Looking ahead to the general election after former president Trump’s comfortable win in the New Hampshire GOP primary Tuesday night, CNN’s Van Jones advised President Biden to fly under the radar on the 2024 campaign trail, suggesting his lethargy is a political liability.
“If I were Biden, I would stay hidden,” Jones said. “And I’ll tell you why: He doesn’t inspire confidence. He’s not a great messenger for himself.”
The conversation was prompted by Obama David Axelrod, former senior adviser to President Obama, who earlier in the CNN segment said the 2024 race would be “trench warfare.”
CNN host Anderson Cooper questioned the assertion that there would be active competition between the frontrunners: “Are they going to hide in the trenches?” Cooper asked.
“Is there going to be a campaign trail?…Are there going to be debates?” he added.
Instead of having Biden represent himself, Jones said it would be more strategic to make progressive activists, such as union leaders and clean-energy executives, act as surrogates to sell the American people on the administration’s policy successes.
“There’s something wrong with this campaign, where we’re somehow expecting Joe Biden, and frankly he hid during the last campaign, to now be Flash Gordon,” Jones said. “The people who are benefitting from the Biden economy – and they exist – should be empowered to speak.”
After the pandemic erupted amid the 2020 presidential election, Biden did almost no in-person campaigning or public events. The rallies Biden did on occasion hold attracted very small crowds in comparison to Trump’s events.
By fall 2022, as most Americans began to resume their pre-Covid lives, Biden still made few appearances on the campaign trail.
While Trump has held campaign events across the country since announcing his 2024 candidacy, he boycotted all five of the Republican primary debates, raising the question of whether he will agree to face Biden in person. It also remains to be seen whether Biden would agree to take the stage next to Trump, who he has repeatedly attacked from a distance as a threat to democracy.
Jones’s apprehension about a public-facing Biden, reflects a growing uncertainty among many Americans about the elderly incumbent’s mental and physical fitness for a second term. Biden has had very limited interactions with the public for a chief executive, holding only two joint press conferences with foreign heads of state, only five solo press conferences in 2022, and no solo press conferences in 2023.
A New York Times/Siena College poll of 3,662 registered voters conducted from October 22 to November 3 indicated anxiety around Biden’s perceived frailty, with 71 percent agreeing strongly or somewhat with the claim that the 80-year-old is too elderly to be an effective president and 62 percent saying he lacks the mental sharpness for the role. On the other hand, only 39 percent believe the same about Trump’s age, 77.
A CBS News poll from September found that only a third of voters believe Biden would finish a second term, suggesting most Americans suspect he will either die in office or deteriorate to the point at which he must resign.