President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is off to a ‘slow start’ according to a Wednesday Axios report.
According to the outlet, Biden’s 2024 campaign manager has yet to start her role and fundraising leaders have yet to even be named. This puts the Biden re-election team already behind Biden’s 2020 campaign and "months behind" former President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
However, Democrats argue that Biden is better positioned today than Obama was for re-election and that the DNC is "better functioning," so there shouldn’t be too much concern.
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The Axios report opened with the claim, "Biden's re-election campaign is off to a slow start — months behind the 2012 pace of Barack Obama, the last president to win re-election."
It noted that one of the big reasons for the hampered beginning was that the president "announced his re-election bid before his campaign team was ready to go."
Biden has reportedly announced "just two full-time staffers" and his 2024 campaign manager, Biden senior aide Julie Chávez Rodriguez "doesn't start her new job for another two weeks, limiting the campaign's decision-making."
In addition, Axios noted reports that Biden’s team were planning to report fundraising totals for "the first 48 hours after he announced the campaign on April 25," yet stated that "a week later, no totals had been announced."
Despite the apparent inconsistency in messaging, a Biden campaign spokesperson told the outlet that "the plan was always to share fundraising numbers at the end of the second quarter."
The report compared Biden’s re-election start to Obama’s in 2012, the last time a U.S. president ran for re-election and won. It stated, "Biden's team is well behind Obama's schedule from 12 years ago. By January 2011, Obama's team had announced its senior leadership, was scouting Chicago office space, and was actively courting donors."
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Axios also noted that Obama already had a campaign manager, Jim Messina, who had "criss-crossed the country for months before the official launch to meet with donors and had secured large donation commitments by early March 2011."
Comparing that to Biden’s seemingly-delayed fundraising push, the outlet stated, "Biden's team held its first big donor event of the 2024 cycle last weekend — but it wasn't a fundraiser. Because Chávez Rodríguez is still a senior aide at the White House, she was limited by ethics rules in what she could talk about with donors."
In addition, "Biden's campaign has yet to announce who will lead its fundraising team."
Not only is this fundraising drive behind his Democratic predecessor’s, it’s lagging behind Biden’s previous campaign. The report said, "The campaign's reluctance to release its fundraising numbers so far is a contrast to four years ago, when Biden's 2020 team announced that it had taken in $6.3 million in the first 24 hours after his campaign announcement."
Though the piece claimed Democrats are not overly worried about this start considering this campaign is in a different place than previous one. Axios wrote, "Biden's team is in a different political situation than what Obama faced in 2011, and doesn't feel as much urgency."
It quoted Messina, who recently weighed in on the differences between Biden’s re-election efforts and Obama’s. Messina claimed, "Biden is better positioned than Obama."
The former Obama campaign manager also argued that under Biden, Democrats "had a better midterm result, they have more Democratic governors helping out, and the DNC is much better functioning. We had to start earlier."
