Why Biden’s promise to ‘defend democracy’ won’t be enough to rally voters in 2024 

On Friday, President Biden went to Valley Forge, Pa., site of George Washington’s marshalling of troops for a decisive battle in the Revolutionary War, for his first 2024 campaign event of the year. Wanting to capture the symbolism of that bleak moment for the American rebels, Biden, like Washington, hopes to rally the nation to fight for democracy and against tyranny. 

 As Biden put it, “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is what the 2024 election is all about.” This, he said, is “the most urgent question of our time.”  

But simply saying it will not make it so. 

While Friday’s speech was filled with stirring rhetoric, Biden will have to be much more concrete about why voters should care about preserving democracy if he wants to prevail. Voters have a lot on their minds and seem to be in an especially sour mood — civics books’ bromides about democracy’s virtues will not do the job. 

As Biden’s campaign goes on, he will have to clearly connect the preservation of democracy with the government’s ability to address issues that are now top of mind for the American electorate. He will have to show voters how the things that they care about will be in jeopardy if we lose our capacity to govern ourselves through democratic institutions and processes.  

In other words, he will have to do more than he did on Friday to explain why democracy matters in the voters’ daily lives.  

This will be no easy task.  

Let’s look at the approach Biden took during his visit to Pennsylvania. 

The New York Times was right to describe what the president said as an “an early effort to revive the politically sprawling anti-Trump coalition that propelled Democrats to key victories in recent elections.” As the Times put it, “Biden’s task now is to persuade those voters to view the 2024 contest as the same kind of national emergency that they sensed in 2018, 2020 and 2022.” 

Biden paid particular attention to what likely Republican nominee Donald Trump has said about the events of Jan. 6, 2021. The president accused his Republican rival of “trying to rewrite the facts” of that fateful day and of “trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election.”  

Continuing his focus on the attack on the Capitol, Biden told his audience that “Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest; it was a violent assault. They were,” he argued, “insurrectionists, not patriots. They weren’t there to uphold the Constitution; they were there to destroy the Constitution.” 

“The choice is clear,” Biden said, drawing a stark contrast between Trump’s campaign and his own. “There is no confusion about who Trump is and what he intends to do. … Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power. Our campaign is different.”  

It was not until late in his speech that Biden connected his defense of democracy with the defense of abortion rights, voting rights, and economic and environmental justice. As he put it, “without democracy no progress is possible. … Democracy is how we’ve opened the doctors of opportunity.”  

But he did not dwell there or talk about pocketbook issues. He quickly returned to blasting Trump for his “assault on democracy,” insisting that in 2024, “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.” And he promised to make “the defense, preservation and protection of democracy … the central cause of my presidency.” 

Biden faces several challenges in his effort to rally the country to that cause. 

First, surveys show that, today, millions of Americans are less attached to democracy — and less aware of the threat to it — than they were in generations past. As political scientists Christopher Claassen and Pedro C. Magalhães noted in an article last fall, “Support for democracy in the United States, once thought to be solid, has now been shown to be somewhat shaky.” 

They went on to point out that, “One of the most concerning aspects of this declining attachment to democracy is a marked age gap, with younger Americans left supportive of democracy than they’re older compatriots.” 

Other polls have shown that “about half the country — 49 percent — say democracy is not working well in the United States, compared with 10 percent who say it’s working very or extremely well and 40 percent only somewhat well.”  

This suggests that for Biden’s effort to rally Americans to the defense of democracy, he will have to do more than praise its virtues, as he did on Friday — he will have to acknowledge its flaws and identify paths to improve its performance. 

Second, Biden faces the challenge of convincing people, even those disposed to use their vote to defend democracy, that he — not Trump — is the right choice to do so. The Trump campaign is already doing all it can to muddy the waters. 

The former president himself did so when he responded to Biden’s speech, claiming that it is Biden who threatens democracy. As he put it, “Because of his gross incompetence, Joe Biden is a true threat to democracy.”   

Trump told a rally in Iowa last month that Biden is guilty of “weaponizing government against his political opponents like a Third World political tyrant. Biden and his radical left allies like to pose as standing up as allies of democracy.  

“Joe Biden,” Trump suggested, “is not the defender of American democracy, Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.” 

Finally, when Americans are asked to identify “the most important issues facing the country today,” they mention inflation, health care, the climate, jobs, and immigration — in that order. Biden’s challenge is to remind to voters that a democratic government produces better policy outcomes on each of those issues.  

Democracies, as Biden’s own State Department explains are “more likely to secure the peace, deter aggression, expand open markets, promote economic development, protect American citizens, combat international terrorism and crime, uphold human and worker rights, avoid humanitarian crises and refugee flows, improve the global environment, and protect human health.” 

The New York Times captured the nature of Biden’s task: “Democrats have found that while ideas of democracy can motivate the party’s most engaged voters, it can be more of a struggle to connect lofty ideals to voters who are more focused on economic issues like high prices and interest rates.”  

In the end, Biden must connect the defense of democracy to the day-to-day concerns of the American electorate. He has to convince them that their own ways of life and prosperity are on the ballot if he is to succeed when Americans go to the polls in November. 

Austin Sarat (@ljstprof) is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Amherst College.