President Joe Biden is reportedly set to roll out an interesting messaging strategy against Republicans seeking to win the Republican presidential nomination. According to reports, it will be a more robust version of the president’s rhetorical “MAGA Republicans” trope.
You might recall back in the olden days of September 2022 when the president went full Sith Lord in a dark and dreary speech about the pernicious threat MAGA Republicans pose to the country. Before a backdrop resembling something out of the dystopian classic “V for Vendetta,” Biden warned the nation about the dangers of electing these evil MAGA Republicans.
The president’s strategy will include more of that.
The Biden campaign plans to highlight what it’s calling an “extreme MAGA blueprint” by GOP candidates during the first Republican presidential debate, according to a memo first shared with NBC News.
The memo, written by campaign communications director Michael Tyler, lays out five criticisms of the GOP field, including Republicans’ views on cutting Social Security and Medicare, lowering taxes for the rich, banning abortion, protecting the gun lobby and undermining democracy, which focuses on election deniers.
“The 2024 Republicans are focusing on litigating the benefits of slavery, which books they want to ban from schools, and a made-up war on ‘woke’ that they themselves can’t even define,” the memo said. “That’s a race for the MAGA base, not a pathway to winning a general election in 2024.”
The campaign expects the candidates to try to “out-MAGA each other” on the debate stage Wednesday night in Milwaukee, according to the memo.
President Biden and Democrats have been using the “MAGA Republicans” trope since 2022. It is an effort to cast Republicans as wildly extreme and out of touch with the American public. The outcome of the 2022 midterm elections appears to show that this strategy was at least somewhat effective.
For the 2024 election, the success of this approach will depend largely on the Republican contenders. With the candidates who veer further to the right on hot-button issues like abortion, it might be easier to portray them as radicals. Moreover, Biden and company could use the focus on anti-wokeism as another line of attack by trying to convince the nation that Republicans seek to whitewash America’s troubled history with race, while also attacking members of the LGBTQ community.
However, these talking points could backfire if Republicans are savvy enough to highlight the extremism that leftists are pushing when it comes to the woke issues, especially when it comes to saturating K-12 schools with progressive political propaganda. They could take advantage of the national backlash against transing and sexualizing children, a position that Biden will have a hard time defending without resorting to barefaced deception.
On the other side of the coin, relying on portraying Republicans as radical extremists might have already lost its efficacy, especially because Democrats have been so outrageous in their fixation on sexuality and gender identity. Even further, their failure to curb crime due to lax policies against violent offenders will almost certainly be seen as radical to those who favor criminal justice reform, but not the type that endangers citizens.
There is also the possibility that there could be a stronger backlash against the president using this line of attack. After he gave his speech in September, even folks on the left criticized him for demonizing half of the voting base as “MAGA Republicans.” It did not exactly go over well with many in both political camps.
At the end of the day, however, it is the economy that will likely be the deciding factor. If the nation continues to go through tough monetary times, no amount of screaming “MAGA Republicans” is going to cut it. If people are still struggling to make ends meet, they might just choose someone who they might perceive as extreme on some issues if it could result in economic relief.
