President Biden is reportedly borrowing from Donald Trump for his 2024 presidential campaign, but doing so in a way that is more "carefully" thought out.
Biden is running a slim operation at the moment, one that appears to be copying Trump's campaigns. But Biden is doing so in a way that takes advantage of the position he's in, and there's a clear end goal, according to the Washington Post's report on Saturday.
"President Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, has spent her first months on the job planning a sweeping national reelection effort by squatting in a borrowed office overlooking an Amtrak commuter line on Capitol Hill. With just three other paid staffers, her entire operation cost $1.4 million from April through June — about an eighth of what President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign spent in the same period in 2011, when it operated out of an imposing office suite in Chicago nearly the size of a football field," the outlet reported. "Biden aides say that skeletal quality is not a weakness but the plan."
Biden's camp is able to do this because, beyond the campaign itself, "much of the machinery that aims to reelect Biden has quietly been churning at full blast, as hundreds of staffers in the national Democratic Party, state affiliates, outside groups and the White House chip in on a broad strategy designed to exploit changes in campaign finance rules — even while the main campaign office itself has yet to be established." In other words, he's outsourcing the biggest tasks.
This, the Post reports, mimics a Trump method of campaigning.
"The model in some ways echoes the approach taken by Donald Trump in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, when almost all of his field organizing and volunteer programs were run through the Republican National Committee. But in that case, the approach stemmed largely from Trump’s lack of interest or experience in running a sophisticated campaign operation, rather than from a carefully thought-out strategy," the report states. "Biden’s team hopes it can seize the advantage of a unified party apparatus while Republicans, without an incumbent, are splintered and facing an increasingly bitter primary battle between Trump and his rivals for the presidential nomination."