Biden campaign grapples with undecided voters who don’t yet believe Trump could be the nominee

By MJ Lee and Arlette Saenz, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Voting in the Republican primary can’t start soon enough in the minds of President Joe Biden’s campaign advisers.

Even as the Biden reelection campaign forges ahead with preparations for another potential general election match-up between Biden and his predecessor, it is grappling with a stubborn reality: The majority of undecided voters simply do not seem to believe – at least not yet – that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee.

According to the campaign’s internal research, this is the case for most of the undecided voters that the campaign is targeting – nearly three-in-four of them, senior Biden campaign officials told CNN. Those officials said one of the biggest reasons driving this is the simple fact that many voters are not paying close attention to the election, including the ins and outs of the GOP nomination process.

“You can’t conceive of how tuned out these folks are,” one senior campaign official said.

To that end, Biden campaign officials see the task of helping voters recognize that Trump is a strong frontrunner as one of their most important and urgent challenges, with the first GOP caucus in Iowa now just days away. A key part of that work is painting a vivid picture of what a second term of a Trump White House would look like.

At some point in the near future, Biden campaign officials say they expect that a switch will turn on for many of these voters who are not yet convinced that Trump is likely to be on the ballot in the fall. As one senior official put it, a realization will hit: “Oh s—, it is an election between that guy and that guy.”

But what’s impossible for the campaign to predict at this point in the election cycle is when exactly it will click for voters that “that guy” – Trump – is poised to be the GOP presidential nominee. Just 20% of the public has been paying a lot of attention to the 2024 presidential campaign, according to an AP-NORC poll from the end of last year; meanwhile, 47% said they have paid little or no attention.

For now, the most immediate task at hand for Biden’s team is to lay the groundwork for their anticipated fight against the former president. Biden opened the campaign year with his most forceful rebuke of Trump yet as his advisers look to steadily ramp up their attacks in the coming months.

“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power,” Biden said ahead of the third anniversary of the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

The campaign this week showed its laser focus on Trump around two high-profile events in Iowa.

The former president appeared in a Fox News town hall on Wednesday night at the same time Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley faced off in CNN’s Republican presidential primary debate. But the Biden campaign chose to only respond in real-time to Trump’s comments – and did not engage in the Haley-DeSantis fight – as they previewed their main political arguments for the coming year.

“The president looks forward to spending the next 10 months reminding the American people how dangerous Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda are for Americans’ pocketbooks, their freedoms, and their democracy,” said Biden communications director Michael Tyler.

One issue the Biden team was quick to seize on: Trump taking credit for overturning Roe v. Wade. The campaign’s press team sent a news release simply quoting the former president saying, “The following is a statement from Donald J. Trump: ‘For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it. And I’m proud to have done it.’’”

Biden’s advisers view those kinds of comments as fodder for their general election fight, especially as they believe abortion rights could serve as a major motivating factor at the ballot box.

Biden’s team also saw a recent opening for a fight with Trump over the economy. The campaign quickly sought to amplify the former president’s prediction the economy would crash with the hope it would happen under Biden’s watch, and they tapped the president himself to fire back on social media.

“[Trump]’s acknowledging that my economy is doing pretty darn well, because he doesn’t want that to continue,” Biden said in a video posted to social media platform X. “And by the way, the idea that he wants to see a crash in the next 12 months – he doesn’t want to be Herbert Hoover. He has to understand, he’s already Herbert Hoover. He’s the only other president who lost jobs during his term.”

The focus on Trump and particularly the argument around protecting democracy has outsized importance, as senior officials acknowledge that Biden’s economic message is still not breaking through. As the president continues to trail his predecessor in hypothetical head-to-head matchups, voters in particular hold a poor view of the US economy, despite economic bright spots and months of “Bidenomics” messaging.

Biden advisers and allies openly acknowledge that they expect a Biden-Trump match-up to be close. Until Trump clearly emerges as the next GOP nominee, they say, they plan to continue reminding voters what the former president did with his first term in office and warn of what another four years of a Trump presidency would look like.

“Once you get to that head-to-head, the dynamics change. The world is different,” one senior Biden campaign official said.

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