on the minds of many voters come election time.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesAt the same time, Harris has to make the case for herself, ideally by showing more forcefully what she can do. One thing Biden might consider is putting Harris in charge of ensuring that America’s transition to the age of artificial intelligence works to strengthen communities and the middle class. It is a big theme that could take her all over the country.I wrote a column more than two years ago suggesting that Biden make Harris “his de facto secretary of rural development, in charge of closing the opportunity gap, the connectivity gap, the learning gap, the start-up gap — and the anger and alienation gap — between rural America and the rest of the country.” It would have been a substantive challenge and would have enabled her and the administration to build bridges to rural Republicans. Never happened.I am terrified of going into this election with a Democratic ticket that gives moderate Republicans and independents — who are desperate for an alternative to Trump — any excuse to gravitate back to him.And beware. Trump is no fool. If he’s the G.O.P. nominee, I can easily see him asking a more moderate Republican woman, like Nikki Haley, to be his running mate, knowing that her presence on the ticket could be an incentive that gives at least some of those Republicans and independents who are down on Trump an excuse to plug their noses and vote for him another time.Make no mistake, the vice presidency is really going to matter in an election that is really going to matter. Because I don’t want Biden to win this election by 50.1 percent. I want it to be a landslide rejection of Trumpism and the politics of division. I want it to send a loud message around the world — to the Putins and the Netanyahus and the Orbans — that there are way more of us Americans on the center-right and the center-left, way more people who are ready to work together for the common good, than there are haters and dividers.That’s an America worth handing over to our children and grandchildren.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Julie Chávez Rodríguez: 5 Things to Know About Biden’s Campaign Manager

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      President Biden on Tuesday named Julie Chávez Rodríguez as the campaign manager for his re-election effort, elevating a senior adviser and the highest-ranking Latina in the White House to one of the most intense and scrutinized jobs in American politics.Ms. Chávez Rodríguez, 45, a veteran of the Obama administration and of Vice President Kamala Harris’s political orbit, also worked on Mr. Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign before becoming director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. She is the granddaughter of Cesar Chávez, the iconic labor leader.Here are five things to know about the selection of Ms. Chávez Rodríguez:She has navigated Bidenworld …Mr. Biden has a small circle of close aides, some of whom have known him for years. Breaking into that world can be a challenge, and many Democrats expect that key advisers at the White House will oversee the operation.But several Democrats said that Ms. Chávez Rodríguez had impressed Mr. Biden, 80, and his top advisers, adding that she was often seen as a trustworthy team player with strong political relationships.She “didn’t start off as a Biden person, but she’s always been an honest broker,” said Cristóbal Alex, who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign and in the White House. In both places, he said, some came to embrace the slogan “in Julie we trust.”She has not managed a campaign before, a departure from the résumés of some past presidential campaign managers who had run congressional races or were steeped in party committee work.But she was a deputy campaign manager on the 2020 Biden campaign. At the White House, she dealt regularly with governors, mayors and other state and local leaders and led emergency response coordination efforts.“The ability to multitask, the ability to move on a dime, to be able to step back and sort of take in the complexity and then manage through that complexity — I can’t imagine a more challenging job than the one she’s had,” said Gov. Phil Murphy, a New Jersey Democrat and the chair of the National Governors Association. “I’m not making light of what it’s like to run a presidential campaign for a second. It’s a big job. But she’s had a big job.”… and Harris’s orbit.She is also closely connected to Ms. Harris, who may draw particular attention from voters because of Mr. Biden’s age.Ms. Chávez Rodríguez, a Californian, served as Ms. Harris’s state director when she was a California senator, and on her presidential campaign.“Her deep relationships with Biden’s core team and a deep relationship with the vice president’s office, I think, makes for the ideal candidate,” said Juan Rodriguez, a strategist who worked with her (no relation, he said) under Ms. Harris.A woman of color is now the face of Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign.During the last presidential campaign, Mr. Biden at times faced criticism over the whiteness of his inner circle.As he moves now to energize core elements of the multiracial coalition that delivered him the presidency, some Democrats said Ms. Chávez Rodríguez offered vital representation at the highest levels of American politics.“People in the Hispanic community are feeling that,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who directed the Domestic Policy Council during the Obama administration, the first Hispanic person to hold that job.She got an early start in political activism.Ms. Chávez Rodríguez, who was arrested at age 9 during a protest, has seen her family and professional lives overlap.Valerie B. Jarrett, who served as a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, recalled that Ms. Chávez Rodríguez worked at the dedication of a national monument to her grandfather, but was reluctant to join a family photo, citing professional obligations. (Dolores Huerta, who worked closely with Mr. Chávez, insisted she join, Ms. Jarrett said.)The moment demonstrated an “egoless quality, which is, let’s say, unusual oftentimes in high levels,” Ms. Jarrett said.Whether that family legacy is meaningful to voters is another matter, said Matthew J. Garcia, a Dartmouth professor who has written about Mr. Chávez, noting that the United Farm Workers, the union he co-founded, has lost clout.“It may work with baby boomers, but the newer generation have different ideas about the U.F.W., if they have any ideas at all,” he said.Mr. Biden, however, placed a bust of Mr. Chávez in the Oval Office.She is walking into a difficult job.While Mr. Biden, as the incumbent, has many advantages, he also has clear liabilities. And in a deeply polarized country, early surveys show a competitive general election race.Against that backdrop, Ms. Chávez Rodríguez must quickly help build a huge operation and balance Mr. Biden’s governing responsibilities with campaigning, while adjusting to leading a campaign for the first time.“The traditional résumé of a campaign manager for a candidate for president of the United States is usually to be white and to be male,” Ms. Muñoz said. “If you’re a woman of color, you, almost by definition, have to come up through a nontraditional route. But I’ll tell you what — the president knows what she can do.” More

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      Biden buscará la reelección y así prepara la posible revancha con Trump

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      El presidente de EE. UU. anunció formalmente que se candidatiza a un segundo mandato, presentándose como el demócrata mejor posicionado para impedir que Donald Trump vuelva a ocupar la Casa Blanca.At 80, President Biden is already the oldest president in American history and, by the end of a potential second term, he would be 86.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — El presidente de Estados Unidos, Joe Biden, anunció que buscará un segundo mandato de cuatro años en un video publicado en línea la mañana del martes en el que instaba a los votantes a permitirle “terminar este trabajo” y abriendo la posibilidad de una revancha con el expresidente Donald Trump.En el video, de tres minutos y cuatro segundos, Biden que ha pasado sus primeros años en el cargo luchando por la democracia y la libertad. Y advierte que los “extremistas de MAGA” en todo el país —al emplear las siglas en inglés del lema de Trump, “Hagamos a Estados Unidos grandioso de nuevo”—amenazan dichas libertades.“Cuando me postulé para presidente hace cuatro años, dije que estábamos en una batalla por el alma de Estados Unidos. Y así seguimos todavía”, dice Biden en el video y añade luego: “Por eso estoy presentándome para la reelección”.La declaración formal de la candidatura de Biden sucede cuatro años después del día que anunció que buscaría la presidencia en 2019, declarando en aquel entonces que era crucial evitar que Trump ganara un segundo periodo.Biden triunfó en 2020. Pero si Trump se convierte en el nominado de los republicanos —ahora es el favorito— el legado de Biden estará determinado por si será capaz de bloquear una vez más el regreso de Trump al poder.Aquí hay más que debes saber:Biden hablará a trabajadores del sindicato a las 12:30 pm hora del este en Washington sobre los planes para ayudar a la fabricación y la clase media. El evento hace un guiño a su anuncio de 2020, cuando habló en un salón sindical de Pittsburgh después de publicar un video de lanzamiento de campaña en línea.Es probable que ni la agenda de Biden ni su discurso cambien de inmediato. Sus colaboradores dijeron que se esperaba que mantuviera los mismos temas en los que se había centrado durante meses: reclamar mérito por una economía que mejora y atacar a los republicanos en los temas relacionados con el aborto, los recortes de impuestos, las armas y la intolerancia. Algo que comenzará rápidamente es la recaudación de fondos. Los principales donantes del presidente han sido invitados a una cumbre en Washington el viernes para comenzar a reunir fondos.Biden ha despejado prácticamente la carrera presidencial demócrata a pesar de las dudas que suscita su edad —a sus 80 años, ya es el presidente estadounidense de más edad de la historia— y de los recelos persistentes de un gran número de votantes de su partido. Aunque las encuestas muestran repetidamente que los demócratas anhelan una cara nueva en 2024, no saben quién sería.Biden eligió a Julie Chávez Rodríguez, una de las principales asesoras y la latina de más alto rango en la Casa Blanca, para ser su directora de campaña. Quentin Fulks, quien dirigió la campaña de 2022 para el senador Raphael Warnock de Georgia, será su suplente. Pero otros miembros del círculo cercano de Biden, incluida Jen O’Malley Dillon, su directora de campaña anterior, y Anita Dunn, su gurú de las comunicaciones, permanecerán en la Casa Blanca por ahora.El presidente no menciona por nombre a Trump en el video. Pero el trasfondo es claro: empieza con las escenas del ataque al Capitolio el 6 de enero. Cuando Biden dice las palabras “extremistas de MAGA”, la pantalla muestra una imagen de Trump con el brazo sobre el hombro del gobernador de Florida Ron DeSantis, otro potencial rival republicano. Aunque el equipo de Biden está apostando a que probablemente su oponente será Trump, el presidente ya ha empezado a arreciar sus críticas contra todos los republicanos. More

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      As Biden Runs Again, the Map, Issues and Incumbency Favor Democrats

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      Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe their country is on a “wrong track.” The incumbent president will be 81 on Election Day 2024. More than half of the voters in his own party don’t want him to run for re-election.Yet as President Biden embarks on his campaign for a second term, Democratic officials firmly believe he is beginning his bid on Tuesday from ground that is far more solid than his personal standing indicates. Democratic unity has stifled even the hint of an intraparty insurgency. The issues dominating the nation’s politics have largely worked in the Democrats’ favor. And a battleground that has narrowed to only a handful of states means, at least for now, that the 2024 campaign will be waged on favorable Democratic terrain.“I’m always going to be worried because we’re a very divided country, and presidential races are going to be close, no matter who is in it,” said Anne Caprara, who helped lead Hillary Clinton’s super PAC in 2016 and is now chief of staff to Illinois’s Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker. “But for the first time in my career, I think Republicans have painted themselves into a terrible position. They’re losing and they can’t seem to see that.”Without doubt, Mr. Biden’s personal liabilities are tugging at the Democrats’ well-worn worry strings. Despite low unemployment, a remarkably resilient economy and an enviable record of legislative accomplishments in his first two years, the octogenarian president has never quite won over the nation, or even voters in his party. A new NBC News poll has Mr. Biden losing to a generic Republican presidential candidate, 47 percent to 41 percent.“President Biden is in remarkably weak shape for an incumbent running for re-election,” said Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster who co-directs the NBC News poll.Republicans plan to play on those uncertainties, harping on Mr. Biden’s age and frailty and painting him as the weakest incumbent president to run for re-election since Jimmy Carter tried 44 years ago. The campaign of former President Donald J. Trump is already looking past the coming Republican nomination fight to contrast what it sees as the strength of personality of an aggressive challenger against a vulnerable incumbent.“This is a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump,” said Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, adding, “If they think that is their greatest strength, they are going to have a long, miserable year.”But the political fundamentals look significantly better than Mr. Biden’s personal approval.By avoiding a serious primary challenge, Mr. Biden will not be spending the next year fighting with members of his own party on difficult issues like immigration, crime, gender and abortion in ways that might turn off swing voters. Instead, he can bide his time attending ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings for roads and bridges, semiconductor plants, electric vehicle manufacturers and solar energy projects that stem from his three biggest legislative achievements — the infrastructure bill, the “chips and science” law and the Inflation Reduction Act, with its huge tax incentives for clean energy.President Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, attending a ceremony at the White House on Monday, the day before he formally declared his candidacy for a second term. Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe mere presence of Mr. Trump in the Republican primary race is helping the Democrats make the 2024 campaign a choice between the two parties, not a referendum on the incumbent, a far more difficult challenge for the party in power, said Jim Messina, who managed the last successful presidential re-election campaign, Barack Obama’s in 2012. Early polls, both in key states like Wisconsin and nationally, have Mr. Biden holding onto a slim lead over Mr. Trump, but even with or behind Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.The Republicans’ narrow control of the House has also given Mr. Biden a foil in the months before a Republican presidential nominee emerges, just as the Republican Congress helped Mr. Obama.And then there is the map.The 2022 midterms should have been a disaster for a president with low approval ratings. Instead, in two critical states — Pennsylvania and Michigan — the Democratic Party greatly strengthened its hand and its electoral infrastructure, with victories in the governors’ races in both states, the Pennsylvania House flipping to the Democrats and the Michigan Legislature falling to complete Democratic control for the first time in nearly 40 years.At the outset of the 2024 campaign, two-thirds of the Upper Midwestern “Blue Wall” that Mr. Trump shattered in 2016 and Mr. Biden rebuilt in 2020 appear to favor the Democrats.As partisanship intensifies in Democratic and Republican states, battlegrounds like Florida, Ohio and Iowa have moved firmly toward Republicans, but other battlegrounds like Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire look reliably Democratic.That has elevated just a handful of states as potentially decisive next year: Wisconsin, the third brick in the “Blue Wall”; Georgia, once reliably Republican; Arizona; and Pennsylvania, especially if the political winds shift in the Republicans’ favor. If Mr. Biden can lock down Pennsylvania, he would need to win only one of the other big battlegrounds — Wisconsin, Georgia or Arizona — to get the necessary Electoral College votes in 2024. Even if he lost Nevada, he would still win as long as he secures New Hampshire and doesn’t split the Electoral College votes of Maine.Wisconsin had a split decision in 2022, with the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, winning re-election while the Republican senator, Ron Johnson, also prevailed. But this month, an expensive, hard-fought State Supreme Court race in Wisconsin went to the Democratic-backed candidate by 11 percentage points, a remarkable margin.Democrats won the governorship in Arizona in 2022. And while they lost the governor’s race decisively in Georgia, they eked out the Senate contest between the incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and the Republican, Herschel Walker.Those recent electoral successes point to the other major factor that appears to be playing in the Democrats’ favor: the issues. The erosion of abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has continued to dominate electoral outcomes in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And abortion is not fading, in large part because the socially conservative core of the Republican electorate keeps driving red states and conservative judges forward on abortion restrictions.The tragic drumbeat of mass shootings has kept gun control high on the political agenda as well, an issue that Democrats believe will help them with suburban voters in key swing states and will trap Republicans between a base of voters who want no compromise on gun rights and a broader electorate that increasingly favors restrictions.Republicans have issues that could favor them, too. Crime helped deliver House seats in New York and California, which secured the narrow House majority for the G.O.P. And transgender politics might help Republicans with some swing voters. A poll for National Public Radio last summer found that 63 percent of Americans opposed allowing transgender women and girls to compete on teams that align with their gender identity, while broader support for L.G.B.T. rights has only gained ground.But a hotly contested primary is likely to drag the eventual nominee to the right, even on issues that could otherwise favor his party. Mr. DeSantis, widely seen as Mr. Trump’s most serious challenger, signed a ban on abortion in his state after six weeks, a threshold before many women know they are pregnant.And at some point, Republicans’ drive against transgender people and their fixation on social issues may appear to be bullying — or simply far afield from real issues in the lives of swing voters, said Ms. Caprara, the chief of staff for the Illinois governor.“There’s this toxic soup between abortion, guns, gay rights, library books, African American history,” she said. “It just comes across to people as, ‘Who are these people?’”The biggest issue, however, may be the storm cloud on the horizon that may or may not burst — the economy. In 2020, Mr. Biden became one of the few presidential candidates in modern history to have triumphed over the candidate who was more trusted on the economy in polls.Since then, the surge of job creation from the trough of the coronavirus pandemic has shattered monthly employment records, while unemployment rates — especially for workers of color — are at or near their lowest levels ever. Inflation, which peaked near 10 percent, is now at about 5 percent.Yet Mr. Biden continues to get low marks on his economic stewardship, and those marks could deteriorate as the Federal Reserve continues to tamp down inflation with higher interest rates, warned Mr. Messina, the former Obama campaign manager. A new poll for CNBC found that 53 percent of Americans expect the economy will get worse, compared with 34 percent when Mr. Biden took office.“Today, I’d rather be Joe Biden,” Mr. Messina said. “But I wish I knew where the economy is going to be, because that’s the one thing hanging out there that nobody can control.” More

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      Biden Announces Re-election Bid, Defying Trump and History

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      WASHINGTON — President Biden formally announced on Tuesday that he would seek a second term, arguing that American democracy still faces a profound threat from former President Donald J. Trump as he set up the possibility of a climactic rematch between the two next year.In a video that opens with images of a mob of Trump supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the president said that the “fight for our democracy” has “been the work of my first term” but is incomplete while his predecessor mounts a comeback campaign for his old office that Mr. Biden suggested would endanger fundamental rights.“Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms,” Mr. Biden said, using Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan to describe the former president’s allies. “Cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy. Dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love. All while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.“When I ran for president four years ago,” he added, “I said we were in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are.”The official declaration finally ended any lingering suspense over Mr. Biden’s intentions and effectively cleared the way to another nomination for the president, barring unforeseen developments. While he had repeatedly and consistently said he intended to run, Mr. Biden stoked renewed speculation by delaying his kickoff for months. Now his team can assemble the formal structure of a campaign organization and raise money to finance it.Mr. Biden tapped Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a senior White House adviser and granddaughter of the iconic labor leader Cesar Chávez, as his campaign manager. Quentin Fulks, a Democratic operative who most recently ran Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election campaign in Georgia, will serve as her principal deputy. But the operation is expected to be overseen from the White House by top presidential aides.Although he described himself as “a bridge” to the next generation during his 2020 campaign, a comment that some interpreted as a hint that he would serve only one term, Mr. Biden concluded that he was not in fact ready to hand over the torch yet. His decision was fueled in part, aides said, by his antipathy for Mr. Trump and his belief that he is the Democrat best positioned to keep the criminally indicted and twice-impeached former president from recapturing the White House.In offering himself as a candidate again, Mr. Biden is asking Americans to trust him with the powers of the commander in chief well into his ninth decade. At age 80, Mr. Biden is already the oldest president in American history, and, if he were to win, he would be 86 at the end of a second term, nearly nine years older than Ronald Reagan was when he left the White House in 1989. Mr. Trump, no youngster at 76, would himself outlast every president by age other than Mr. Biden if he were restored to the Oval Office and finished his new term at 82.As Mr. Biden formally kicked off his campaign, he appeared at this point to be a virtual lock to win his party’s nomination. While many Democrats had hoped he would cede to a younger candidate, no formidable challenger for the nomination has emerged. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a son of the iconic assassinated senator and a vocal critic of vaccines, and Marianne Williamson, the self-help author whose 2020 campaign fizzled before the first votes were cast, have announced long-shot bids but pose little evident threat to the incumbent president.If Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump square off again next year, it would be the first time that the same nominees faced each other in consecutive presidential elections since 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson for the second time. It would also be the first time a president was challenged by his predecessor since Theodore Roosevelt attempted a comeback in 1912 against his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, in a three-way campaign won by Woodrow Wilson.While Mr. Biden presides over a more unified party than his potential challenger does, many Democrats privately worry that the president may not be up to another campaign. His overall approval rating remains mired at just over 42 percent, according to an aggregation of polls by the political website FiveThirtyEight, lower than 10 of the last 13 presidents at this point in their terms.While polls show that most Democrats have favorable opinions about Mr. Biden, a majority of them would still rather he not run again. In a survey by NBC News released this week, 70 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Democrats, said he should not seek a second term. Seven out of 10 of those who did not want him to serve four more years cited his age as a factor.Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump face a strikingly competitive race, with recent polls by Yahoo News, The Wall Street Journal and Morning Consult showing the president slightly ahead while surveys by The Economist and the Harvard University Center for American Political Studies find him trailing by several points. Mr. Biden faces similarly mixed results against Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the strongest challenger to Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination.Mr. Trump did not even wait for Mr. Biden’s video to be posted to attack the president’s re-election announcement, castigating him in a statement on Monday night for high inflation, gas prices and illegal immigration. “You could take the five worst presidents in American history, and put them together, and they would not have done the damage Joe Biden has done to our nation in just a few short years,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “Not even close.”Mr. Biden’s announcement represented the latest improbable chapter in a long life in public office, the fourth time he has thrown his hat in the presidential ring and presumably the last campaign of a half-century-plus career that began with his election to the New Castle County Council in 1970.Over the course of 36 years in the Senate, eight years as vice president and campaigns for the White House in 1988, 2008 and 2020, Mr. Biden has become one of the most familiar faces in American life, known for his resilience in adversity as well as his habitual gaffes. And yet the avuncular, backslapping, work-across-the-aisle deal maker has struggled to translate decades of good will into the unifying presidency he promised.Working with the narrowest of partisan margins in Congress, Mr. Biden in his first two years scored some of the most ambitious legislative victories of any modern president, including a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package; a $1 trillion program to rebuild the nation’s roads, highways, airports and other infrastructure; and major investments to combat climate change, lower prescription drug costs for seniors, treat veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and build up the nation’s semiconductor industry. Some of those bills passed with Republican votes.Along the way, he has revitalized international alliances that had frayed under Mr. Trump, rallying NATO and other partners around the world to stand against Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. With bipartisan support, he has committed more than $100 billion to arm Ukraine’s military and help its government and people survive the Russian onslaught.Yet his decision to withdraw forces from Afghanistan after 20 years in keeping with an agreement with the Taliban struck by Mr. Trump led to a debacle in 2021 in which the radical militants took over the country, fleeing Afghans swarmed American airplanes taking off from Kabul and a suicide bomber killed 13 American troops and 170 Afghans during the withdrawal.Mr. Biden has also struggled to secure the southwestern U.S. border, where illegal migration has soared, and he has had mixed success in stabilizing the post-pandemic economy, which saw inflation rise to its highest level in four decades and gas prices shoot up to record levels. While both have begun to come back down and unemployment is near historic lows, many Americans remain unsettled by economic anxiety.Perhaps most frustrating to Mr. Biden, his hopes to heal the rifts that widened under Mr. Trump have so far been dashed, with American society still deeply polarized and his predecessor still a potent force in stirring the forces of division and emboldening white supremacists and anti-Semites.The president’s critics say that Mr. Biden is the one who is divisive because of his attacks on Mr. Trump’s “ultra-MAGA Republicans,” and they portray him as a socialist bent on destroying the country. Regardless of whom they nominate, Republicans expect to challenge Mr. Biden next year by linking him to the nation’s economic troubles and depicting him as a feckless leader held captive by his party’s activist left.Even as Mr. Biden put off a formal kickoff to his re-election bid, his team had been quietly making plans for the coming campaign. Top advisers such as Anita Dunn, Steven J. Ricchetti and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon will oversee the campaign from the White House even though the operation’s formal headquarters will almost certainly be in Wilmington, Del., under Ms. Chavez Rodriguez’s direction.But it will be much different than any campaign in which Mr. Biden has ever run. His first two bids for the White House each collapsed by the end of the first caucus, in an era long before the ubiquitous presence of social media and modern technological techniques, and his 2020 campaign was warped by the Covid-19 pandemic, which kept him largely isolated at his home in Delaware.This time aides said he planned a vigorous campaign travel schedule but would lean heavily on digital communications that bypass the traditional news media. The emerging contest will be complicated by the fact that his opponent is under criminal indictment by a local Democratic prosecutor in New York on charges of covering up hush money paid to a porn star and is being investigated by Mr. Biden’s own Justice Department for instigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and illegally refusing to turn over classified documents.Although Mr. Biden has remained publicly silent on Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, the former president has tried to blame the incumbent, accusing him of wielding the justice system against him out of partisan animus. No evidence of that has surfaced, but Mr. Biden’s own handling of classified documents is being investigated by a special counsel and his son Hunter Biden is being investigated by another federal prosecutor.Mr. Biden’s strategists recognize that he starts off the campaign with significant vulnerabilities but are banking on the idea that however ambivalent swing voters may be about him, they are dead set against putting Mr. Trump back in the White House. If they face another Republican, they plan to argue that anyone who wins that party’s nomination will have to adopt the same radical positions as Mr. Trump. More