WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t even need to leave the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., to show the breadth of the coalition they need to keep together as they run for reelection in 2024.
On Tuesday afternoon, a crowd of union members greeted Biden with chants of “Run, Joe, Run” as he appeared to deliver his first remarks since announcing his run for reelection at the North American Building Trades Unions’ convention, with the mostly white, mostly male, mostly older delegates from around the country eating up a speech chock-full of economic populism.
“My economic plan is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America,” Biden told the crowd in a speech dedicated to slamming GOP economic plans and hyping his own progress, with nary a mention of abortion or any other social issue. “Like many of you, not much trickled down to my dad’s kitchen table.”
Biden was not the only attraction at the convention. A sign in the lobby outside the auditorium advertised a sweepstakes prize: the “hunting edition,” complete with woodland camouflage, of an all-terrain vehicle.
A few hours later and two miles to the east, a significantly more diverse crowd of college students and activists used one of the political left’s favorite chants — “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” — to warm themselves up before Harris delivered a speech focused on protecting abortion rights and advancing social justice.
“We are living, I believe, at a moment of time when so many of our hard-earned freedoms are under attack,” Harris said, promising to protect transgender rights, fight for gun control and battle politicians who want to ban books, while barely mentioning economic issues. “This is a moment for us to stand and fight.”
The two events are not contradictory — abortion rights are a winning issue for Democrats, even working-class voters, and it’s not like the younger crowd gathered at Howard University was full of fiscal conservatives seeking a cut in the capital gains tax. However, the back-to-back events highlight a central challenge facing Biden and Harris as they steam toward a confrontation with an increasingly authoritarian GOP: how to message their accomplishments and goals to a voting base significantly more fractured and diverse than the GOP’s mostly monochromatic conservative movement.
The split, at its core, is generational, though there are class, ideological and racial divides as well. Younger voters, along with Black and Latino voters, want to see progress on social issues, including abortion rights. The older portion of the Democratic base sees more to like in Biden’s economic pitch, including protecting the safety net and creating opportunity for working families.
Danielle Deiseroth, the interim executive director at Data for Progress, noted older voters “go feral” over Social Security and Medicare, while younger voters tune out such messaging because they’re not receiving them anytime soon, instead focusing on climate change and gun violence.
“It’s important for the Biden campaign to take a dual-track approach,” Deiseroth said. “Unfortunately, for the Biden campaign comms department, it’s going to need to be everything everywhere all at once.”
In the opening days of the campaign, Biden is aiming to tie everything together under the gauzily defined banner of freedom.
“Joe Biden has made defending our basic freedoms the cause of his presidency,” the narrator says in the Biden campaign’s first ad, released Wednesday morning. “The freedom for women to make their own health care decisions, the freedom for our children to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to vote and have your vote counted, for seniors to live with dignity, and to give every American the freedom that comes with a fair shot at building a good life.”
The ad is airing in six states — Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — where Biden and Harris won by a combined total of roughly 300,000 votes in 2020. It will be a challenge keeping the coalitions powering those narrow victories together, from winning over suburban voters in Phoenix to turning out Black voters in Atlanta and limiting GOP advantages in the rural counties of Michigan and Wisconsin.
Mini Timmaraju, the president of NARAL, which co-hosted Harris’ speech at Howard, said voters could easily grasp the disparate parts of Biden and Harris’ agenda.
“That’s a super Washington, D.C., pollster, pundit dilemma,” Timmaraju told HuffPost. “When we talk to voters, it’s not complicated at all. They’re capable of talking about the economy and their fundamental freedoms and understand the intersection.”
Timmaraju noted pundits and reporters were skeptical about the Democratic party’s emphasis on abortion rights in the run-up to the party’s surprisingly strong midterm elections, when poll after poll indicated voters’ top issue was ongoing inflation and a sluggish economy.
“It wasn’t a problem in the midterms, despite a whole bunch of white dudes in the press saying it was a problem,” she said.
At this point, Biden’s political operation is used to holding together its unwieldy coalition. A few weeks before Biden announced his 2020 bid, he appeared in the same hotel ballroom before a similar union crowd, where he cracked a joke about his history of touching women inappropriately. While the crowd of electrical workers loved it, the party’s younger base found it cringeworthy.
Younger voters, in particular, have never fully warmed up to the 80-year-old Delawarean, even as he’s updated a number of their priorities, including canceling student debt and relaxing marijuana laws. On Tuesday morning, not long after he officially launched his campaign, a coalition of left-leaning youth groups sought to make sure Biden kept up his appeals to a voting bloc long derided as finicky and inconsistent.
“Going into 2024, our youth coalition is deeply committed to defeating fascist, right-wing extremism and the eventual Republican presidential nominee,” the groups, including the Sunrise Movement and March For Our Lives, wrote. “But when bad decisions are made – like approving the Willow Project, denying asylum and citizenship for millions of immigrants, and settling for the status quo – it’s harder for us to get young people to the polls.”
And at the same time, Republicans have made at least incremental gains with two other key elements of the Democratic Party’s base, Latinos and Black voters. Black turnout, especially in major cities, has also dipped since the highs of President Barack Obama’s tenure.
Biden named a Latina, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, and a Black man, Quentin Fulks, to lead his campaign, although his older and universally white inner circle will remain in the White House and retain significant influence.
What unites all of these groups is an uncertainty about the accomplishments of Biden and Harris, who have never been able to dominate the news cycle in a Trump-like fashion. Both public and private Democratic surveys have shown a lack of awareness around even the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature policy achievement.
“Something that’s been clear in all of our polling is that there’s no vote or group that can be taken for granted,” Deiseroth said. “There’s a disconnect in communicating the policy wins that the Biden administration has accomplished over the past two years. Voters across different age groups and racial groups like the Democratic Party’s values. But tying those to tangible policy wins is the biggest task ahead of them.”