WASHINGTON – Their rivals are busy answering citizens’ questions at the city halls throughout South Carolina, glad-handing with trade house owners in New Hampshire and grinding to hit each one among Iowa’s 99 counties.
But the front-runners for their birthday celebration’s nomination, former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, are slightly campaigning in the most important early-voting states as the number one season enters the fall rush.
Biden is attending a union parade in Philadelphia on Monday. But he has held only one campaign rally in the four-plus months since he officially introduced his 2024 reelection bid. Trump, who complained of his Biden’s “basement strategy” in 2020, has no longer campaigned for 3 weeks now, ultimate showing at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 12.
The schedules underscore the fact that Democrat Biden and Republican Trump, regardless of underwater approval ratings nationally, are the dominant front-runners. Biden faces most effective token opposition in anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s seen extra favorably by way of Republicans than Democrats, whilst Trump is currently beating his closest rival by way of huge margins, in step with contemporary polls.
“When you have a massive lead over your primary opponents, it doesn’t seem like a lot of point,” stated veteran Republican pollster Whit Ayres, talking about the early-state campaigning conventional at this level of a race.
Biden and Trump have labored to challenge an air of inevitability 4 months prior to balloting starts in 2024. Biden has inquisitive about governing and touring the nation to advertise his coverage accomplishments. Trump time and again skips occasions with different applicants and handed on the first Republican number one debate ultimate month.
But each have other causes for their relative absence from campaigning.
Trump’s crew has been ate up by way of the criminal charges he now faces in 4 separate jurisdictions accusing him of illegally looking to overturn the result of the 2020 election, improperly classifying hush cash bills in trade data, mishandling categorised paperwork after leaving place of business and looking to impede that investigation.
Trump has complained that the looming trials will drive from campaigning.
“I’m sorry, I won’t be able to go to Iowa today, I won’t be able to go to New Hampshire today because I’m sitting in a courtroom on bull——,” he said during his last visit to New Hampshire, in August.
For now, Trump’s bookings and arraignments have actually served as his highest-profile campaign events.
His trips to jails and courthouses in New York, Miami, Washington and Atlanta have dominated coverage of the race, with his movements tracked by news helicopters and broadcast live on television and across the internet. His historic mug shot, now featured on T-shirts, mugs and posters, helped his campaign raise more than $20 million in August alone.
Aides say his schedule will ramp up after the Labor Day weekend, with trips this coming week to Iowa and South Dakota — neither is a key primary or general election state — and California after that. He has also been busy behind the scenes. Beyond golfing and meetings with his lawyers, Trump has called into conservative podcasts, taped videos he releases on his Truth Social network and attended fundraisers, both at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and in other states.
Last month, he traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, for a fundraiser that drew several hundreds, including musicians Kid Rock and John Rich and the former NASCAR driver Darrell Waltrip, according to a person who attended but asked to remain anonymous to discuss the private gathering at the the Four Seasons hotel.
This past week, Trump hosted the families of members of the military who died during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. The week before, he held a fundraiser for the Patriot Freedom Project, a group that supports those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Aides say he has also focused on relationship building, calling party officials and recording videos for state and county party events. Such efforts, they say, have helped him earn him earn endorsements from senators, members of Congress and statewide officials.
“We do a lot of fundraising out of state, at Bedminster, calls. There’s a lot that goes into running a campaign that’s not in front of the camera,” said Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita.
They have also acknowledged the large-scale rallies that were the signature of his past campaigns — and which he was doing weekly at this point in 2015 — are expensive, especially as the former president’s political operation has been diverting tens of millions of dollars to spend on legal fees defending him and his allies. In places of the rallies, Trump has given speeches at events organized — and paid for — by state parties, and made unadvertised stops at local restaurants, where he interacts with supporters.
In early-voting New Hampshire, Mike Dennehy, a veteran Republican strategist, stated he thinks Trump “is doing the bare minimum necessary for him to maintain his lead.” At the same time, Trump’s broader campaign “is working very hard, harder than they have have worked in the history of Donald Trump campaigns,” Dennehy said.
“The contenders in the Republican primary are not giving Donald Trump much of a contest. So he has the luxury of just doing enough to maintain his lead,” he stated.
Biden has campaigned even much less.
The president championed a Democratic National Committee effort to make South Carolina the party’s leadoff state in its 2024 presidential primary, breaking with Republicans who are still starting in Iowa. But Biden has not visited South Carolina as a 2024 candidate.
Biden’s reelection campaign says his approach mirrors that of past incumbents, including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Biden is frequently promoting his policy achievements but keeping campaign costs low, while working with national and state Democrats to bolster staff and data operations so that they will be in place when the race heats up next year.
The president has attended fundraisers around the country for his reelection campaign and visited battleground states such as Arizona on official business. Sometimes, he has gone to Republican bastions, including Utah, Texas and Alabama.
Once there, he often blurs the line between politics and the presidency, celebrating things such as the bipartisan infrastructure law approved by Congress last year, while chiding Republicans for opposing a green energy and health care package that he argues is creating jobs and lower costs for Americans.
“You get great credit for doing your job and people tend to listen to you more when you’re not talking about your own reelection but you’re just talking about enacting something that’s good for the country,” stated Ed Rendell, a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. “That’s a real advantage. The incumbent can just go on being the incumbent.”
Biden’s Labor Day travels are taking him back to Philadelphia, site of his lone campaign rally. It was at the city’s convention center, where some of the country’s largest unions paid for a June event after announcing that they had banded together for the first time to offer a joint endorsement of Biden.
A return to Pennsylvania recalls the pandemic-marred 2020 campaign, when Biden visited the state more than any other. Even though he was a senator from Delaware, Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and still frequently talks about his Keystone State roots.
“I think it’s indicative of a campaign that is not forgetting the lessons that were learned in 2020, when Pennsylvania got so much attention – even in the limited campaigning,” stated Mike Mikus, an established Democratic marketing consultant primarily based in Pittsburgh. “If you take it for granted you could lose it.”
Of route, focusing an excessive amount of on one state can create gaps somewhere else. The maximum obvious instance was once Hillary Clinton no longer campaigning in Wisconsin after the 2016 Democratic number one and narrowly dropping the state to Trump. But Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, famous that Biden’s first go back and forth as president was once to Wisconsin.
“This election cycle feels like the exact opposite of 2016,” Wikler stated. Referring to the conventional Democratic “blue wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, he added, “This is an administration that understands to its core that bolstering the blue wall is the path to reelection in 2024.”
___ Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press author Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed to this record.