President Biden’s 2024 campaign is likely to look a lot different than the last time he sought a White House bid.
Though his potential general election opponent, GOP primary frontrunner former President Trump, will set up a possible rematch between the two men, the circumstances of campaigning have changed dramatically and in unexpected ways since 2020.
Here are five ways Biden’s reelection campaign will differ.
Pandemic restrictions gone
Perhaps the largest difference between Biden’s 2020 White House run and his 2024 reelection effort will be his ability to be out in the forefront as COVID-19 has faded into the background of most Americans’ daily lives.
The prevalence of the virus, resulting in restrictions amid the lack of an effective vaccine during the 2020 campaign, meant Biden mostly avoided large events and sparingly traveled far from his home in Delaware.
That strategy drew mockery from Republicans, who suggested Biden was hiding in his basement, but it proved effective as Biden and his team allowed then-President Trump and his inflammatory rhetoric to take the spotlight.
This time around, Biden will be able to meet voters where they are. White House allies believe it will be an asset, as Biden is particularly effective when he’s working rope lines, taking selfies and having face-to-face interactions with voters.
Republicans will be quick to seize on any signs that Biden is unable to keep up with the pace of a more active campaign.
“It’s going to be hidin’ Biden again, just like we had in 2020, and I just hope the American people reject that and want to see this candidate face the American people and answer tough questions, which he’s never done,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said Wednesday on Fox News.
Abortion at center of Democrat campaigns
Abortion was already an issue for many voters during the 2020 election following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and subsequent appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
But the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that overturned Roe v. Wade by the conservative-majority bench opened the floodgates for a slew of restrictive abortion laws passed in Republican-led states and lawsuits targeting access to abortion medication.
“For the first time, the president will really matter with regards to abortion in a visceral way,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way. “A Republican president with a Republican Congress would likely pass some abortion ban.”
The Biden-Harris campaign is expected to lean into their defense of reproductive rights and abortion access, believing the midterm election results, state ballot initiatives and a Wisconsin Supreme Court race have all shown the issue has changed the political landscape.
Their focus on abortion was featured prominently in Biden’s launch video, which showed images of protests outside the Supreme Court and included the president talking about “MAGA extremists” threatening to take away women’s health care decisions.
A record to run on
If Biden was able to win the White House in 2020 in part because of anti-Trump sentiment that dragged down his opponent, he will have to do more to show voters he deserves a second term.
“Running for president the first time is aspirational. You can make all sorts of big bold promises. Running for reelection is when you actually get your report card from the American people,” Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary, said Sunday on her MSNBC show.
The White House believes Biden has a strong record to run on, pointing to consistent economic growth out of the pandemic, a slew of bipartisan legislation passed with narrow margins in Congress and a return of U.S. leadership on the world stage in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But the president is likely to face intense scrutiny from Republicans over inflation, the surge of migrants at the southern border and the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, which included a bombing that left 13 Americans dead.
A late March poll from The Associated Press found 31 percent of Americans surveyed approve of Biden’s handling of the economy. Among Democrats, 76 percent said they approved of his overall job as president, but just 63 percent said they approved of his handling of the economy.
Jan. 6 riots
The first image of Biden’s reelection announcement video is of rioters violently storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election results — the last step in solidifying his win.
The frequency with which Biden talks about the attack on the Capitol, which came days before his inauguration, is a reflection of how it has heightened concerns about the fragility of U.S. democracy and the dangers of a second Trump term.
Biden often warned during the 2020 campaign that Trump posed a danger to democracy and drew on Trump’s comments about the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., to warn the soul of the nation was at stake.
The president is likely to similarly use the Jan. 6 attacks to warn democracy is still at risk, just as he did during last year’s midterms when he called out the prominence of election deniers among GOP candidates.
“When I ran for President four years ago, I said we are in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are,” Biden said in his campaign launch video. “The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer.”
Trump’s legal woes
Trump is not guaranteed to be Biden’s opponent; the former president will have to beat out a field of GOP challengers that is still taking shape.
But Trump is consistently leading in nearly every national poll of GOP primary voters, and surveys have indicated many of them would still back the former president despite him being the only president in history to be charged with a crime.
While Trump was a controversial figure who’d been impeached once already at the time of the 2020 election, the former president is now under numerous legal clouds that could simultaneously give Biden fodder for attacking his eventual opponent while testing his desire to avoid weighing in on Justice Department matters.
Trump has been charged with more than 30 felony counts in New York City over his alleged involvement in a hush money scheme to cover up an alleged affair during the 2016 campaign. He is facing separate Justice Department investigations into his conduct around the Jan. 6 attacks and his handling of classified material upon leaving office. And the attorney general in Fulton County, Ga., is probing possible illegal activity around efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
All of those investigations give Biden a clear opening to attack Trump as unfit for office and undeserving of a second term. But the president and his administration have been careful not to be seen as meddling in Justice Department matters or ongoing investigations.
As a result, Biden is not expected to proactively attack Trump over his legal woes anytime soon, but the issue bears watching if Trump does secure the GOP nomination.