Joe Biden's Last Campaign

Author

Timothy Wirth
March 07, 2024

This long piece by Evan Osnos will probably end up being the definitive discussion of Biden the person, politician, and President. Very long, written by Evan Osnos, certainly one of the most talented newer journalists of this century. T

The New Yorker

Joe Biden’s Last Campaign

Trailing Trump in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection.

March 4, 2024

“I’ll show you where Trump sat and watched the revolution,” Joe Biden said, stepping out from behind his desk in the Oval Office. It was noon on a Wednesday, in the doldrums of January. The Middle East was aflame, and Biden’s approval rating was among the lowest of any President in history, but, for the moment, he was preoccupied with Donald Trump. As he led the way through a door toward his private chambers, he startled two Secret Service agents in the corridor. They had expected him to remain at his desk for a while; agents, referring to him by his handle, had passed word: “Celtic is in the Oval.” Walking by, he said, in a whispery deadpan, “Hey, guys—it’s a raid,” and then moved on.

Biden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie. He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a contemplative pose. (It’s one of his favorites, even though Bobby Kennedy thought that it evoked his brother during the Bay of Pigs debacle.) He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he often visited Barack Obama for lunch. One wall is graced by “The Peacemakers,” a famous painting of Lincoln and his military commanders, on the cusp of winning the Civil War. Another is dominated by a large television set, installed by Donald Trump.

It was in front of that TV that Trump spent the afternoon of January 6, 2021, after exhorting his supporters to march on the Capitol and stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election. With the television remote and a Diet Coke close at hand, he watched the events live on Fox News, rewinding at times for a second look. It is a period in Presidential history that the House select committee on January 6th later called “187 Minutes of Dereliction.”

“This is where he sat,” Biden said, and I braced for a bit of speechifying on democracy or character or the defiling of the Presidency. (As early as 1970, a colleague of Biden’s on a Delaware county council observed that he could make a “fifteen-minute speech on the underside of a blade of grass.”) But, in the dining room, he let the moment pass. At the age of eighty-one, in his fourth year as President, he displays less of the reflex to fill every silence. Gesturing around the room, he said, “I don’t do interviews here, because it’s not so commodious.” He gave a rueful laugh and headed back to his office.

Not long ago, most Americans found it inconceivable that they might once again face the choice between Trump and Biden. In the years since Trump lost the 2020 election and refused to concede, he has been found liable for sexual assault and financial fraud, and indicted for attempting to overturn the election and refusing to return classified documents; as his legal challenges mounted, he embarked on a campaign focussed on “retribution” against his enemies. Yet Republicans have become steadily less likely to hold Trump responsible for the violence on January 6th—and less likely to believe that Biden actually won the White House.

Back in the Oval Office, where winter sun shone through glass doors, I asked Biden if it was possible for him to reach voters who had those beliefs. He treated the question as a provocation: “Well, first of all, remember, in 2020, you guys told me how I wasn’t going to win? And then you told me in 2022 how it was going to be this red wave?” He flashed a tense smile. “And I told you there wasn’t going to be any red wave. And in 2023 you told me we’re going to get our ass kicked again? And we won every contested race out there.” He let that sink in for an instant and said, “In 2024, I think you’re going to see the same thing.”

For decades, there was a lightness about Joe Biden—a springy, mischievous energy that was hard not to like, even if it allowed some people to classify him as a lightweight. For better and worse, he is a more solemn figure now. His voice is thin and clotted, and his gestures have slowed, but, in our conversation, his mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date. At one point, he pulled out a white notecard inscribed with some of Trump’s most alarming comments: his threat to terminate the Constitution, his casual talk of being a dictator on “Day One,” his description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Biden tossed the list on his desk and gave a look of disbelief. “What the hell! ” he said. “If you and I had sat down ten years ago and I said a President is going to say those things, you would have looked at me like, ‘Biden, you’ve lost your senses.’ ”

I last interviewed Biden in 2020, when he billed himself as a “transition candidate” and praised “an incredible group of talented, newer, younger people.” But, in office, he has presided over the passage of ambitious legislation, the end of the covid pandemic, and an economic revival beyond anyone’s expectation—and declared his intention to run for a second term. I asked Biden if there was ever a time when he doubted that he would run again. “No,” he said. “But, look, if I didn’t think that the policies I put in place were best for the country, I don’t think I’d be doing it again. I’m running again because I think two things: No. 1, I’m really proud of my record, and I want to keep it going. I’m optimistic about the future.” He continued, “And, secondly, I look out there, and I say, ‘O.K., we’re just—most of what I’ve done is just kicking in now.’ ”

If you spend time with Biden these days, the biggest surprise is that he betrays no doubts. The world is riven by the question of whether he is up to a second term, but he projects a defiant belief in himself and his ability to persuade Americans to join him. For as long as Biden has been in politics, he has thrived on a mercurial mix of confidence and insecurity. Now, having reached the apex of power, he gives off a conviction that borders on serenity—a bit too much serenity for Democrats who wonder if he can still beat the man with whom his legacy will be forever entwined. Given the doubts, I asked, wasn’t it a risk to say, “I’m the one to do it”? He shook his head and said, “No. I’m the only one who has ever beat him. And I’ll beat him again.” For Biden, the offense of the contested election was clearly personal. Trump had not just tried to steal the Presidency—he had tried to steal it from him. “I’d ask a rhetorical question,” Biden said. “If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?”

By the usual measures, Biden should be cruising to reëlection. Violent crime has dropped to nearly a fifty-year low, unemployment is below four per cent, and in January the S. & P. 500 and the Dow hit record highs. More Americans than ever have health insurance, and the country is producing more energy than at any previous moment in its history. His opponent, who is facing ninety-one criminal counts, has suggested that if he is elected he will fire as many as fifty thousand civil servants and replace them with loyalists, deputize the National Guard as a mass-deportation force, and root out what he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

But the usual measures do not apply these days. Rarely in American history have two major parties had such wildly different intentions—and such similar levels of support. In 2020, seven states hinged on a difference of less than three percentage points. “The electorate is frozen,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, an adviser to Democratic donors, told me. “There will be important movements on the margin—but they are only important because this thing is fucking tied.”

For a long time, Biden had a modest but steady advantage in the polls, ahead by three or four or five points. By this February, though, Trump had taken the lead, forty-seven to forty-two per cent, according to an NBC poll. (In 2020, by contrast, Biden never trailed Trump in any major poll.) Some Democrats were already complaining publicly that Biden’s campaign was complacent and behind schedule in hiring staff for battleground states. On Bill Maher’s podcast, the political consultant James Carville said, “Somebody better wake the fuck up.” Maher wondered if Biden was in danger of staying so long in his job that he would be blamed for handing it to the opposition—becoming the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Presidency.” At a dinner attended by major donors in Chicago, Senator Chris Coons, a co-chair of the Biden campaign, struck a reassuring note. “I’m given to worry on occasion,” he told the audience. “I’ve been known to wring my hands.” But in the 2022 midterms, he reminded them, “the American people showed up,” giving the Democrats unexpectedly strong results. “Folks, trust our voters,” he said. “They will show up again.”

As the election year arrived, Biden’s aides argued that the polls were too early to be useful; they reasoned that sitting Presidents are often a target for free-form resentment—and that, in any case, only a quarter of Americans were engaged enough to even realize that it would be a choice between Trump and Biden. His advisers present his confidence as a virtue. One told me, “He is not diverted by politics or by bad polling or by some crazy-ass shit that Donald Trump has done.” Bruce Reed, one of his closest aides, said, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.”

When I visited Biden in January, two days had passed since the Republican caucuses in Iowa. Trump had won all but one of the state’s ninety-nine counties; the voting was so lopsided that news organizations called the race with many votes still to be cast. For all the speculation that Ron DeSantis might secure evangelical voters, Trump took even more of them than he had eight years before. In the Oval Office, I brought up the Iowa results and asked Biden to explain why Trump was still popular with a substantial portion of Americans. He disputed my framing. “Substantial portion of the Republican maga party,” he said. “That’s who it is.”

His objection was not just rhetorical. “Look, a hundred thousand people voted,” he said. “He got fifty per cent of a hundred thousand votes.” To be precise, it was closer to a hundred and ten thousand votes, but the point remained: Trump had generated the lowest turnout in a contested G.O.P. race in a quarter century, a drop of forty per cent from the Republican primary of 2016. It didn’t help that temperatures were below zero that night, but the fact was that nearly half the Republicans who voted chose someone other than Trump. Some forty per cent of Nikki Haley supporters in Iowa told pollsters that if she fell short they would vote for Biden. “Now, they’re going to argue the weather was the reason,” Biden told me. “But what about this enthusiasm—this hard-baked enthusiasm?”

Trump is too familiar and too disliked to attract many new supporters. And when voters are asked in polls how they will react if he is actually convicted of a felony, Biden pulls ahead again. But the schedule of Trump’s trials is in flux, and, even if he is convicted, it is difficult to predict how that unprecedented spectacle will reverberate.

By the end of January, the race was nearing the point at which history shows a correlation between approval ratings and electoral results: incumbents who trail their opponent nine months from Election Day rarely go on to win. When pollsters asked who would do better in specific areas, the gaps were stark. On immigration and border security, Trump led Biden fifty-seven to twenty-two; on the economy, fifty-five to thirty-three. On the “required mental and physical stamina for the presidency,” Trump was lapping Biden, forty-six to twenty-three per cent. Even seasoned analysts who tend to discount small fluctuations in polls took note. “Let’s say it’s a fifty-per-cent chance that Trump could be President again,” a prominent Biden donor told me. “That’s like a fifty-per-cent chance that the doctor is going to tell you that you have pancreatic cancer.”

David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief campaign strategist, told me that age was the crucial issue for Biden. “I don’t question his competence as President,” he said. “You give me Biden’s record and take fifteen years off of him, and this wouldn’t be a competitive race. This is the barrier he has to overcome, and it’s a hard one, because the march of time is immutable.”

The kind of people who believe that they should be President of the United States do not generally go graciously into retirement. Alexander Hamilton, who knew his share of ex-politicians, described them as “discontented ghosts.” When Richard Nixon was between stints in office, he fretted, “I’m going to be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four.” Calvin Coolidge, the only twentieth-century President who voluntarily passed up a reasonable chance at reëlection, said that he hoped to avoid “grasping for office.” (Coolidge noted that Presidents “live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment.”) In Biden’s case, he has been in politics so long that one of his aides told me a decade ago that he seemed “afraid if he stops working he might just fall over.”

Early in Biden’s Presidency, his age was a fixation mostly on the right. Conservative media circulated video anytime he fell—while dismounting from his bike, or tripping over a sandbag onstage. Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, joked about bringing “soft food” to a meeting with Biden, even though McCarthy was, according to Politico, “privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive.” Biden’s doctors reported no significant trouble. (His latest medical report, released last week, lists sleep apnea; atrial fibrillation; a “stiff” gait, owing to arthritis and the aftermath of a fractured foot; and gastroesophageal reflux, which causes him to cough and clear his throat. Like most of his predecessors, Biden didn’t undergo a cognitive test, but the report notes that an “extremely detailed neurologic exam was again reassuring.”)

For a time, Democrats who worried that Biden’s age would prevent his reëlection hesitated to speak out. “A lot of people thought, O.K., we’ll get our ass kicked in the midterms, and then we’ll have this big conversation about whether Joe should run again,” a former Democratic official told me. “Then the midterms are this big surprise.” For Biden, questions about his age were inextricable from feelings of being underestimated by the establishment. In 2015, during his second term as Vice-President, when he was reeling from the death of his son Beau, Obama enveloped him in personal support but was, in Biden’s words, “not encouraging” of his running for President—a fact that some intimates recall with bitterness. (One told me that Biden was treated in a spirit of “See you later. Emeritus. God bless. Nice guy.”) An effort to discourage him from running for reëlection in 2024 could well have had the opposite effect. Besides, Trump—just four years younger than Biden—was already so prone to signs of age that the DeSantis campaign set up a social-media account called the Trump Accident Tracker. He had confused Jeb Bush with George W. Bush, talked about Obama when he meant Biden or Hillary Clinton, and called the Hungarian Prime Minister “the leader of Turkey.”

The former Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, urged him to embrace his age with swagger, like his fellow-octogenarians Mick Jagger and Harrison Ford. Biden tried out some jokes. Just as Ronald Reagan, in a 1984 debate, had vowed not to “exploit the youth and inexperience of my opponent,” Biden told an audience he had “never been more optimistic about our country’s future in the eight hundred years I’ve served.” In the meme wars on social media, the campaign promoted illustrations of Biden as a political mastermind, firing lasers from his eyes.

Still, Axelrod and others eventually started voicing their worries. “I felt like Biden had the ability to say, ‘I’ve run my race, and I’ve faithfully fulfilled my duties to the nation,’ ” he told me. “He’s really done a hell of a job, but he is not a particularly competent performer in front of cameras now. That’s mostly how people interact with the President. Bill Clinton said, ‘Strong and wrong generally beats weak and right.’ ” (When Axelrod expressed criticisms, Biden reportedly dismissed him as a “prick,” after which one of Axelrod’s friends printed campaign buttons that read “Pricks for Biden.”)

The concerns about Biden’s age exploded on February 8th, with the release of a report by the special counsel Robert Hur on the handling of classified documents, which Biden’s lawyers had reported after discovering them in his offices and garage. Hur, who had worked for the Justice Department under Trump, concluded that he lacked evidence to bring charges, but also described Biden, indelibly, as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur wrote that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

The Administration could have chosen to emphasize the fact that Biden, unlike Trump, had been exonerated, but Biden wanted to dispute Hur’s comments. At a hastily called press conference, he said, “I’m well meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing.” He seethed at the assertion that he did not remember the date of his son’s death, saying, “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.” In his final answer of the night, after being asked about hostage negotiations, he slipped up, referring to the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, as the President of Mexico. Stories about Biden’s age and memory dominated the news for days. After the Times carried several articles on the topic on a single Sunday, Margaret Sullivan, the newspaper’s former public editor, criticized the response as disproportionate—calling it the “2024 version of the media’s obsession with Hillary’s emails”—and faulted the press for not focussing as much on Trump’s recent threat to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” against nato allies that do not spend enough on their militaries.

Hur’s comments and Biden’s press conference spread panic among Democrats. “If we don’t get an emergency transplant, we’re going to die,” one donor told me. Ezra Klein, of the Times, argued that Biden was governing well but was no longer capable of sustaining the “performance” that a campaign requires: “Whether it is true that Biden has it all under control, it is not true that he seems like he does.” Klein proposed that Democrats hold an open convention this summer and let a “murderers’ row of political talent” compete for the nomination. Proponents often mention Gretchen Whitmer, Raphael Warnock, and Gavin Newsom, among others. But, at the moment, none of these people poll better against Trump than Biden does, or have enough money on hand to mount a serious campaign. And holding an open convention risks fracturing the Party, as a relatively small group of insiders scramble to pick a candidate. The last time Democrats held an open convention, in 1968, a Party divided by war fought openly; the losers stayed home on Election Day, and Richard Nixon won by one per cent.

Unless Biden decides to step aside, it is overwhelmingly likely that he will be the nominee in November. “There is no group of wise men or women who compose the Party anymore, who have the assumed gravitas,” Michael Kazin, the author of “What It Took to Win,” a history of the Democratic Party, told me. “The President now runs the Party.”

Like many Democrats, Axelrod has turned his critiques to the opposition. “Now I think the question is: how do you make the best argument for Biden in a race against Donald Trump?” he told me. “Both these guys are old. The difference between them is one of them is actually working on the project of building a better future—not for himself, but for the country and for our kids and grandkids. And then you have on the other side a guy who’s not looking to the future but is consumed by his own past.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, voiced a position that I encountered among many high-ranking Democrats. “He’s not the only option that we had,” he told me. “But, once he’d made the decision to go, he became the only option that we have.” In the months that remain, Whitehouse said, the best way to beat Trump is a strategy that he called “Biden plus offense.” When people are “frightened or angry, you need to convince them that you, too, are equally concerned and you’re willing to throw punches and pick fights,” he said. “If you’ve got your sleeves rolled up and you’re waist-deep fighting alligators in the swamp, then nobody’s really thinking about your age.”

Last March, Trump held the first rally of his 2024 Presidential campaign in Waco, Texas—a choice with unsubtle significance. Thirty years before, federal agents in Waco confronted a cult called the Branch Davidians, whose members were stockpiling weapons and explosives in their compound. After a siege, the building caught fire, and more than seventy people died. The incident became a rallying cry for right-wing activists and militiamen, who see themselves as locked in conflict with a tyrannical regime. Trump’s event embraced the full aesthetic of anti-government resistance. He stood onstage with his hand over his heart, while loudspeakers blared “Justice for All”—a recording in which inmates serving time for their role on January 6th sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance. (“Justice for All” later reached the top of a Billboard chart.) While the song played, a huge screen showed scenes of the riot at the Capitol. Trump told the crowd, “For seven years, you and I have been taking on the corrupt, rotten, and sinister forces trying to destroy America.” He declared, “2024 is the final battle.”

The violence of January 6th has become a touchstone for Biden, too, but with a different valence. He staged his first rally of 2024 on the eve of the riot’s third anniversary, near a site chosen to dramatize the stakes: Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington hunkered down in 1777 and turned a group of militias into a cohesive force for democracy.

The encampment sprawled across a grassy plateau, where Washington arrived at the head of a contingent of weary and ill-equipped soldiers. Biden arrived in Marine One, accompanied by dusty green military helicopters loaded with advisers, security staff, and the press pool. The Presidential arrival is a hoary ritual of the media, but these days it carries the added risk that any stumble will become fodder for critics. Biden descended the steps from the helicopter and turned back to extend a hand to Jill Biden, his wife. They gazed at the weathered remnants of the revolutionary camp, then ducked into a waiting limousine. After a couple of stops—laying a wreath at a memorial, visiting a stone house that Washington used as his headquarters—the motorcade headed to a community college in the nearby suburb of Blue Bell, where Biden would give a speech.

Biden stepped onstage to the audience’s chant of “Four more years!” But little of what followed bore much resemblance to a typical campaign speech. There was no ingratiation, no name-check for the local pols. He barely bothered with the requisite list of first-term achievements. “The topic of my speech today is deadly serious,” he began, “and I think it needs to be made at the outset of this campaign.” He talked of the sacrifices memorialized at Valley Forge. “America made a vow—never again would we bow down to a king,” he said. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.” He turned to the memory of January 6th and ticked through the horrors of that day—the wooden gallows, the chants of “Where’s Nancy?” Over and over, he named Trump—more than forty times in all. “Trump lost sixty court cases—sixty,” Biden said. “The legal path just took him back to the truth: that I won the election, and he was a loser.” The crowd erupted in chuckling applause.

Four years ago, Biden tried to position himself as a unifier in an age of conflict and name-calling. But there is less of a market for that this time, and in any case he finds it hard to hide his contempt. He conjured the image of Trump joking about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, who was struck with a hammer, fracturing his skull: “He laughed about it. What a sick—” Biden held up his hands, as if to stop himself from going further, and clenched his fists as the crowd applauded. (In private, Biden is less decorous; among other things, he has been heard to call Trump a “sick fuck.”) He cited Trump’s threat to give the death penalty to Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his reported mockery of dead soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” (Trump has denied this.) “How dare he?” Biden asked. “Who in God’s name does he think he is?” He was rolling now, calm and clear. Preserving America’s democracy, he told the crowd, is “the central cause of my Presidency.”

For nearly half a century in Washington, Biden worked on many things—foreign policy, crime, domestic violence. It’s only now, in the era of Trump, that he has arrived at a defining mission. In the final moments of the speech, he posed a question that will almost certainly feature in his rhetoric in the months ahead, a question that could be posed to Biden as much as to the audience. “We all know who Donald Trump is,” he said. “The question we have to answer is: who are we?”

Among the staff members backstage at the rally, none had spent more time formulating that day’s message than Mike Donilon, an unassuming man in a roomy gray suit. Donilon is, as Sheldon Whitehouse puts it, the “high priest of Bidenism.” At sixty-five, he has short white hair, long white eyebrows, and a quiet voice, often used to deliver gnomic pronouncements. He does not tweet or go on television, and even after decades in politics he slips into restaurants in D.C. without attracting notice. He started out as a pollster before making ads and running strategy for campaigns, and has worked with Biden off and on since 1981, longer than nearly any other member of his inner circle. In the 2020 election, it was Donilon who spurred Biden on, helping to shape the campaign around the concept of a “battle for the soul of a nation.” He followed Biden into the White House as a senior adviser.

Donilon’s mild demeanor can be misleading. Like Biden, he has firm beliefs—about politics, the public, the press—and a contrarian side. In 2020, he and his campaign team had to decide whether to emphasize the economy or the more abstract idea that Trump imperilled the essence of America. “We bet on the latter,” Donilon said, even though “our own pollsters told us that talking about ‘the soul of the nation’ was nutty.” That experience fortified his belief that this year’s campaign should center on what he calls “the freedom agenda.” By November, he predicted, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”

He sees a parallel to the race between George W. Bush and John Kerry, in 2004. At the time, Donilon was working on television ads for Kerry. “The Democratic Party didn’t want to believe it was a 9/11 election,” he said. Instead, the Party tried to focus on an array of issues—the war in Iraq, the economy, hostility to Bush. But, shortly before the election, a new video of Osama bin Laden was released that dredged up memories of 9/11. Bush won, and Donilon vowed not to repeat the error: “I decided, after the election, I would never be part of a Presidential campaign that didn’t figure out—with clarity—what it wanted to say and stick to it.”

It’s easy to miss how unusual a “freedom agenda” is for a Democratic Presidential campaign. Since the nineteen-sixties, Republicans have held fast to the language of freedom—from the backlash against civil rights to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. But Democrats have been trying to convince the public that the Republican Party under Trump has transformed into the “maga movement,” an authoritarian crusade bent on dominion. Donilon said, “At its heart, it doesn’t believe in the Constitution, doesn’t believe in law, embraces violence.” He sees an opportunity for Democrats to be “in a place where they usually aren’t.” They can lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”

The idea of wrapping the 2024 campaign around this kind of high concept is divisive in Democratic circles. “I’m pretty certain in Scranton they’re not sitting around their dinner table talking about democracy every night,” David Axelrod told me. “The Republican message is: The world’s out of control and Biden’s not in command. That’s the entire message—Trump, the strongman, is the solution. I think you have to be thinking about how you counter that, and how you deal with fears about Biden’s condition.” Axelrod argues that in 2020, even as the Democrats summoned concerns about the soul of a nation, they never lost sight of more concrete issues: “Biden as a guy who really understood and fought for the middle class, Biden as a person of faith, and Biden as someone who had a deep connection to the military. It was basically ‘Biden is one of us.’ ”

Donilon is undeterred. He shares Biden’s pride in defying predictions that Democrats would take heavy losses in the 2022 midterms, because of inflation and poor views of the economy; instead, they expanded their Senate majority and picked up two governors’ seats, the best performance in decades by a party in the White House. The freedom campaign, Donilon said, is a story in three acts: “The first act was 2020. Trump represented a threat, and Biden won. 2022 was a second round. You had these election deniers, and all these folks around the country, and they were beaten back.” He added, “Round three is 2024. The thing is, you got to win all the rounds.”

As the crowd dispersed in Pennsylvania, I scanned the social-media reaction to Biden’s speech. His supporters had thrilled to the flashes of anger: “Biden almost slips up and calls Trump a sick fuck”; “pissed off Biden is my favorite Biden.” His opponents were posting, too, of course, but they didn’t bother with the content of his remarks. The Republican National Committee put up a clip of Biden walking stiffly beside the First Lady. Soon, it had been reposted hundreds of times, while the posts in Biden’s favor had not spread as widely.

That was no accident, according to Sarah Longwell, a former Republican strategist and a founder of the Bulwark news site. “Democrats do not build their own echo chambers the way Republicans do,” she said. “It’s a strange communications differential. It’s not rocket science: you create a narrative, you are relentless about promoting it, you have a million people all working from the same sheet of paper.” She continued, “I know that this is a thing with Democrats—it’s like herding cats—but if Biden is not the strongest communicator, why aren’t there hundreds of surrogates for him? Having spent a long time on the Republican side, I am constantly flabbergasted by the inability of Democrats to prosecute a case against Republicans relentlessly, with a knife in their teeth.”

In Chester County, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, I stopped for dinner with three local Democratic volunteers. “The three of us live in the swing district of the swing county of the swing state,” Caroline Bradley, a marketing director for a fitness company, told me. “Registration for our district is pretty much fifty-fifty, Democrats and Republicans.” Her friend Vanessa Babinecz chimed in, “Purple, purple, purple!” Babinecz, who is thirty-eight years old and of mixed race, works as an administrator at a private school, and had watched the Valley Forge speech at home, with her toddler on her lap. “I was riveted,” she said—and that surprised her. “He can still connect with people.”

Babinecz confessed a lack of enthusiasm for Biden. “I wish there was someone younger, but I don’t know anyone who’s younger who’s qualified, who could do it,” she said. “I thought Kamala would’ve been great, but for whatever reason she just can’t make a compelling speech.” Babinecz is confident, though, that women will be motivated to vote by Republican efforts to eliminate access to abortion. She said, “Every single woman I’ve ever talked to about it either has had an abortion or knows someone who’s had an abortion.” She offered the President some advice: “He needs to have a few viral TikToks and a few viral Instagrams. We need to see pictures of him in his slippers interacting with his grandkids. A more approachable side, not just him on a stage.”

Social media could be vital. With older Americans already entrenched in partisan identity, strategists are focussed on mobilizing young urbanites. Dmitri Mehlhorn, the donor adviser, said that the numbers are potentially significant: “How many Millennials and Gen Z-ers are in dense cities in one of the seven swing states? About five million.”

Bradley, who described herself as a “HinJew” (“My father’s Hindu, my mother’s Jewish”), keeps a close eye on persuadable voters, monitoring the number of people who contact the local Democratic Party to switch their registration. Through her outreach, she’s heard that “people are sick of Biden now. I don’t know if fear of Trump is enough this year.” When major candidates are unpopular, third-party options prosper. Though polls show modest support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein, protest votes can tip the results of a tight race—and they become more likely when people think that their vote won’t determine the outcome.

As we talked, the volunteers returned often to the challenge of getting Biden’s message to break through to an overloaded, disengaged public. Bradley looked back fondly at the simplicity of an earlier slogan: “You want to know why Barack Obama was awesome? Hope, change. Hope, change.” She went on, “Biden hasn’t figured out how to be clickbait. I work full time. I have two kids. How much time do people really have? Biden does all of these things and nobody knows what he’s done.” Biden has passed up major opportunities to advertise his record, including televised interviews before the Super Bowl. His advisers have embraced less conventional venues—he has appeared on podcasts with comedians and with a life-style guru.

There is no guarantee that the more people see Biden, the more they’ll like him. But as Longwell, the former Republican strategist, who has spent hundreds of hours with focus groups, told me, “Trump was in people’s faces so insanely all the time for so long that actually voters got quite used to the rhythms of a President who was just front and center constantly. Let’s get Biden on shop floors, in swing states, putting his arms around people. People think he is invisible.”

When you go to work for Biden, you’ll likely hear his version of Tip O’Neill’s classic political adage. In his view, all politics is not local; it’s personal. Even more than most politicians, Biden refracts the world through the lens of the individual—through an accounting of people’s idiosyncrasies and biographies, their talents, flaws, and blind spots. Before meeting foreign leaders for the first time, he will grill his briefer for insights into their areas of pride and vulnerability. When he talks about economics, he refers to data less often than to “dignity,” and he routinely conjures up the image of a laid-off father or mother, on the humiliating trip home to face their kids. Senator Whitehouse told me, “The world is personal to him in a way that it is not to everyone.”

Biden takes the same approach to his own life, which he tends to frame in terms of obstacles overcome and respect earned—or, when necessary, seized. In his first memoir, “Promises to Keep” (2008), he devoted the opening chapter to his stutter, which a nun mocked by calling him “bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden,” and to his efforts to defeat it by practicing Irish poetry in front of the mirror. He also recalled his mother’s high-minded pugilism: “She once shipped my brother Jim off with instructions to bloody the nose of a kid who was picking on smaller kids, and she gave him a dollar when he’d done it.”

Biden’s self-mythology took shape around the figure of the underdog. “I was young for my grade and always little for my age, but I made up for it by demonstrating I had guts,” he wrote of his early years, in Scranton. He described exploring the region’s culm dumps, heaps of coal slag with fires smoldering below the crust: “On a dare, I’d climb to the top of a burning culm dump, swing out over a construction site, race under a moving dump truck. If I could visualize myself doing it, I knew I could do it.”

That effortful confidence carried over into politics. After scraping through the University of Delaware, he graduated from law school at Syracuse University, despite rarely attending class. In 1972, as a council member in New Castle County, with governing experience mostly related to stoplights and sewers, he decided to run for the United States Senate. His opponent, Senator Caleb Boggs, had won seven straight elections, but Biden saw a path for himself—playing up his youth, showing off his handsome family, flattering Boggs with patronizing grace. In June, while polling at three per cent, Biden rented the biggest ballroom in Delaware for what he was already calling his “victory celebration.” When he won—by just three thousand votes—it was one of the biggest upsets in Senate history.

In 1987, as Richard Ben Cramer started writing “What It Takes,” his study of the psychology of Presidential aspirants, he gravitated to Biden, then a third-term senator competing in the Democratic primary. Biden had survived a personal agony almost beyond reckoning: in 1972, a car accident had killed his wife, Neilia, and daughter, Naomi, and left his young sons, Beau and Hunter, hospitalized. But Biden had found a calling in the Senate, where he came to believe ever more deeply in his capacity to envision a way through obstacles. “Joe called that process ‘gaming it out,’ ” Cramer wrote, “and it went on continuously in his head.”

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