Biden seeks to wield January 6 against Trump as 2024 campaigning kicks off
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump’s presidency ended with his supporters breaking into the US Capitol in an unsuccessful attempt to block the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s election victory. As the two men gear up for an expected general election rematch in November of this year, the Biden campaign has moved to make sure voters are aware of the now former president’s intimate involvement with the January 6 insurrection. The Biden campaign announced today that its first television advertisement of the year will be narrated by the president and focus on Trump and the threat his “Make America great again” (Maga) philosophy poses to US democracy. Biden will hammer the message home on Friday, with a speech in Pennsylvania marking the third anniversary of the assault that will double as a major campaign speech.
The Democrats put concerns over US democracy at the center of their pitch to voters in 2022, when many of their lawmakers and governors won their elections despite historical trends against the president’s party. They seem set to repeat the strategy with Biden on the ballot and struggling with persistently low approval ratings and several opinion polls showing him trailing Trump. We’ll see if the strategy works in the months to come.
Here’s what we expect to hear more about today:
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Senators from both parties continue to negotiate over reaching a compromise on immigration policy, which will face long odds to passage even if they succeed.
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Americans did not give majority approval to a single elected or appointed government official in a new Gallup survey.
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We are 11 days away from the Iowa Republican caucuses, which Trump is looking to dominate, while Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are both hoping for a strong performance, or even an upset win.
Key events
While polls of Iowa Republicans are far less plentiful than they are of the national electorate, those we do have show Donald Trump with an overwhelming advantage in the state.
Poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight shows the former president with 50% support in the first state to vote in the GOP’s nomination process. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is his closest runner-up, with 18.4% support, and Trump’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley is in third place, at 15.7%.
Trump plans two rallies on 6 January in Iowa
Donald Trump, whose false claims of election meddling set the stage for the January 6 insurrection, will be campaigning in Iowa on the third anniversary of the attack.
He has two rallies planned in the afternoon that day, one in Newton, and the other in Clinton. The former president is leading in polls for the Republican nomination, and also facing federal criminal charges in Washington DC for his plot to disrupt Joe Biden’s election win, of which the January 6 attack was its most violent development.
It’s unclear what he will tell attendees at the rallies he has planned.
In campaign ad ‘Cause’, Biden casts himself as defender of democracy
The Biden campaign’s first television advertisement of 2024 sees the president talk about his defense of democracy, without mentioning Donald Trump’s name.
But viewers will notice shots of the January 6 insurrection, as well as the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which occurred shortly after Trump moved into the White House. There are also plenty of images of the military and global crises that Biden wants voters to believe he is best qualified to handle.
You can watch the whole advertisement, titled “Cause”, here:
Biden seeks to wield January 6 against Trump as 2024 campaigning kicks off
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump’s presidency ended with his supporters breaking into the US Capitol in an unsuccessful attempt to block the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s election victory. As the two men gear up for an expected general election rematch in November of this year, the Biden campaign has moved to make sure voters are aware of the now former president’s intimate involvement with the January 6 insurrection. The Biden campaign announced today that its first television advertisement of the year will be narrated by the president and focus on Trump and the threat his “Make America great again” (Maga) philosophy poses to US democracy. Biden will hammer the message home on Friday, with a speech in Pennsylvania marking the third anniversary of the assault that will double as a major campaign speech.
The Democrats put concerns over US democracy at the center of their pitch to voters in 2022, when many of their lawmakers and governors won their elections despite historical trends against the president’s party. They seem set to repeat the strategy with Biden on the ballot and struggling with persistently low approval ratings and several opinion polls showing him trailing Trump. We’ll see if the strategy works in the months to come.
Here’s what we expect to hear more about today:
-
Senators from both parties continue to negotiate over reaching a compromise on immigration policy, which will face long odds to passage even if they succeed.
-
Americans did not give majority approval to a single elected or appointed government official in a new Gallup survey.
-
We are 11 days away from the Iowa Republican caucuses, which Trump is looking to dominate, while Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are both hoping for a strong performance, or even an upset win.
