President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign isn’t yet in full swing, but Democratic strategists are already setting up his 2024 messaging—and they think they have a surprise issue that can cut through party lines.
Biden will certainly be dragged into culture wars. And if Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, he’ll of course have to be a counterweight to Trump’s MAGA brand of shock and awe politics. But the White House also thinks Biden can own boring, bipartisan issues that almost every voter agrees on.
Enter “junk fees,” the surprise costs consumers face when they want to check a bag on an airline or buy a concert ticket online.
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It’s those little annoying fees—fees that many Republicans want to protect and most Democrats want to dismantle—that Biden and the White House think can be a surprise winner.
Yes, abortion will motivate many Democrats to vote. Of course many moderates remain repulsed by Trump. But junk fees? Democrats are betting Republicans won’t have a good answer why they think you should face a surprise cost when you want to, say, book a vacation.
And more than just winning over voters because they’re trying to save consumers a few bucks, Democrats think the issue can actually be revealing of the GOP’s pro-corporate ideology—cutting into MAGA messaging that has convinced many Americans that Trump and Republicans are looking out for them.
Biden is vying for a whole of government approach on the issue, from Congress to agencies, to tackle junk fees.
It’s niche, but it’s tangible—and his allies say that’s by design.
“The genius of Joe Biden’s presidency has been to deliver changes that people feel every day,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told The Daily Beast.
“It’s politically smart, but it’s also the right thing to do. To show people that government can be on the side of people, not just always helping out big corporations,” she said.
Warren pointed to things like the $35 cap on insulin and student debt forgiveness as policy issues that are tangible for Americans.
“And now junk fees,” she added.
The latest junk fees movement from Biden didn’t come out of nowhere. After a viral breakdown of ticket sales during the launch of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, companies like Ticketmaster—and their junk fees—were in the limelight. In Biden’s State of the Union speech in February, he dinged surprise fees from airlines for things like baggage costs or paying to sit next to a loved one. “Americans are tired of being played for suckers,” he said to applause.
In tandem, Democrats in both the House and Senate introduced bills supporting his push, which they say are making progress.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), sponsor of the Junk Fee Prevention Act, told The Daily Beast last week that tackling this issue “has more and more momentum given the president’s statements and meetings.”
“It’s an idea whose time has come—the idea that we ought to abolish junk fees,” he said.
Blumenthal signaled there may be room for bipartisan support on the matter—which would be necessary in the Senate—and he is “having conversations with a lot of receptiveness.”
Adam Green, co-founder at Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told The Daily Beast there’s some hope that Republicans will “join the call.”
“The White House is staying focused on this issue, and groups like ours will be working with the president and Congress to shine the spotlight on junk fees through a series of hyper-local events this summer,” Green said.
Biden has taken time to applaud companies who have already adopted his push. At an event this month, he put companies who are scrapping so-called “junk fees” front-and-center.
Since the effort, businesses like LiveNation have agreed to start showing prices up front, and Ticketmaster announced it will add an option for users to see upfront pricing. At least three major airlines have also guaranteed no extra fees to sit with a child. And the Department of Transportation mounted a not-so-subtle pressure tool that outlines which companies do and don’t offer that guarantee.
The White House and pro-Biden groups like Building Back Together—an outside arm supporting the president—have also made the initiative a centerpiece of their messaging.
The effort fits into the sort of broad scheme of Biden’s previous policy wins, like the infrastructure bill, which delivered individual projects on roads and bridges across the country that Americans could see active progress on, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, which also packed in individual policies like clean-energy tax credits.
To be sure, the strategy of staying away from the GOP’s infighting isn’t guaranteed to last.
Right now, Biden’s perfectly poised to leave the GOP primary field to themselves. It’s overcrowded. The party’s standard-bearer is under two indictments—something Biden’s team is strategically staying away from—and conservatives are increasingly targeting Biden with things like half-hearted impeachment pushes and investigations into his administration.
Again, Biden isn’t shying away from the bigger stuff like abortion or democracy either. Both were featured in his re-election announcement earlier this year. In the midterms, Biden also made “MAGA Republicans” his target, and he leaned in on things like reproductive rights and the future of democracy then, too.
But working in some of the little, basic things that may be lost in a scattered GOP primary is a different tactic.
And yet, some of those basics are still being spun as overreach by Biden’s potential competitors.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), for instance, in an interview with Fox News Radio said the effort by the president to eliminate junk fees is akin to socialism.
“Having fee control, income control, price control, it sounds more like socialism than free markets and capitalism that led to the lowest level of poverty, frankly, in the history of our country just a few years ago,” Scott said.
While Scott may want to spin it as socialism, the White House is confident this is an issue that cuts across the partisan spectrum, and Republicans are going out on a limb to protect corporate interests at their own peril.
For now, the bread-and-butter approach is all gravy in Bidenworld.
Jim Kessler, executive vice president at the moderate-Democratic think tank Third Way, told The Daily Beast there’s an obvious strategy in going for consumer issues. And even though the issue might be smaller compared to some of the grand schemes Republican contenders will promise in 2024, the right combination of tangible issues can be more impactful than a few broad ideas.
“There’s value in doing things as a political leader that transcends political partisanship and ideology. And, you know, there are a host of things that you can do that are very consumer oriented. And you’re an advocate for the regular person,” Kessler said.
“Obviously it’s not the lone strategy,” he added. “It’s one of the lanes he’s driving in.”
