Republican 2024 hopefuls audition against Biden targeting his age

After US president Joe Biden launched his re-election campaign, Donald Trump cast himself as a strongman who would “rescue America from the wreckage of the Biden economy” in a visit to New Hampshire where the former president portrayed the incumbent as disoriented and enfeebled.

Fox News presenter Nikki Haley predicted Biden’s demise, stating that a ballot cast for Biden would amount to one for vice-president Kamela Harris. Haley, three decades younger than Biden and running on a call for a “new generation of leadership”, posited that the president wouldn’t make it to the last year of a second four-year term when he would be 86.

Florida governer Ron DeSantis has argued that freedom is “hanging in the balance” as he accuses Biden of presiding over a system of “medical authoritarianism” during the pandemic where the government tried “to control your behaviour.”

And Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate, launched his presidential exploratory committee with an accusation that Biden and the “radical left” have weaponised race and that he is best suited to dismantle the “culture of grievance” that Scott claims they have fostered.

Current and prospective Republican presidential candidates are auditioning before GOP primary voters, not only to appeal to them on the basis of their personalities, political beliefs and policy proposals, but on who is best equipped to defeat Biden and draw the sharpest contrasts with him. Biden’s announcement that he is running for a second term – which comes amid no signs of formidable opposition in the Democratic primary – turned him from a long-expected rival into an actual one.

There are some overlaps in the way the Republican field is attacking Biden, as candidates collectively unfurl criticism over stubborn inflation and rising crime in some American cities and offer sharp critiques of his handling of foreign policy and the southern border. But there are also distinctions among the candidates, their backgrounds, and the ways they are seeking to differentiate themselves from another – all elucidating the range of general-election rivals Biden could face if his party renominates him.

Their early broadsides collectively signal that GOP challenges to Biden’s competence, his mental acuity and his fitness to serve as president well into his eighties will be central to the general election campaign – even as there is an emerging debate within the GOP about whether some voters could be turned off by attacks on Biden’s age.

Strategists allied with the efforts of the current and potential Republican contenders for the White House say it is too early to predict exactly how voters will rank their concerns in an election that is more than a year-and-a-half away.

Republican strategist Mike Shields says that the most potent argument that the GOP candidates can make is that Biden has been an incompetent leader. While age may be part of that conversation, he argued that the White House contenders should focus on the economy in their critiques, as much of the field is also doing right now.

“As long as his numbers are being driven down because he is unable to do anything to address inflation – and people see him as sort of incompetent – first of all, he has a huge problem, and secondly, that’s what Republicans need to focus on,” Shields says.

Democrats have shrugged off the breadth of attacks the GOP has unleashed as evidence that Republicans are still searching for the most effective strategy to defeat Biden. Democratic National Committee spokesperson Ammar Moussa said the GOP attacks amount to an attempt to distract voters from polarising positions on abortion and entitlements.

“Maga Republicans’ tepid and muddled response demonstrates the impossible task the GOP has of trying to tear down President Biden’s successful record of delivering for the American people and fighting for freedom,” Moussa said in a statement.

Haley, 51, the daughter of Indian immigrants who served as Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, has not been subtle in suggesting that she is a figure who could usher generational change in the GOP. The former governor launched her White House campaign calling for cognitive testing for older candidates and tweeted a campaign video last week that included images of Biden with his eyes closed in a meeting, transposed against a clip of Haley alleging the president has been “asleep at the wheel”.

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Scott, 57, argues that Biden and the left have used polarising rhetoric about racism and prejudice to divide Americans and “hold on to their power.” He argues that his personal story – as the son of a single mother who overcame poverty and seized the opportunities that America offered to him – disproves their arguments.

As DeSantis has made pandemic policies a focal point of his pitch, allies of the Florida governor, who is 44, have sought to highlight Biden’s literal stumbling, as they go after his record on the economy and other issues. The “DeSantis War Room” Twitter account, a social media account that draws attention to the governor’s public statements and responds to his critics, released a video mocking Biden’s assertion that he wanted to “finish the job,” closing with footage of Biden stumbling on the stairs of Air Force One. “We’d rather you not finish the job,” the narrator says, as the images appear on screen.

In 2021 as they traded barbs over Covid-19 restrictions, Biden quipped, “Governor who?” when asked about DeSantis’s criticisms. In response, the Florida governor took a jab at Biden’s memory, stating he wasn’t surprised that Biden had forgotten him: “I guess the question is ‘What else has he forgotten?’”

Polling and interviews indicate that concerns about Biden’s age have become a key factor for voters as they look ahead to 2024. Sixty-five percent of adults believe Biden is too old for another term as president, according to a February Yahoo-YouGov poll. Clear majorities of Republicans and independents expressed that sentiment, as did nearly half of Democrats.

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Biden’s advisers intend to rebut the GOP attacks on his acumen and stamina by showing his vigour on the campaign trail and his sharpness in interactions with voters. In 2021, they released medical records from his physician stating that he was capable of executing his responsibilities without complication. But his age and verbal gaffes are increasingly becoming a point of debate in the 2024 campaign, even though Trump (at 76) is only a few years younger than Biden, 80.

In New Hampshire, Trump portrayed Biden, as he often does, as out of his depth and weak on the world stage – alleging without evidence that Biden has brought the United States to the brink of World War III by emboldening adversaries like Russia, Iran and China. At one point, Trump did an imitation of Biden as a confused, elderly man trying to find his way out of a room: “Where am I going? Where the hell have I been?” Trump said during his brief pantomime in Manchester, New Hampshire.

At the same time, he insisted during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, that his criticisms of Biden have nothing to do with age, telling Carlson that other people in their eighties and nineties, including senator Bernie Sanders, are “sharp.” He described some of Biden’s answers in an interview with NBC News as incoherent: “There’s something wrong,” he told Carlson.

Jason Miller, an adviser to Trump, says Americans’ worries about the economy and inflation would be central to the former president’s reelection bid, as voters contrast his economic record with Biden’s. Though many different factors have contributed to inflation, including snarled supply chains related to the pandemic, Miller predicted that voters would place the blame squarely on the incumbent.

“The cost of milk, bread, eggs – everything, whether it be rent, the cost of living, gas – everything is through the roof and people’s lives are very much hurt by Joe Biden’s economic policies,” Miller says.

Marc Short, former chief of staff for vice president Mike Pence and a current adviser to him, says that while the issue of age has shown up as a liability for Biden in the polls, “the American people are pretty competent and able to make up their own minds and decisions about whether or not the current president is failing.”

He predicted that the most salient lines of criticism against Biden would be to focus on inflation and the possibility of a recession – “that’s a double whammy” – and the case for restoring American strength on the world stage, particularly after the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Such arguments dovetail with Pence’s pitch for himself as he moves toward entering the race.

Biden is in an unprecedented situation because of his low-40s approval ratings and the clear aversion many have to him running again, Republican pollster Whit Ayres believes Harris’s struggles to generate strong support from voters in either party have added complexity to Biden’s reelection prospects. More than a dozen Democratic leaders in key states expressed concerns earlier this year about Harris’s political strength in interviews with The Washington Post.

“That’s an enormous number of people who really don’t want the incumbent president to run again,” Ayres says. “You layer on top of that the fact that the vast majority of the American people do not believe that someone in their mid-eighties should try to be shouldering the enormous burdens and pressures of the presidency – and that is especially true when he has a vice president who is widely viewed by members of both parties as not ready for prime time. That is an enormous hill to climb.”

In broad terms, Biden is centering his campaign on the idea that he is running to guard American freedoms endangered by “Maga extremists” and protect a democracy that was placed in jeopardy by the pro-Trump mob that attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

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Though Biden has been eager to tout a series of laws passed to blunt the impact of inflation, including the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, a Washington Post-ABC News poll earlier this year found that 6 in 10 Americans said the president has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing” during his presidency.

Before an audience of union workers following his video announcement on 25 April, Biden said voters should reject the “trickle-down economics” embraced by Republicans. He touted the gains Americans have seen from the pandemic relief package he signed, as well as a bipartisan infrastructure law. He cast his economic plans as a work in progress: “You and I, together, we’re turning things around and we’re doing it in a big way,” he said.

A strategist supporting DeSantis, who is expected to announce his candidacy soon, argued that economic concerns could be a key persuasion point in helping him win back suburban voters who have drifted away from the GOP, pointing to a Pew Research survey released in April showing that only 19 per cent of Americans view economic conditions as excellent or good.

The strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because DeSantis has not yet announced his plans, argued that Biden’s policies aren’t helping the average suburban family in any demonstrable way, while the “booming economies of Florida and other red states” could give suburban and college-educated voters an indication that there is a “successful alternative.”

© The Washington Post