Denial and uncertainty hang over a rematch between Biden and Trump, 6 months before Election Day

WILMINGTON, North Carolina – This North Carolina voter is nervous.

Will Rikard, a 49-year-old father of two, was among the hundreds of Democrats who stood up and cheered for Joe Biden when the first-term president gave a fiery speech recently about the billions of dollars he has delivered to protect water. drinking water in the state. .

But later, the Wilmington resident acknowledged he is concerned about Biden’s political standing in the impending rematch with former Republican President Donald Trump.

“There’s not enough energy,” Rikard said of Biden’s coalition. “I think people are going to need to wake up and move on.”

Exactly six months before Election Day, Biden and Trump are locked in the first contest in 112 years, with a current and former president vying for the White House. It’s a race that is both deeply rooted and highly evolving, as many voters are just beginning to embrace the realities of the 2024 campaign.

Wars, trials, Robert Kennedy Jr.’s independent candidacy and deep divisions across America have injected extraordinary uncertainty into a race for the White House in which either man would be the oldest president ever inaugurated on Inauguration Day. At the same time, political fights over abortion, immigration and the economy are playing out on Capitol Hill and in statehouses.

Looming over all of this is the disbelief of many voters, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Biden and Trump – the presumptive nominees of their respective parties – will ultimately appear in this fall’s general election.

“I think we have an electorate that is going through phases of mourning over this election,” said Sarah Longwell, who conducts regular focus groups with voters across the political spectrum as co-founder of the group Republican Voters Against Trump. “They denied: ‘Not these two, it can’t be these two.’ And I think they are in depression now. I’m hoping people will find acceptance.”

Trump is in the midst of the first of potentially four criminal trials and faces criminal charges. The Constitution does not prevent him from assuming the presidency if he is convicted — or even if he is in prison.

Biden, who will turn 82 just weeks after Election Day, November 5, is already the oldest president in US history; Trump is 77 years old.

Privately, Democratic operatives close to the campaign constantly worry about Biden’s health and voters’ poor perception of him. In recent weeks, aides have begun walking alongside Biden as he walks to and from Marine One, the presidential helicopter, on the South Lawn of the White House, in an apparent effort to help mask the president’s stiff gait.

Still, neither party is making serious contingency plans. Whether voters want to believe it or not, the general election matchup is all but set.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said many voters are reeling from what he called “a gut-wrenching, gut-wrenching fight” that was the 2020 presidential election.

“A lot of them haven’t grasped the fact that it is, in fact, going to be a rematch,” Cooper said in an interview. “When that happens, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Joe Biden will win.”

Even before voters start paying close attention, the political map in the fight for the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency is already taking shape.

Biden’s campaign is increasingly optimistic about North Carolina, a state it lost by just 1 percentage point in 2020. Overall, the Democratic president’s re-election campaign has several hundred staffers in more than 133 offices across the seven most critical states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

Trump’s team has barely begun to roll out infrastructure in swing states, although he campaigned in Wisconsin and Michigan last week, sending a clear signal that he intends to block Biden’s path to re-election through the “blue wall” of Democrats in the Midwest.

Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said Trump is making plans to invest new resources in at least two other Democratic-leaning states.

At a private donor retreat in Florida on Saturday, LaCivita discussed the campaign’s plans to expand its electoral map to Virginia and Minnesota, based on the Trump team’s growing optimism that both states are within reach.

“We have a real opportunity to expand the map here,” LaCivita told the Associated Press. “Biden’s campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on television ads and his vaunted ground game. And they have nothing to show for it.”

The Biden campaign welcomed the Trump team to spend money in Democratic states. “The Biden campaign will focus relentlessly on the path to 270 electoral votes, and that is what our efforts represent,” said campaign communications director Michael Tyler.

Biden has been spending much more aggressively on election infrastructure and advertising in the six-month period leading up to Election Day.

In the eight weeks since he won the Republican nomination, Trump’s campaign has spent virtually nothing on television advertising, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. Outside groups aligned with Trump spent just over $9 million.

Over the same period, AdImpact found, Biden and his allies spent more than $29 million spread across Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump’s team has been unusually conservative, in part to avoid the mistakes made in 2020, when his campaign essentially ran out of money and was forced to reduce advertising in the critical final days of the election, but also because it has struggled to reignite his appeal to small donors and the diversion of a few dollars to the former president’s legal defense.

Trump’s team insists it will soon ramp up its advertising and local infrastructure, though LaCivita declined to provide any details.

It’s clear that Biden and Trump have serious work to do to improve their standing with voters.

Although optimistic in public, Biden’s allies recognize in private that his approval ratings may be lower than Democrat Jimmy Carter’s numbers at this point in his presidency. Trump’s ratings aren’t much better.

Public polls consistently show that voters dislike the 2024 options.

Only about 2 in 10 Americans say they would be excited about Biden (21%) or Trump (25%) being elected president, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March. Only about a quarter of voters surveyed say they would be satisfied with each of them.

A recent CNN poll carried out in April revealed that 53% of registered voters say they are dissatisfied with the presidential candidates they will have to choose in this year’s elections.

Another major unforeseen event is Kennedy, a member of the famous political dynasty and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who is running as an independent. Both major campaigns are taking him seriously as a potential spoiler, with Trump’s allies notably increasing their criticism of Kennedy in recent days.

For now, Biden’s team is more focused on reminding voters of Trump’s divisive leadership. Three years after Trump left office, there’s a sense that some voters may have forgotten what it was like with the former reality TV star in the Oval Office — or his efforts to overturn the 2020 election that put him in legal jeopardy.

“The plan reminds voters what life was like under Trump and also demonstrates to voters that the ways in which the world feels uncertain to them now are not, in fact, caused by the president, but can actually be navigated by this president. ” Biden pollster Mary Murphy told AP. “Voters will trust his leadership and administration, knowing things could be much worse if it’s Donald Trump.”

Biden’s team is also betting that the violent backlash against new abortion restrictions, which Trump and Republicans have widely defended, will swing voters toward Democrats, as they did in the 2022 midterm elections and 2023 state elections.

But Biden’s success also depends on Democrats’ ability to reassemble their winning 2020 coalition at a time when enthusiasm is waning among critical voting blocs, including blacks, young voters and Arab Americans dissatisfied with the way the president dealt with the war in Gaza.

Trump was forced to adapt his campaign to his first criminal trial in New York. Prosecutors allege he committed financial fraud to hide secret payments to a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump. He denies her allegation and pleads innocent.

For now, Trump is forced to attend the trial most days of the week. A verdict is likely still weeks away. And after that, he faces the prospect of more trials related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of confidential documents. The Supreme Court is considering whether Trump should receive immunity, or partial immunity, for actions he took while in office.

Last week, Trump took campaign breaks due to the court’s agenda, rallying voters in Wisconsin and Michigan, where the abortion debate is raging.

Trump appeared to be looking for a way to lessen the political impact caused by the unrest sparked by the Supreme Court’s overturning of the nation’s right to abortion. The former president suggested the issue will ultimately unite the country as states craft different laws.

“A lot of bad things will happen besides the abortion issue if you don’t win the election, with your taxes and everything,” he told Michigan voters.

Trump’s team says privately that his unprecedented trial in New York will dominate the news – and voters’ attention – for the foreseeable future. His campaign largely stopped trying to release unrelated news during the trial.

Even if Trump were convicted by a New York jury, his advisers insist that the fundamentals of the election will not change. Trump has worked aggressively to undermine public confidence in the allegations against him. Meanwhile, more traditional issues work in his favor, including persistently high inflation and the situation on the US-Mexico border, in the opinion of the Trump team.

LaCivita said such questions constantly reinforce Biden’s weakness as “the news of the day gets worse.”

Both sides seem to agree that the dynamics of the race could still change dramatically based on a number of factors, from how the economy performs or the course of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to crime or migration trends or other anticipated events. . Debates over potential candidates this fall could be another unforeseen event.

Such uncertainty, said Biden’s swing states director Dan Kanninen, could play to his advantage.

“This dynamic is both an opportunity and a challenge for us,” he said, “because we will have the resources, the infrastructure and the operation built to engage voters in all of these difficult waters.”

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Miller reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Linley Sanders in Washington and Michelle L. Price in Freeland, Michigan, contributed to this report.