Bill Kristol, former Republican White House Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle asked David Axelrod, Democratic former White House Senior Advisor for President Barack Obama (and chief strategist for Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns), “What campaign strategies might increase Joe Biden’s chances?” in the 2024 presidential election.
Axelrod said “I would not count on the shock and dismay of people over the fact that [Trump] is under 91 criminal indictments, or that he engineered an insurrection, and so on. I think you’re going to get that [vote] for free, but it’s not enough to win.”
Axelrod argues that touting Biden’s achievements during his first term is not enough to win. “Elections, when your message is right, are about the future, and my argument would be: Biden’s fighting for you and your future; Trump is consumed by his past and fighting for himself.”
Axelrod said as “a person of empathy who grew up in a working-class circumstance,” Biden “needs to put himself on the side of working people in their economic fight.” He gave an example of how Biden could have done that during an interview on the Today show this weekend.
During an Easter egg hunt, Al Roker asked Biden, “A lot of people are worried that their bucks aren’t going as far. What do you tell them?”
Biden answered, “I would tell him we’ve got the strongest economy in the world.”
Axelrod says “That is the wrong strategy. The right strategy is to say, ‘Look, we’ve made a lot of progress from the day I walked in the door as a country, and I’m proud of our country for fighting through this pandemic and getting back to where we’ve got this much employment. But the fact is, the way people experience this economy is the way I did when I was growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. How much did you pay for the groceries? How do you afford the gas, the rent? These continue to be a problem, and I’m fighting that fight.’”
Axelrod notes that’s how Obama won the 2012 race: “We were still very much feeling the effects of the great recession. We were out of the recession, but people still were stung by the experience of it, and if we went out and claimed economic mastery, we would’ve lost.”
Above is a clip of President Obama speaking at a re-election campaign event in 2012. He refers to Republicans as “the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class. They drove our economy into a ditch.” Obama used a car stuck in a ditch analogy for the economy and portrayed the Democrats as the ones who climbed down into the ditch and “put our boots on and pushed and shoved” until “we got the car out of the ditch.”
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