Help or hindrance? Biden takes a back seat as Trump goes all in on midterms

Raucous music will be played, bellicose speeches will be given and big lies will be told. Donald Trump will hold his 20th and 21st campaign rallies of the year in Nevada and Arizona this weekend, urging voters to support Republican candidates in the midterm elections.

Joe Biden will be relaxing at home in Delaware.

Related: What are the US midterm elections and who’s running?

The 45th and 46th US presidents have always been like chalk and cheese and those differences extend to how they approach next month’s crucial vote to determine control of Congress as well as three dozen state governorships.

Trump is pressing on with the travelling circus of mass rallies – featuring merchandise, “Make America great again” (Maga) caps and communal grievance – in small towns or rural areas that have been a hallmark of his political career since 2015.

Biden is likely to hold rallies of his own as election day approaches but for now has focused on smaller, more intimate fundraising receptions in conference centres, back gardens or ritzy New York apartments with the help of alcohol and celebrities.

Underpinning both is the calculation that although both Biden, who turns 80 next month, and 76-year-old Trump are the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties respectively, there are plenty of situations in which they might be seen as more of a liability than an asset.

“They are both a help and hindrance at different points,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington. “Biden is a help raising money; he’s a hindrance with the broader public at large. Trump is a help with the base voter to help gin them up and turn them out; he is a hindrance with the same sort of voters who turned against him and who Republicans need.”

The Axios website reported this week that Biden had flown less for domestic political purposes, and hosted fewer out-of-town fundraisers, than either Trump or former president Barack Obama in their corresponding midterm cycles.

The coronavirus pandemic partly explains his slimmer travel schedule. But so too does Biden’s approval rating, which has hovered in the 30s or low 40s all year, meaning that he could be a potential drag on some midterm candidates seeking to focus on issues such as abortion rights rather than inflation and the threat of petrol prices rising again.

Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman running for the Senate in Ohio, a state that Trump won twice, does not appear enthusiastic about Biden coming to stump for him. He told the conservative Fox News channel: “I want to be the face of this campaign. I don’t want any distractions.”

Progressives on the left of the Democratic party also have misgivings about joint appearances with a president who campaigned as a moderate and, despite some significant legislative achievements, has fallen short of some important objectives in their view.

Chris Scott, chief political officer of the political action committee Democracy for America – which this week endorsed Senate candidates Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, Cheri Beasley in North Carolina, Alex Padilla in California and Charles Booker in Kentucky – said: “There are parts, especially even in the midwest, are still very endeared to him but also you have a lot of the base of the party that still wanted to see more done by him and felt like he wasn’t pushing hard enough.

“You are not necessarily the best asset for us to put out there in every place with you being a little bit more cautious at times. We’ve been vocal about the Biden administration in that, yes, you’ve accomplished some things but you should have pushed harder. You should have been more proactive versus reactive on some things.”

But Scott added: “Him being the top for Democrats is still a much stronger position than everything former president Trump has been in the news for and is going to continue snowballing with. Trump is going to continue to be a liability but nobody in the party can check him. When you’ve created this monster and you wanted him to go so far, and as far as the extremism has gone, it’s hard to put the monster back in the box now.”

Trump has inserted himself into the midterms whether Republican candidates and leaders like it or not. Last month the New York Times reported that the former president had invited himself to rally in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, forcing hopefuls Mehmet Oz and JD Vance to make the best of it.

Some candidates, such as Kari Lake and Tudor Dixon, running for governor of Arizona and Michigan respectively, have enthusiastically embraced the ex-president as a way of firing up turnout from the Republican base.

John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “Whereas it may be difficult for many inside-the-Beltway and for dyed-in-the-wool Democrats to accept, Trump seems to be magical on the stump on behalf of candidates, many of whom, as we’ve seen, are Maga candidates.

“These are people that are ready to vote solidly Republican and he brings that out. What it does for independents remains to be seen.”

But other Republican candidates have adopted a more traditional approach: adopt extreme positions in the primary election, then pivot to moderation in the general so as not to scare away swing voters. For example, Don Bolduc, running for the Senate in New Hampshire, reversed his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump two days after winning a primary.

In these cases, joint campaign appearances with Trump, who is likely to repeat his “big lie” and make other polarising statements, could be politically toxic. But turning him away could risk his wrath and verbal abuse.

Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic election campaign strategist, said: “I don’t think Trump is helping his candidates because he’s going to drive away suburban voters, swing voters, women, but he insists on doing it.

“A lot of his candidates, I think, would prefer that he not show up. He did his thing in the primaries and they’d like to pretend in the general that they’re a little different than they were in the primaries.”

It looks like a replay of the 2020 presidential election in which Trump barnstormed the country while Biden, mindful of pandemic restrictions, rarely ventured out of his basement and won by 7m votes. This time Biden also has a consuming day job – the presidency – and some believe that he should stay focused on that.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster and strategist, said: “The best thing that Joe Biden can do for the Democrats is to keep doing his job and laying out the issues and laying out the choice here, which is what he’s doing.

“The best thing that Trump could do for his party is to be quiet but what he’s doing is great for the Democrats because he’s constantly talking about himself, Trump Republicans, overturning the election and running for office and that really energises Democrats and unnerves independent women.”

Biden is also quietly proving an effective fundraiser. As of 1 October, he had headlined 11 receptions to raise money directly for the Democratic National Committee at venues ranging from mansions in southern California to a yacht club in Portland, Oregon, and bringing in more than $19.6m. On Thursday night he was in New York for a reception for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Such events play to his strengths with one-on-one interactions. At a fundraiser in the Washington suburbs this summer, Biden first focused his attention on a little girl near the front. “Honey, what’s your name?” he asked a little girl, sitting through what he joked had to be the most “boring” event. “Well, let me tell you something. Is that your daddy? He owes you big for having to sit here.”

The fundraisers have also featured celebrities such as the actor Robert De Niro and film-maker Ken Burns and enable Biden to cut loose from the formality of a scripted White House speech.

Biden will be hoping that he fares better than Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Obama, both of whom have suffered huge losses in their first midterms – though both bounced back to win re-election to the White House two years later. For Trump, also, the stakes are unusually high – sweeping defeats for his endorsed candidates could raise fresh questions about his viability in 2024.

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “Trump is responsible for the nomination of at least four Senate candidates who will make the difference in control of the Senate. He also knows that if they all go down to defeat this will be a very significant blow to him nationally. So he’s all in.

“It’s pretty clear since so many of these people [are] in closely run contests in swing states that, if they lose, establishment Republicans are going to debit it to Mr Trump’s account.”

Galston, a former policy adviser to Clinton at the White House, added: “To the extent that the president is not sure that appearing with many of the candidates in closely run contests would be helpful to those candidates, he’s making a wise and humble calculation as to where he could do the most good.

“I have the sense that Mr Biden, who is a political professional of the highest order, understands that this can’t be about him, that he has to do what’s useful and not what’s gratifying to one’s ego. The contrast with the other fellow couldn’t be sharper. I’m not sure that Donald Trump is capable of imagining that he might not be an asset everywhere and, even if he could imagine it, the desire to be in the spotlight would simply override everything else.”