Biden now 'fully embracing' campaign’s pivot to directly attacking 'feeble' Trump: report

30 March 2024

President Joe Biden is now gaining ground on former President Donald Trump in several swing state polls after months of lackadaisical numbers. His newest campaign strategy of taking the fight directly to Trump may have something to do with that.

According to a recent report by the Guardian's Adam Gabbatt, political experts say the president's good fortune in the latest polls could be attributed to his new offense-oriented approach. Gabbatt wrote that "Biden has dubbed Trump 'mentally unfit'" on the campaign stump, and hit his predecessor during a recent campaign event by saying the country "deserves better than a feeble, confused and tired Donald Trump."

"What he was doing before obviously wasn’t working. Typically, we all learn from bad experience and Biden has been behind in the polls to a candidate who is quite frankly hated by almost half of the American electorate," Indiana University-Bloomington political science professor emeritus Marjorie Hershey told the Guardian. "I think that Biden was under considerable pressure from his advisers, from activists, to do something different."

The president's change in tone could be correlated to his boisterous State of the Union address earlier this month, in which he spoke for over an hour and lobbed repeated attacks on Trump (whom he only referred to as "my predecessor"), Congressional Republicans and even the Supreme Court. In the hours following that speech, Biden's reelection campaign saw its most fruitful window of fundraising of the 2024 cycle. And during a campaign event in New York earlier this week with former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Biden brought in another $25 million.

He's also contrasted his own robust fundraising with his rival's financial woes, referring to Trump as "broke Don." Gabbatt wrote that at one recent campaign event, Biden cracked a joke about the 45th president of the United States' money problems in the wake of multiple costly civil judgments.

"Just the other day, this defeated-looking man came up to me and said: ‘Mr President, I need your help. I’m in crushing debt. I’m completely wiped out,’” Biden told the audience. "I said, 'Sorry, Donald, I can’t help you.'"

Hershey — the political science professor — said one fact of contemporary politics is that negative campaigning tends to work better than holding the high ground.

"People are more likely to remember negative charges than positive statements," she said. "People are more likely to give negative statements greater weight than they do positive statements."

While attacking one's political opponent is nothing new, a 2023 study found that the more combative form of negative politicking became much more prevalent after Trump first declared his candidacy in 2015. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology professor Robert West — one of the study's co-authors — lamented that negative politics is now seen as the surest way to win an election.

"It’s very sad that the other side is now starting to play the same game," he said. "This looks like we’ve lost as a society, because everyone plays that game now."

Click here to read the Guardian's report in full.

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