Biden Campaign Says GOP Primary Is Over, Will Focus on Trump

The GOP primary is practically over, President Joe Biden’s 2024 Campaign said on Wednesday, adding that they will now focus on former President Donald Trump.

“We’re just looking at the reality of the data in front of us, right? We’ve been prepared for this since the launch of this re-election in April of last year. Now, coming off of Iowa and New Hampshire, you have Donald Trump who’s fully consolidated the extreme MAGA [Make America Great Again] base of the party and is marching towards the nomination,” Biden’s campaign communication director Michael Tyler said.

President Biden’s campaign is officially in general election mode and will mobilize resources accordingly, he said.

“The campaign has already begun staffing up in battleground states across the country … You can of course expect more to come in that regard because it’s all hands on deck now. We’re full steam ahead heading into the general election,” Mr. Tyler told reporters.

President Trump won the New Hampshire GOP primary on Tuesday.

According to The Associated Press,  with 97 percent of the vote tallied, President Trump got 54.3 percent of the vote. Former South Carolina governor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley got 43.3 percent of the vote.

President Trump will be the Republican Party’s nominee and a Trump-Biden rematch is coming, the Biden campaign said right after the New Hampshire GOP primary results came out.

“Tonight’s results confirm Donald Trump has all but locked up the GOP nomination, and the election-denying, anti-freedom MAGA movement has completed its takeover of the Republican Party,” Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement on Tuesday. “Donald Trump is headed straight into a general election matchup where he’ll face the only person to have ever beaten him at the ballot box: Joe Biden.”

Biden’s Strategy for 2024

President Biden joined several campaign events around the anniversary of Jan. 6 and laid out a clear strategy against President Trump: that is, labeling the former president and his supporters as “extremists” and accusing them of being “anti-democratic.”

“Today, we gathered in a new year, just one day before Jan. 6, a day forever seared in our memory because it was on that day when we nearly lost America—lost it all,” President Biden said during his speech on Jan. 5 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. “Today, we’re here to answer the most important questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?”

“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him; not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power. Our campaign is different. For me and Kamala, our campaign is about America. It’s about you,” President Biden told supporters.

Another area the Biden campaign is focusing on is independent voters.

“In New Hampshire, a general election battleground state, signals from undeclared voters show that Trump does not have the support from independents that he has had in the past years,” principal deputy campaign manager for the Biden campaign Quentin Fulks said during the Wednesday press call.

“President Biden is doing better among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than Trump is doing comparative with Republicans and GOP-leaning independents,” he said.

Winning independent votes could be an uphill battle for President Trump, AP VoteCast data shows.

About 21 percent of Republicans who said they would vote in New Hampshire said they would not support President Trump. Among the independents who said they would vote in the New Hampshire GOP primary, 68 percent said they would not support Mr. Trump.

AP VoteCast is a survey of 1,989 New Hampshire voters who said they would take part in the Republican primary and 915 Democratic primary voters.

Claire McCaskill, a former Democrat U.S. senator from Missouri, also suggested that independent Republican voters could be a pivot force in 2024.

“I think there’s two Republican parties right now: Donald Trump is the new Republican Party, and he is going to consolidate the base of the new Republican Party—and I think that’s probably 60 to 70 percent of the people who call themselves Republicans.

“But there’s another 25 or 30 percent, and that’s the Nikki Haley party—and those are people, many of whom have said clearly they will never vote for Donald Trump—those are the voters that Joe Biden needs to be looking at,” Ms. McCaskill said during an interview with MSNBC.

Denouncing MAGA Could Backfire

President Trump started the MAGA movement during his 2016 campaign with the slogan of “Make America Great Again.”

Massive MAGA rallies have become an icon of President Trump’s campaigning across 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Though the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign have been trying to denounce the MAGA movement, some of President Trump’s supporters insist that the MAGA movement is much bigger than just Republicans.

Various reports indicated that President Trump enjoys support from people of various backgrounds and parties, including increasingly, among black and Latino Americans.

The MAGA crowd is “diverse,” Dean Phillips, a 2024 Democrat challenger to President Biden noticed.

“I went to a Donald Trump rally a couple nights ago. … I saw the line of people waiting in the cold for hours … Met probably 50 Trump people waiting in line, every single one of them thoughtful, hospitable, friendly. All of them [are] so frustrated that they feel nobody is listening to them but Donald Trump. A diverse crowd, people who had never been to a Trump event before. My party is completely delusional right now,” he said during the interview with CNN.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—who has largely donated to Democrats—also warned Democrats that being disrespectful to President Trump’s supporters, who want America to be great again, could backfire.

“I just want to point out, I wish the Democrats would think a little more carefully when they talk about MAGA,” Mr. Dimon told CNBC hosts. “When people say MAGA, they’re actually looking at people voting for Trump and they think they’re voting—and they’re basically scapegoating them, that you are like him. But I don’t think they’re voting for Trump because of his family values.

Mr. Dimon added that time has proven President Trump right on certain policies.

“He’s kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well. … Tax reform worked. He was right about some with China. … He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues. And that’s why they’re voting for him.”

“Can we stop that stuff and actually grow up and treat other people respectfully and listen to them a little bit? And I do think the economy will affect … I think this negative talk about MAGA is going to hurt Biden’s election campaign,” he warned.