WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are set for their most direct confrontation to date this week in a battleground state play for working-class voters, further illustrating how both men have increasingly turned their attention to a likely rematch ahead of schedule.
The matchup is one both campaigns had seen as inevitable, but sources acknowledge it has kicked off earlier than had been anticipated. Biden’s decision to join striking autoworkers in Michigan on Tuesday — after Trump had already announced plans to meet with voters — comes as Trump is treating his own party’s primary campaign as more of a coronation.
Biden campaign advisers say the stepped-up focus on Trump, the Republican front-runner, is driven in part by Trump’s recent moves on issues they expect to be crucial next fall — abortion and the economy.
When Trump, for instance, criticized GOP rivals for seeking to enact abortion bans starting as early as six weeks of pregnancy, the Biden team quickly highlighted his earlier efforts to take credit for having appointed Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
And when Trump announced plans to meet with United Auto Workers members in Michigan rather than attend this week’s GOP primary debate, Biden’s re-election campaign deployed talking points to surrogates to hammer home what they said was Trump’s anti-worker and anti-union record.
Biden’s campaign had initially telegraphed, before his April re-election announcement, that it would most likely stick closely to Barack Obama’s re-election strategy of keeping the president out of the campaign fray for as long as possible. Obama didn’t hold his first campaign rally until late spring 2012.
But Biden has taken a different approach as part of an effort to show key Democratic coalition groups are behind him. When Biden attended a campaign-style rally major labor unions hosted in June, a senior campaign adviser offered that the campaign was “doing it a little differently” than Obama and that it would hold more political events this year.
At a Labor Day rally in Philadelphia, Biden blasted Trump, but not by name, instead calling him the “great real estate builder” for having reneged on his plans for a major infrastructure bill. The following week Biden branded him “Donald Hoover Trump” for being just the second president to have left office with fewer Americans working than when he started. And at recent fundraisers in New York, Biden has been test-driving even more pointed criticisms of Trump as a threat to democracy, which will be a theme of another major speech this week in the battleground state of Arizona.
Biden’s campaign is still keeping its eyes on the rest of the GOP field, even as the seven-person Republican primary debate in Simi Valley, California, on Wednesday appears to be more of a sideshow. One reason, a Biden adviser said, is the possibility that one of the participants could end up on the general election ticket with Trump. In a “prebuttal” call with reporters Monday, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and California Gov. Gavin Newsom cast the GOP field as Trump acolytes, supporting and building on what they said was a failed “MAGA-nomics” approach.
But Trump seemed free to go after Biden throughout the Republican primaries because none of his rivals threatened him and diverted his attention. Since his earliest days on the campaign trail in the spring, Trump has used that license to take policy stands that position him closer to the political center than several of his challengers and to hone his arguments against Biden.
Biden’s domestic travel this year has centered mostly on his economic record, with a particular focus on how his accomplishments have helped workers without college degrees and those in industries like manufacturing, which have declined for two decades.
Trump’s trip to Detroit on Wednesday aims to take advantage of a potential rift between Biden and that coalition. Rather than choosing a side in their dispute over salaries and benefits, Trump is levying the charge that Biden’s push for electric vehicles puts auto industry jobs in more lasting peril. Unlike the Republicans who have aligned themselves with the car companies, Trump frames himself as an ally of blue-collar laborers, a vital constituency in crucial Midwestern swing states that helped him win the 2016 election.
Trump has also distanced himself from the most extreme element of his party on abortion by embracing rape, incest and life-of-the-woman exceptions to state-level bans; criticizing fellow Republicans for the way they talk about the issue; and hammering Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for having signed a bill outlawing most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
Trump jumped into the general election far earlier than Biden, giving himself a head start in a race for the White House that increasingly looks like it will yield a rematch.
Brad Todd, a Republican strategist, said Biden and Trump are essentially both incumbents on their respective sides at a time when the nation is so deeply and evenly divided.
“If this is an election between two incumbent presidents, it only figures that the general election starts early,” he said.
Jim Messina, who ran Obama’s 2012 campaign, said it’s to Biden’s advantage to sharpen voters’ focus against Trump.
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“It helps you engage your base and your fundraising,” he said. “What has become clear to the Democrats is it’s going to be Trump.”
While Biden doesn’t have as large a campaign as Obama did at this point in 2011, Messina said that this time the campaign is working much more closely with the Democratic National Committee and will most likely be able to again set fundraising records. And, he cautioned, amid elevated anxiety, Democrats should look closely at the poll numbers Obama had in 2011 and Biden has now.
Biden’s numbers “are exactly — to the number — where Barack Obama’s were,” he said. “You can’t panic when everyone else is. Just stick to your plan.”
