Biden and Trump are keeping relatively light campaign schedules as their rivals rack up the stops
Their rivals are busy answering voters’ questions at town halls across South Carolina, glad-handing with business owners in New Hampshire and grinding to hit every one of Iowa‘s 99 counties.
But the front-runners for their party’s nomination, former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, are barely campaigning in crucial early-voting states as the primary season enters the fall rush.
Biden is attending a union parade in Philadelphia on Monday. But he has held just one campaign rally in the four-plus months since he formally launched his 2024 reelection bid. Trump, who complained of his Biden’s “basement strategy” in 2020, has not campaigned for three weeks now, last appearing at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 12.
The schedules underscore the reality that Democrat Biden and Republican Trump, despite underwater approval ratings nationally, are the dominant front-runners. Biden faces only token opposition in anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is viewed more favorably by Republicans than Democrats, while Trump is currently beating his closest rival by large margins, according to recent polls.
“When you have a massive lead over your primary opponents, it doesn’t seem like a lot of point,” said veteran Republican pollster Whit Ayres, speaking about the early-state campaigning typical at this stage of a race.
Biden and Trump have worked to project an air of inevitability four months before voting begins in 2024. Biden has focused on governing and traveling the country to promote his policy accomplishments. Trump repeatedly skips events with other candidates and passed on the first Republican primary debate last month.
But both have different reasons for their relative absence from campaigning.
Trump’s team has been consumed by the criminal charges he now faces in four separate jurisdictions accusing him of illegally trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, improperly classifying hush money payments in business records, mishandling classified documents after leaving office and trying to obstruct that investigation.
Trump has complained that the looming trials will force 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 New Jersey club 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.
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, said 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 said.
