After unsurprisingly successfully surviving his party's primaries in South Carolina, US President Joe Biden is concentrating his efforts on Sunday against a backdrop of mixed polls on a very strategic state, Nevada.
As expected, the 81-year-old Democrat won the vote with 96.2% of the vote in the southeastern state with a large African-American population where he had no real competition.
He wanted to see it as a lucky omen, he who had restarted a campaign in 2020 that got off to a bad start by largely winning the primary in the same state.
AFP
“I have no doubt that you have put us on the right path to winning the presidency again and making Donald Trump the loser again,” the American president commented from the West Coast.
Because Joe Biden didn't come to enjoy his victory in South Carolina: the Democrat traveled to California, the land of Democrats and a generous source of funding, on Saturday before traveling to Nevada on Sunday.
Biden on a “mission”
The dry, mountainous state holds its Democratic primary on Tuesday. But above all, the American president is thinking about the presidential election in November and the increasingly likely prospect of a new duel against his Republican predecessor Donald Trump.
In 2020, Joe Biden narrowly won Nevada, one of those “swing states,” those undecided states where presidential candidates focus all their energy.
The presidential election, as in 2020, should be decided by small differences in votes in certain constituencies in these strategic states: Nevada, Michigan, Arizona and even Pennsylvania.
According to his campaign team, the president wants to talk about “the issues of this election” in Las Vegas, Nevada's largest city.
AFP
In other words, continue to make it clear that November's elections will decide not just economic policy or diplomacy, but also the future of American democracy.
On Saturday, Joe Biden declared: “We’re not running a campaign, we’re running a mission” against Donald Trump.
Surrounded by complaints, the Republican nonetheless continues to mobilize a loyal and even fervent base with his sometimes violent rhetoric about an America in “decline” that he alone could restore.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, generates little enthusiasm despite the good shape of the American economy. His age worries even the Democratic electorate – while that of his rival, 77, hardly seems to move his supporters.
The president assured Saturday that he was “confident” about his campaign because “people are starting to better understand” what election awaits them.
Weak point in immigration
But Joe Biden's eternal optimism cannot really be fueled by the polls: he remains generally very unpopular, and the polls on his chances of re-election are mixed.
On Sunday, the NBC broadcaster published an opinion poll in which Donald Trump was 47% ahead of Joe Biden (42%) in terms of voting intentions.
However, according to the same poll, the Democrat would overtake his rival if the latter, who was on trial in several cases, including four criminal cases, were convicted by the courts this year (45% versus 43%).
A few days ago, Quinnipiac University, whose polls are closely followed, published a poll in which Joe Biden, on the contrary, increased the gap with Donald Trump in terms of voting intentions (50% versus 44%).
The poll released by NBC also confirms that immigration is a major vulnerability for Joe Biden amid the arrival of migrants at the border with Mexico.
As for the race for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump is guaranteed to win the votes of Nevada delegates at the end of a rather byzantine process.
The next big stop for him will be South Carolina, where the right is organizing its primaries on February 24th.
The former Republican president faces the state's former governor, Nikki Haley, the only one who still stands up to him. If he rejects this, nothing will stand in the way of Donald Trump being elected as the Republican Party's representative in the presidential election this summer.