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President Joe Biden is putting long-time Democratic adviser Gene Sperling in charge of helping smooth the upcoming labor contract talks between the auto workers’ union and Big Three automakers, a White House official confirmed Monday — a looming potential economic headache facing the president’s reelection effort.
In tapping Sperling, Biden is putting an economic power player and long-time manufacturing advocate in a position to win over a union that is openly skeptical about the White House’s push for electric vehicles. The effort could also shore up support for the president in Michigan — the state where Sperling was born and which played a crucial role in Biden’s election in 2020.
“As a White House point person on key issues related to the UAW and Big Three, Sperling will help ensure Administration-wide coordination across interested parties and among White House policymakers,” a White House official said in a statement to POLITICO. “Gene will work hand-in-glove with acting [Labor] Secretary Julie Su on all labor-related issues.”
The official was granted anonymity to discuss a matter not yet officially announced.
The United Auto Workers and its new leadership have chastised Biden for steering hundreds of billions of dollars toward incentives for electric vehicles, a policy that the union worries threatens its members’ jobs. Biden’s top Republican rival for the White House, former President Donald Trump, has preyed on those anxieties to court support from auto workers.
That leaves Sperling with a full plate. UAW’s collective bargaining agreement with Detroit’s major car companies ends Sept. 14. Should the talks turn acrimonious, a strike could damage the economy and give Republicans fresh ammunition in the 2024 campaign.
Sperling has spent months advising the White House, including overseeing implementation of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. He has recently begun incorporating engagement with auto companies and the UAW into his daily role.
Sperling, 64, was the national economic council director and national economic adviser to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and a member of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry from 2009 to 2010.
While auto companies received a taxpayer-funded bailout in 2009, UAW leadership contends workers made huge sacrifices to help the industry recover from the recession. That legacy colors much of what is animating UAW President Shawn Fain, who has taken the labor organization in a more aggressive direction since winning a runoff election in March.
The UAW cited its concerns about the jobs implications of electric vehicles when it said in May that it was not yet ready to endorse Biden. It represents a blemish for Biden, a self-proclaimed car guy who has fashioned himself the most labor-friendly president in modern U.S. history.
Biden has pledged to make half of new vehicle sales electric by 2030. But the UAW has pushed Biden to attach more strings to federal investment to ensure companies that receive taxpayer-backed subsidies provide sustaining wages and better working conditions. The fledgling U.S. battery manufacturing industry key to making electric vehicles — and to which the Biden administration has steered tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies — has little relationship with organized labor.
The UAW has often referenced a 2018 study it conducted that suggested moving away from internal combustion engines, which have more parts and require more workers, would cost its members 35,000 jobs. Fain last month slammed the Biden administration for issuing a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to build three battery factories in Kentucky and Tennessee, where labor organizing is more difficult.
“They’re just raising an alarm,” Reem Rayef, senior policy advisor with BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental groups, said in an interview about UAW’s recent public comments. “That’s all great to put these jobs here. I think what we are hearing from UAW is, ‘That is great, but it’s not enough.’”
Gene Sperling, 64, was the national economic council director and national economic adviser to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and a member of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry from 2009 to 2010.
Democratic leaders hoped Elissa Slotkin would clear the field in the Senate primary in Michigan, giving the battle-tested candidate extra time and money to prepare for the general election. Instead, a handful of Democrats have already jumped into the race — and one more is likely on the way.
Actor Hill Harper is finalizing plans to launch his Senate campaign in the coming weeks. The Democrat is preparing for his kickoff event, according to a person close to Harper’s team. He has also shot his announcement video and ordered campaign T-shirts.
The Win Company, the Democratic firm that produced ads for now-Sen. John Fetterman in 2022, made Harper’s launch video, a second source told POLITICO.
Harper, an actor on “The Good Doctor,” has never run for office before. He is expected to run to the left of Slotkin, a moderate, three-term Democratic House member who represents a swing district. His allies believe Harper, who is African American, will be able to build a coalition that includes progressive and Black voters. They also point to his history serving on President Barack Obama’s cancer panel and his ties to well-heeled potential donors in Hollywood.
“I think Hill getting in the race would be a really good thing for Michigan Democrats,” said Washtenaw County Sheriff Jerry Clayton. “In my experience, coronations tend to hurt the party, while robust and competitive primaries with a healthy and respectful debate over the real issues tends to help.”
Some Democrats cautioned that Harper’s bid isn’t a sure thing until he announces he’s running. He had initially prepared for an April kickoff.
If Harper pulls the trigger, he will face an uphill climb. Slotkin had $2.3 million on hand at the end of March, according to campaign finance reports. And she is expected to win the support of much of the Democratic Party statewide and nationally. EMILY’s List, VoteVets, End Citizens United, Rep. Haley Stevens and the Michigan Building Trades Council have endorsed her.
Many of Slotkin’s would-be Democratic competitors have already opted against a Senate campaign, including Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. Retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who Slotkin is running to replace, helped narrow the field.
Harper will also have to take on several other Democrats who have jumped into the Senate race, including Michigan State Board of Education President Pamela Pugh, former state Rep. Leslie Love, businessperson Nasser Beydoun and attorney Zack Burns.
On the GOP side, State Board of Education member Nikki Snyder, former Berrien County Commissioner Ezra Scott, businessperson Michael Hoover and attorney Alexandria Taylor are among those vying for the job.
Hill Harper, an actor on “The Good Doctor,” has never run for office before. He is expected to run to the left of Elissa Slotkin.
Joe Biden has long resisted calls from his party to go full blast on the Supreme Court. After rulings this week that upended Democratic priorities, he’s getting closer but still isn’t ready to pull the trigger.
Following Thursday’s Supreme Court rulings that eviscerated affirmative action in college admissions, the president took several swipes at the court in terms notably hostile for him. The current court, he told reporters, was not “normal.” Later, he would tell MSNBC that its “value system is different.”
The dual responses did not match the brimstone and fury that came from elsewhere in the Democratic Party, where lawmakers called for a drastic overhaul of the nation’s top court in light of the affirmative action ruling. And after the court ruled against his executive action granting student loan relief, he knocked the decision but didn’t go off on the court like other high-ranking Democrats.
Still, the responses did move Biden incrementally closer to his party’s base, even pleasing some of the progressive activists who have pushed him to adopt hardline changes to the court — and who will be a key part of any successful coalition for him in the 2024 presidential election.
“The most encouraging comment from the president was the unscripted one,” said Brian Fallon, who as executive director of progressive judicial issues group Demand Justice has been constantly needling the White House to back a liberal plan to add seats to the Supreme Court. “My advice would be to work that into the main message.”
Biden made clear on Thursday that he remains unwilling to go where others in his party are, swatting away the idea of packing the court in his interview with MSNBC. “If we start the process of trying to expand the court, we're going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy,” he said.
But the totality of his responses, coming at a time when the court is under heightened scrutiny and increasingly distrusted, suggested a politician inching closer in rhetoric to the activist camp, at least according to those who Biden himself has entrusted with such an endeavor. Former U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who served on the president’s commission examining potential changes to the Supreme Court, said that Biden’s comments Thursday were “certainly strong for him.” That he refused to trash the court as illegitimate, she added, was not surprising. It kept with his central political identity.
“If the public doesn’t respect the decisions that the court is handing down, we really are all in trouble,” said Gertner, who has urged Biden to support adding extra seats to the court. “He is walking a line that is an appropriate line to walk: ‘I don’t like these decisions. I disagree, but I am not going to characterize the court.’"
“This is consistent with who he is,” she added.
Biden’s guarded criticism comes at a unique moment of scrutiny for the high court. The overturning of Roe v. Wade last summer led to better-than-expected midterms for Democrats, and Biden’s own reelection campaign is planning to make central a promise to codify abortion protections nationally. And recent reporting scrutinizing Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas’ ties to prominent conservative billionaires has amplified calls from Democratic lawmakers for wholesale overhauls of the court.
The structure and composition of the court has remained one of several points of contention between Biden and his base, with the president often occupying the role of institutionalist loath to challenge the legitimacy of another branch of government inside a party increasingly hellbent on getting him to do so.
Biden — who started his career as an attorney before chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee in the late 1980s and early 1990s — has long sought to avoid the perception that he would challenge the independence of the Supreme Court. And on the 2020 campaign trail, he ducked and dodged the issue of expanding the Supreme Court, even as his primary competitors and fellow Democrats expressed openness to it or even embraced it.
“Action and reaction, anger and more anger, sorrow and frustration at the way things are in this country now politically,” Biden said during a September 2020 speech, where he was trying to discourage Republicans from confirming a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the waning weeks of the campaign. “We need to de-escalate, not escalate.”
Republicans did not heed that plea. And as they moved closer to ultimately confirming Amy Coney Barrett, Biden chose another middle-road option: Instead of promising retribution, he pledged to roll out the commission of scholars to study changes to the court system.
The commission was viewed in Democratic circles as a classic Washington punt. When its report came together in December 2021, it stopped well short of any sweeping recommendations like adding additional justices or advocating for term limits. It instead endorsed a code of conduct for justices and advocated for the court to continue live streaming audio for its oral arguments. The relatively modest scope of the report was quickly brushed aside in Washington, frustrating even some of the members.
Asked about the report on Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters traveling on Air Force One that Biden has “read” it. She disputed the idea that “it’s sitting on the shelf and collecting dust.” But, she added, she did not have “any additional steps to move forward on” to announce.
The Biden campaign declined to comment for this story. The White House, meanwhile, has largely avoided speaking publicly about recent reporting from ProPublica that detailed Thomas’ close relationship with a billionaire Republican donor, and Alito’s vacation with a different billionaire.
When Dobbs was first decided, some progressives criticized Biden’s response as insufficient. Biden signed several executive orders related to abortion and reproductive health but declined to act on others, such as a plan by progressives to put abortion clinics on federal property, his team seeing the more liberal proposals as unfeasible and in some cases harmful.
Biden advisers believe that he sounded the alarm in an effective way — chastising the decision but not casting the judges as illegitimate and making the case that the remedy was through legislative action and elections. They think the rightness of their approach was proven in the policy sphere and at the ballot box: Democrats wildly outperformed expectations in the midterm elections in large part due to voter anger over Dobbs.
Joe Biden — who started his career as an attorney before chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee in the late 1980s and early 1990s — has long sought to avoid the perception that he would challenge the independence of the Supreme Court.
Two years ago, top Republicans in Washington aggressively tried — and failed — to recruit then-Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to run for the Senate. Now they’re testing the waters once more.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), chair of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, called Hogan earlier this month, according to a GOP operative familiar with the conversation.
The two connected in what the operative described as a talk “opening a channel.” But during his chat with Daines, Hogan made it clear that his eye is not currently on the Senate.
“The governor reiterated that he has never been interested in the Senate,” the source told POLITICO.
A prominent moderate and anti-Trump Republican, Hogan had recently announced that he is not running for president on the GOP ticket after openly flirting with a bid. That raised questions about what type of political future he imagined for himself: whether it be a run for the Senate or an independent campaign for the White House, which he has not ruled out.
Daines and Hogan spoke a few days after Hogan announced he’d forgo a Republican presidential run. Hogan, a popular politician in Maryland, was term-limited and ended his governorship at the beginning of this year.
In the wake of the GOP’s midterm losses in 2022, Daines has decided to wade into primaries in hopes of nominating quality Senate candidates. He has sought to lure former hedge fund CEO Dave McCormick into the race for Senate in Pennsylvania. Senate Republicans hope Gov. Jim Justice jumps into the contest in West Virginia as well.
Though Hogan would be a prized recruit, Maryland is by no means a must-win state for Republicans as they seek to flip the Senate chamber. There are several more promising targets, with Democratic incumbents running in Republican-leaning states.
One reason that political insiders are watching Maryland’s Senate race is that many expect Sen. Ben Cardin, who is 79, to retire. Cardin said in January that he is undecided on a re-election bid. As of the end of last year, he only had $1 million on hand, according to campaign finance filings.
GOP officials went to great lengths to try to persuade Hogan to run for the Senate in 2022 against the state’s other Senator: Democrat Chris Van Hollen. They tapped Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, and moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to reel him in.
But Hogan ultimately decided against it, saying at the time that “I just didn’t see myself being a U.S. senator.”
Hogan declined through an aide to provide a comment for this story. The National Republican Senatorial Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan had recently announced that he is not running for president on the GOP ticket after openly flirting with a bid.
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Doug Mastriano lost the Pennsylvania governor’s race last year by double digits, an almost unheard-of shellacking in a battleground state where winners and losers are often separated by a single percentage point.
But another way to look at the election — the way the ultra-MAGA retired Army colonel-turned-state senator looks at it — is that he converted millions of voters to his cause and can now strategize, politically, about how to use them.
“What do you do with a movement of 2.2 million?” he told POLITICO on a recent day in his office in the state capitol. “We’re keeping it alive.”
In a sit-down interview, Mastriano, who rarely speaks with the mainstream media, made it clear that he is not finished with his quest to win higher office and transform the Republican Party along the way. He said he is “praying” about whether to go forward with a potential Senate run in 2024. After God, his wife, Rebbie, will have the final word he said.
“We’ve seen people in the past, other Republican gubernatorial candidates, they rise and they disappear when they lose. Why?” he asked. “You have people that love you and support you.”
If he pulls the trigger, Mastriano would run in a primary for the right to take on Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, an institutional figure in the state. Virtually no one in the Pennsylvania GOP establishment is eager for that matchup. But Mastriano said Casey is a letdown to the anti-abortion cause. Casey's father, former Gov. Robert Casey Sr., signed abortion regulations into law that went all the way to a landmark Supreme Court case, where they were largely kept intact.
“I think he’s a huge disappointment. He’s nothing like his dad,” he said. “His dad was more pro-life than most Republicans.”
Until now, Mastriano’s future plans have been a mystery within political circles. He has few relationships with party leaders and eschews traditional consultants, leaving it all but impossible for GOP officials to know what he’s thinking. In that vacuum of information, rumors have been swirling that he might be eyeing a challenge against Republican Rep. John Joyce, whose seat is safely red. But he ruled that out: “Congressman Joyce and myself are friends.”
What Mastriano ultimately decides to do will illuminate just how chastened the most diehard supporters of former President Donald Trump are after the 2022 midterms. Usually, losses of that magnitude drive people out of electoral politics. But the last three federal elections have been discouraging for Republicans, and each time, they’ve shown little desire to course correct. Trump himself is campaigning again in 2024 and remains the frontrunner for the nomination. Whether the GOP finally does move on will be determined, in large part, by how Republican primary voters treat potential and declared candidates like him and Mastriano.
Inside Mastriano’s small legislative quarters, an anti-abortion protest sign sat in the corner. Wearing his trademark spurs and a 3rd Infantry Division ball cap, he said that his fans have been encouraging him to run for the Senate. But he was open about the fact that those encouraging him aren’t Republican dignitaries.
“It’s mostly supporters across the state,” he said. “Nobody with big names have come out and said, ‘Doug, you need to think about this.’ Just people like you and me.”
In fact, Mastriano’s flirtation with another statewide campaign is sure to give heart palpitations to GOP leaders. When a blue wave swept across Pennsylvania in 2022 — Democrats won the gubernatorial race, Senate race and a majority of state House contests — most Republican officials pointed the finger at Mastriano. His staunchly anti-abortion stance that allowed for no exceptions, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, and his appearance at the capitol the day of the Jan. 6 attack alarmed many swing voters.
After staying out of primaries last year, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm intends to get involved this time around. Party leaders at the national and state level have aggressively courted Dave McCormick, the former hedge fund CEO who narrowly lost the Senate primary in 2022, to run again against Casey. Though McCormick sought Trump’s endorsement and employed former Trump aides during his campaign, Republicans believe he has a mainstream appeal that would attract suburban voters.
Mastriano declined to weigh in on the possibility of a McCormick bid: “Unbelievably, I've never met him, so I'd hate to make a judgment on him without meeting him since he's probably going to run.” He also speculated that there could be a number of Republican candidates who vie for the Senate next year, though he declined to name names: “I think I'll have a few people also running that I know and like.”
As he considers what’s next, Mastriano is analyzing what went wrong in 2022, even showing a willingness to bend on certain political tactics that, last cycle, his party shunned.
Republicans, he said, “have to embrace no-excuse mail-in voting.” That they did not is the reason he thinks he lost. He said he knew during the campaign that it was going to cost him. “It’s just so — repugnant’s the wrong word — it’s just so antithetical to how I view elections,” he said.
Mastriano said he was sure he was going to beat now-Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro right up until Election Day. He didn’t buy the polls showing him down badly.
“Because I’d go to these rallies and people would say, ‘We've never seen this.’ In Josh Shapiro's home county the night before the election, I had over 1,000 people — we stopped counting at 1,000. I saw no Shapiro signs in his own county,” he said. “Here I am in Montgomery County the night before the election, I’m like, we got this. The rally was just electric.”
Mastriano did not formally concede until five days after the election.
He acknowledged that taking on Casey could be a challenge.
“How do I beat the Casey name? ‘Mastriano’?” he said with a grin. “At least they know who I am now.”
In the meantime, Mastriano is taking steps to position himself for a possible run. He is holding a rally this Saturday in central Pennsylvania, which will feature Trump lawyer Christina Bobb and conservative media personality Wendy Bell as speakers. He led a hearing on the East Palestine train derailment over the border from the incident in western Pennsylvania, and he successfully pushed a committee he chairs to subpoena Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw to testify. He also hired Dan Cox, the unsuccessful Maryland gubernatorial nominee, as his chief-of-staff.
Toward the end of the interview, Mastriano said Cox was part of his “A team.” As it happens, Cox’s hiring is also a reason political insiders think he might want to run for higher office again.
“Hmm,” he said, laughing. “Gute erkennung. As the Germans say, ‘Good deduction.’”
Former President Donald Trump, left, is joined Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano on stage at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022.
Joe Biden’s closest advisers have spent months preparing for him to formally announce his reelection campaign. But with the president still not ready to make the plunge, a sense of doubt is creeping into conversations around 2024: What if he decides not to?
Biden’s past decisions around seeking the presidency have been protracted, painstaking affairs. This time, he has slipped past his most ambitious timetable, as previously outlined by advisers, to launch in February. Now they are coalescing around April.
But even that target is less than definitive. People in the president’s orbit say there is no hard deadline or formal process in place for arriving at a launch date decision. According to four people familiar with the president’s thinking, a final call has been pushed aside as real-world events intervene. His cloak-and-dagger trip to Kyiv over the holiday weekend took meticulous planning and the positive reaction to it was seen internally as providing him with more runway to turn back to domestic politics.
While the belief among nearly everyone in Biden’s orbit is that he’ll ultimately give the all-clear, his indecision has resulted in an awkward deep-freeze across the party — in which some potential presidential aspirants and scores of major donors are strategizing and even developing a Plan B while trying to remain respectful and publicly supportive of the 80-year-old president.
Democratic Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois, Gavin Newsom of California and Phil Murphy of New Jersey have taken steps that could be seen as aimed at keeping the door cracked if Biden bows out — though with enough ambiguity to give them plausible deniability. Senators like Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar have been making similar moves.
People directly in touch with the president described him as a kind of Hamlet on Delaware’s Christina River, warily biding his time as he ponders the particulars of his final campaign. In interviews, these people relayed an impression that the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C. — that there’s simply no way he passes on 2024 — has crystallized too hard, too soon.
“An inertia has set in,” one Biden confidant said. “It’s not that he won’t run, and the assumption is that he will. But nothing is decided. And it won’t be decided until it is.”
The stasis wasn’t always so pronounced. After former President Donald Trump’s launch in November, there was a desire among Biden advisers to begin charting their own kickoff plans in earnest. That urgency no longer is evident. They feel no threat of a credible primary challenge, a dynamic owed to Democrats’ better-than-expected midterms and a new early state presidential nominating calendar, handpicked by Biden. Holding off on signing campaign paperwork also allows Biden to avoid having to report a less-than-robust fundraising total for a first quarter that’s almost over.
As the limbo continues, Biden’s advisers have been taking steps to staff a campaign and align with a top super PAC. Future Forward, which has been airing TV ads in support of the president’s agenda, would likely be Biden’s primary super PAC, though other groups would have a share in the campaign’s portfolio, a person familiar with the plans said.
But to the surprise of some Biden allies, they say he has talked only sparingly about a possible campaign, three people familiar with the conversations said. His daily focus remains the job itself. Except for the occasional phone call with an adviser to review polling, he spends little time discussing the election. While First Lady Jill Biden signaled long ago she was on board with another run, some in the president’s orbit now wonder if the impending investigations into Hunter Biden could cause the president to second-guess a bid. Others believe it will not.
A decision from Biden to forego another run would amount to a political earthquake not seen among Democrats in more than a half century, when Lyndon B. Johnson paired his partial halting of the U.S. bombing of Vietnam with his announcement to step aside, citing deepening “division in the American house now.”
It would unleash an avalanche of attention on his vice president, Kamala Harris, whose uneven performances have raised doubts among fellow Democrats about her ability to win — either the primary, the general election, or both. And it would dislodge the logjam Biden himself created in 2020 when he dispatched with the sprawling field of Democratic contenders, a field that included Harris.
“Obviously, it creates doubts and problems if he waits and waits and waits,” said Democratic strategist Mark Longabaugh, who continues to believe Biden will run — and that he won’t put off a decision for too long. “But if he were to somehow not declare ‘til June or something, I think some people would be stomping around.”
“There would be a lot of negative conversation … among Democratic elites, and I just think that would force them to ultimately have to make a decision,” Longabaugh added. “I just don’t think he can dance around until sometime in the summer.”
Biden and much of his inner circle still insists he plans to run, with the only caveat being a catastrophic health event that renders him unable. Anita Dunn, Jen O'Malley Dillon and Mike Donilon have effectively overseen the campaign-in-waiting, with Donilon considering shifting over to a campaign proper while the others manage operations from the White House.
Other top advisers would also be heavily involved, including Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, and former chief of staff Ron Klain may serve as an outside adviser for a 2024 bid.
“The president has publicly told the country that he intends to run and has not made a final decision,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “As you heard in the State of the Union, after the best midterm results for a new Democratic president in 60 years, his focus is on ‘finishing the job’ by delivering more results for American families and ensuring that our economy works from the bottom-up and the middle-out — not the top down.”
For now, most of the senior team sees no need to rush, and are identifying April as the soonest he would go. That was the same month Biden unveiled his primary campaign in 2019, and the month that Barack Obama restarted his campaign engines in 2011. Bill Clinton declared in April of the year before he was reelected, and George W. Bush in May, Bates added.
In addition to Biden’s unchallenged hold on the party, they note a belief that some of his legislative wins — like the infrastructure and CHIPS bills — will yield dividends in the months closer to Election Day and the need to pace the president. They point to the year ahead of heavy foreign travel, including his historic stops in Ukraine and Poland to rally European allies against Russia.
“We’re not going to have a campaign until we have to,” a Biden adviser said. “He’s the president. Why does he need to dive into an election early?”
But the delay in an announcement has allowed nervous chatter to seep in — or, in the case of Biden confidants, dribble out from his inner circle. It’s forced them to consider whether Biden’s waiting could leave the party in a difficult position should he opt against another run.
Some people around the president note he’s always been, as he likes to say, somebody who respects fate. And they pointed to the seemingly unguarded answer he gave recently to Telemundo, when asked what was stopping him from announcing his decision on a second term.
“I’m just not ready to make it,” Biden said. He continued to insist in the same interview that polls showing Democrats eager to move on from him are erroneous.
Biden is famously indecisive, a habit exacerbated by decades in the über-deliberative Senate. He publicly took his time mulling a decision not to run in 2016 and to launch his run in 2020. He missed two self-imposed deadlines before choosing Harris as a running-mate.
In the White House, he pushed back the timeline to withdraw from Afghanistan; skipped over his initial benchmark to vaccinate 70 percent of American adults against Covid-19 with at least one shot; and earlier in his presidency let lapse deadlines on climate, commissions, mask standards and promised sanctions on Russia for poisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
His decision-making process is complete with extensive research, competing viewpoints and plenty of time to think. This time around, according to those close to him, he has made rounds of calls to longtime friends, all with an unspoken sense that he is running again — though without a firm commitment being made.
Meanwhile, aspiring Democrats have moved to keep their options open. They’ve done so with enough ambiguity to give them cover — actions that could be interpreted as politicians simply running for reelection to a separate office, selling books, or building their profiles for a presidential campaign further out in the future.
Among them is Pritzker, who was just elected to a second term. The Illinois Democrat — like everyone else — has offered his full support to Biden. But insiders note that senior advisers from his last two campaigns are still standing by just in case. Key among them is Quentin Fulks, who last year served as campaign manager to Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock. Pritzker’s last two campaign managers, Mike Ollen, and chief of staff Anne Caprara, remain ready to deploy, along with others.
“It’s the Boy Scout motto. ‘Be prepared,’” Democratic strategist David Axelrod said, referring to any appearance by Pritzker or other Democrats to be putting their ducks in a row for a potential presidential campaign.
Newsom’s circle of top advisers and close aides have a similar understanding should he need to call on them — after easily winning reelection last year, surviving a recall attempt the year before and building one of the largest digital operations in Democratic politics. Murphy, who’s chairing the Democratic Governors Association, is in the same boat as the others, having vowed to back Biden while indicating an interest in a campaign should a lane open for him.
Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who plans to seek reelection to her Senate seat in 2024, has been keeping up relations with donors far outside of Minnesota, holding a fundraiser in Philadelphia late last month. At the event, Klobuchar was asked if she planned on running for president in 2024, according to a person in the room. “She said she expects the president to run for reelection,” the person said.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also is running for reelection, a dynamic that allows her to pledge support for Biden, bank her own cash, communicate with party leaders on her own behalf — and change direction should she need to. One source close to the senator, however, said another presidential bid is highly unlikely regardless of what Biden decides.
Sanders, who ran for the White House in 2020 and 2016, released a new book, “It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism,” this month. He is making media appearances and going on tour with stops in New York, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Arizona and California, the delegate-rich, Super Tuesday state that he won in his second presidential campaign.
Sanders, who himself is 81, has said that he would not challenge Biden in a primary. But he had not ruled out a run in 2024 in the event there was an open presidential primary. Sanders’ former campaign co-chair, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif), told POLITICO that Sanders “is preparing to run if Biden doesn’t,” adding he’d support Sanders in such a scenario.
Khanna has made his own moves as well, retaining consultants in early-primary states and drawing contrasts with other ambitious Democrats such as former presidential candidate and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, another 2024 possibility. Khanna has said he will back Biden if he runs again and that he would not run for president next year if Biden declined to do so. But he has kept his options open to a campaign in 2028, or years beyond.
“Without being overly aggressive, everyone’s still keeping the motor running just in case and they’re not being bashful about it,” said one Democratic donor, describing a call with the staff of a candidate who ran against Biden in 2020. “On the phone, everyone is very clear and has the same sentence up front: ‘If Joe Biden is running, no one will work harder than me, but if he’s not, for whatever reason, we just want to make sure we’re prepared for the good of the party.”
What’s driving the talk isn’t just Biden and his age, the donor added, but the possibility that Trump could return. “Most donors view the alternative as an existential threat to the country,” said the donor. “So is some of this impolite? Maybe. But no one seems to be taking issue with it.”
As White House officials, advisers and operatives await word from Biden for 2024, many have received little clarity about where they may fit into an eventual campaign. Several decisions related to staffing remain up in the air — a dynamic some attribute to aides trying to best determine where all the moving pieces would fit together.
Meanwhile, a plan to work in tandem with a constellation of Democratic super PACs is already starting to take shape.
Dunn met in recent weeks with donors and officials at American Bridge, another major Democratic super PAC, one person familiar said. Top Biden aides have ties to both Future Forward and Priorities USA, two other super PACs.
While Future Forward is likely to play the biggest role outside the possible campaign, aides stressed the others would be highly active, too. And it’s likely a campaign would designate an operative from outside its ranks itself to serve as an unofficial go-between to better coordinate with the outside groups.
Several of the candidates for the campaign manager position represent a next generation of Democratic talent: Jennifer Ridder, Julie Chávez Rodriguez, Sam Cornale, Emma Brown and Preston Elliott. Christie Roberts, executive director of the Democratic Senate campaign arm and another sought-after operative, appears likely to remain in that job for 2024 following the party expanding its narrow Senate majority.
Addisu Demissie, a longtime operative who ran Sen. Cory Booker’s 2020 campaign and worked closely with Bidenworld to produce the DNC, has been approached and courted for top posts on a campaign or super PAC. And Fulks, coming off the Warnock victory, also is viewed as a possible player on Biden’s campaign.
Yet there are concerns about how much autonomy the role would provide given Biden’s tight-knit circle of old hands that’s famously suspicious of outsiders.
There’s another complicating factor to sort out on staffing, according to the people familiar with the situation: Biden's personal desire for a prominent campaign surrogate to blanket the cable airwaves.
One person who could fit the bill of a more public-facing (less operationally involved) campaign manager is Kate Bedingfield, the Biden insider who just left her post as the White House communications director. Bedingfield’s name has come up more over the last week in conversations among Biden aides, the two people familiar with the talks said.
The campaign pieces are being lined up. And several top financiers say they have been in touch with the president’s team to plan events. The president had a physical examination last week, in which his doctor gave him a nearly clean bill of health.
All that is missing is the official go-ahead.
President Joe Biden is famously indecisive, a habit exacerbated by decades in the über-deliberative Senate.
Days after Sen. John Fetterman's office announced that he had checked himself into a hospital for depression, both his staff and the governor's office in Pennsylvania said they fully expect him to return to work.
Aides to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said they are not taking any steps to prepare for the possibility that Fetterman may eventually announce a resignation.
“Absolutely not,” said Manuel Bonder, press secretary for Shapiro. “The governor admires Senator Fetterman taking care of his mental health and looks forward to him being back in the Senate representing Pennsylvania.”
Fetterman’s aides said he will likely return from inpatient care in a few weeks.
“In Senate time, which is a bit like geologic time, John’s time away will be the blink of an eye,” said Fetterman's chief of staff, Adam Jentleson.
The comments come amid a new round of questions around Fetterman's future in the chamber he now serves. The dismissal of such chatter underscores the progress being made around perceptions and understanding of mental health.
Fetterman is among the first sitting senators to have disclosed his struggles with depression. And in the aftermath, his staff, a wide range of political observers, and mental health advocates applauded the idea that his case could help reduce stigmas around the disease.
During the 2022 midterms, Fetterman suffered from a stroke days before the May primary. He continues to experience auditory processing issues. Fetterman’s Republican opponent, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, made his health and transparency around it issues in the campaign. Fetterman went on to win the race by nearly five percentage points.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) takes part in a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on Capitol Hill Feb. 15, 2023.
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