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Watching Donald Trump ascend, the newly energized Biden campaign is aiming to make the general election all about him. It’s also hoping for some big endorsements.
Reid J. Epstein, Lisa Lerer, Katie Glueck and
Reid J. Epstein and Katie Rogers reported from Washington, and Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck from New York.
As former President Donald J. Trump speeds toward the Republican nomination, President Biden is moving quickly to pump energy into his re-election bid, kicking off what is likely to be an ugly, dispiriting and historically long slog to November between two unpopular nominees.
After months of languid buildup in which he held only a single public campaign event, Mr. Biden has thrown a series of rallies across battleground states, warning that democracy itself is at stake in 2024.
He sent two of his most trusted White House operatives to take the helm of his re-election campaign in Wilmington, Del., after Mr. Trump seized control of the Republican primary race more rapidly than Mr. Biden’s advisers had initially expected.
And other Biden aides are drafting wish lists of potential surrogates, including elected officials, social media influencers and the endorsement of their wildest dreams: the global superstar Taylor Swift.
“It’s game on, the beginning of the general election,” said Representative Ann McLane Kuster of New Hampshire, the chair of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of 97 centrist House Democrats. “We’ve got to win this.”
In a race without historical parallel — a contest between two presidents, one of them facing 91 criminal charges — Mr. Biden is making an extraordinary gamble, betting that Mr. Trump remains such an animating force in American life that the nation’s current leader can turn the 2024 election into a referendum not on himself but on his predecessor.
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