Is Biden’s pledge to defend democracy the key to defeating Trump in 2024?
What’s happening
In his first campaign speech of the election year, President Biden framed the race as a battle over the fate of American democracy.
“Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot,” he said.
With polls showing that a potential 2024 rematch against former President Donald Trump is likely to be a close contest, Biden has opted to make “democracy the central issue” of his reelection bid.
The president spent much of his address discussing the “horror” of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, as well as Trump’s continued election denial and ongoing effort to recast participants in the deadly riots as patriots.
He then pivoted to warnings about what Trump would do if he were to regain the presidency — referencing the former president’s own stated calls for the termination of parts of the the Constitution, his plan to be a dictator on day one of his next term and his pledge to seek retribution against his political enemies.
Trump responded by calling Biden the “true threat to democracy” during an interview with Fox News in which he repeated baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
Why there’s debate
Though most Democrats agree with Biden’s view that Trump poses a unique threat to U.S. democratic institutions if he regains power, there’s strong disagreement within the party over whether it's a good strategy to make that a centerpiece of Biden’s campaign.
Critics of the approach say voters make their decisions based on things that directly affect them in their lives every day, not lofty, abstract concepts like defending democracy. They argue that the president should instead focus on changing the public’s dour views of the economy, addressing concerns that he lacks the stamina to make it through another four years in office and hammering the GOP for its unpopular stances on issues like abortion.
But defenders of the strategy say Democrats’ recent track record in races against election-denying Republicans, most notably during the 2022 midterms, shows that democracy really does motivate voters to come to their side. Many argue that Biden can easily tie all those other “kitchen table issues” into the conversation about democracy by warning that a Trump victory would imperil the economy and put personal freedoms at risk.
Conservatives, for their part, say that Biden has to turn the election into a debate about democracy because voters are so dissatisfied with his performance on all the other issues that he could be campaigning on.
What’s next
Beyond being just a campaign issue, Trump’s election denial has also put him in serious legal trouble that could determine the 2024 race. The Supreme Court is expected to decide in the coming weeks whether states can bar him from the ballot over the claim that he engaged in insurrection. Trump also faces 91 felony counts that, depending on how and when those cases are resolved, could see him put in jail before voters head to the polls in November.
