Biden campaign warns of ‘very close’ general election

President Biden’s campaign issued a warning Thursday that while it is prepared a year out from the 2024 race, it is expecting a razor-tight race — one that is likely to be a rematch with former President Trump.

In a memo, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said her team feels “well-prepared to defeat whoever emerges from the extreme MAGA Republicans’ primary field,” but that “this will be a very close general election.”

Rodriguez argued that the Biden campaign is in a strong position, because the president’s message to protect democracy and the “soul of the nation” still resonates with voters, the GOP primary candidates are focused on “extreme positions” such as banning abortion, and the Biden campaign has $91 million cash on hand.

She also noted that Democratic gains in key states, especially in 2020 and in the midterms, when Democrats had a better-than-expected performance, will help the president in next year.

“We expect this to be a very close race, but recent strong Democratic performances in every battleground state — and President Biden and Vice President Harris’s win in 2020 — demonstrate that the president has multiple paths to earning 270 electoral votes next November,” she said.

Trump is the runaway leader in the GOP primary, a little more than two months before the first Republican contest in the Iowa caucuses. Despite his legal problems, the former president enjoys a healthy lead in national polling and in the key early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Polls show a very tight match-up between Trump and Biden.

The memo only mentions Trump twice by name, including calling the 2017 GOP tax bill a “scam” and arguing that Trump led the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade. The memo does refer to so-called MAGA Republicans multiple times.

Rodriguez argued that Republican primary fighting will burn resources for the candidates. Biden doesn’t have a strong primary challenger, though some candidates who have entered the race, including Marianne Williamson and independents Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the latter of whom appeared this week to pull more support from Trump than Biden in polls.

“While Republicans burn through resources in a contested primary, the campaign is leveraging a united Democratic Party and strong Democratic National Committee to build a strong, innovative operation ahead of the general election,” Rodriguez said.

The third Republican primary debate is Wednesday in Miami. Trump, who did not attend the first two debates, is not expected to participate.