Trump-Biden rematch hits overdrive with Super Tuesday, State of the Union

The expected general election rematch between President Biden and former President Trump is roughly eight months away, but the starting gun for the marathon campaign will go off this week.

Trump will have all but secured his party’s nomination after Super Tuesday, and Biden will use Thursday’s State of the Union address as a springboard to offer up a vision for a second term to millions of Americans before traveling in the days after the speech to battleground states Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Both men and their campaigns see it as being in their respective best interests for the general election cycle to kick into gear as quickly as possible, albeit for different reasons.

Trump and his team are ready to fully move on from nagging questions about Nikki Haley winning thousands of votes in the GOP primary, and the Trump campaign is eager to fully merge with the Republican National Committee (RNC) so it can bolster its lagging fundraising.

The Biden campaign, meanwhile, has insisted it will benefit once Trump is definitively the GOP nominee, a reality officials have argued millions of Americans have yet to realize.

“The next week is a big week,” said Jim Kessler, vice president of policy at the left-leaning think tank Third Way. “The Republican primary should be over at that point, and the president has the State of the Union. To me, the State of the Union is where Biden kicks off the general election.”

Sixteen states will head to the polls Tuesday to vote in presidential primaries. While Trump and Biden are on a collision course for a rematch in November, Tuesday’s results will allocate enough delegates to solidify that reality.

Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, is still in the race, but she has been unable to point to a single state where she can beat Trump.

The former president’s team has projected he will secure the 1,215 delegates needed to become the presumptive nominee by March 19 at the latest.

Once Trump is the presumptive nominee, his campaign can more formally merge with the Republican National Committee (RNC), opening up joint fundraising opportunities, allowing them to share data and other resources, and potentially cracking the door to the RNC helping with Trump’s legal bills.

Trump has in many ways already been behaving like the nominee, making a trip to the southern border on Thursday and attacking Biden personally and directly while largely ignoring Haley after he trounced her in her home state of South Carolina.

At the same time, Biden and his team are also eager for the general election campaign to begin in earnest.

Polling has shown Trump ahead of Biden in key swing states like Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, with Biden ahead in Pennsylvania and the two candidates neck-and-neck in Wisconsin.

One source familiar with the Biden team’s thinking argued the threat of another Trump term will crystallize for many voters in March. The former president is expected to sweep Super Tuesday and officially clinch the nomination by the middle of the month. His trial in New York City in his hush money case is also set to begin at the end of March.

Some Biden allies have suggested it is to the president’s benefit if Trump is more visible to voters, who can be reminded of his legal troubles and his controversial rhetoric.

Kate Bedingfield, a former longtime Biden aide, said Thursday on CNN that having developments around Trump’s legal troubles front and center reminds voters “not just that he’s a threat to our democracy, but also sort of a bigger issue that he’s all about himself. That power is for him a personal pursuit, that the presidency is not about what’s happening to you, your family at the kitchen table but is really about his personal grievances and vengeance.”

Biden will use the State of the Union to make an affirmative case for his second term. The president’s address last year was watched by 27 million Americans, making the annual speech a massive opportunity for Biden to lay out the stakes for November and for his campaign to rally volunteers and communicate with voters.

A White House official said the speech will highlight major first-term accomplishments like the bipartisan infrastructure law, the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act that invested millions in semiconductor production, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed with only Democratic votes and lowered health care costs and incentivized climate-friendly investments.

But the speech will also be a major opportunity for Biden to contrast his vision for the future with that of Trump and the congressional Republicans who support him.

“There’s obviously an argument that Biden will want to make that whatever disappointments you have about him, don’t you remember what you didn’t like about this other guy, and do you really want Republicans in control of the White House and Congress,” said Dave Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College.