President Joe Biden’s first big campaign speech of 2024 will be in Montco on Friday

Call it the fight for the soul of America, part deux.

President Joe Biden’s first major campaign speech of 2024 will be near Valley Forge on Friday, where he will mark the three-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection by warning voters that his leading GOP opponent, former President Donald Trump, presents an existential threat to American democracy.

Friday’s speech, initially scheduled for Saturday but moved due to a forecasted winter storm, comes two weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses and as Trump continues to dominate the GOP primary field. It’s the clearest signal of how Biden, who has struggled to boost his own popularity, is trying to motivate voters through fear of what a second term for Trump — who has ramped up dictator-like rhetoric on the campaign trail — could look like.

“The choice for voters next year will not simply be between competing philosophies of governing,” campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez said on a call with reporters Tuesday. “The choice for the American people in November 2024 will be about protecting our democracy and every American’s fundamental freedoms.”

The selection of Pennsylvania’s bluest suburban county as the location for Friday’s speech shows how winning the critical swing state continues to be a focus for Biden. He has visited the state frequently as president, and he held the first rally for his reelection campaign in Philadelphia.

The campaign wouldn’t specify exactly where Biden is speaking but an invited guest with knowledge of the planning said at least part of Biden’s day would be at Montgomery County Community College, located in Blue Bell about 10 miles from Valley Forge.

Montgomery County’s continued leftward swing helped propel Biden in 2020. He won the county with a margin 50% larger than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 and double President Barack Obama’s in 2012. And as Philadelphia’s share of the Democratic vote has slipped, the suburban slice of the vote has grown.

On Monday, Biden will head to Charleston, S.C., to speak at the church where nine people were killed in an anti-Black mass shooting in 2015. The back-to-back campaign events echo 2020, when Biden cast himself as the best line of defense against Trump, even as polls show that Americans are less engaged and frustrated with the likely rematch.

Trump, who faces several criminal indictments, is also challenging decisions in Maine and Colorado that removed him from the primary ballot. He has characterized those efforts and the legal cases against him as anti-democratic. In a campaign memo released this week, Trump’s campaign indicated that it also sees democracy as a winning message — the former president makes that case by alleging he’s the victim of an anti-democratic effort to stop him from running for office.

“Make no mistake, these are not just indictments against Donald Trump. They are indictments against millions of freedom-loving, hardworking Americans across this country,” Trump campaign staffers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles wrote in a campaign memo this week. “A handful of corrupt political bureaucrats decided to flex their political muscle and dared anyone to challenge them. They have weaponized a revered ten[e]t of our federal system against a political opponent, just as is done in third-world nations. They think they have the system wired and that nobody can stop them.

“Well, they have met their match in President Donald Trump and the tens of millions of his supporters saying, ‘Enough is enough!’”

Biden’s speech on Friday will likely echo a prime-time speech he delivered outside Independence Hall in September 2022 about “the soul of the nation,” as he sought to reframe the stakes and consequences of that fall’s midterm elections.

“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault. We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise,” Biden said to open a searing 25-minute address then. “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the foundations of our very republic.”

Biden’s campaign said it intentionally chose the backdrop of Valley Forge, where 250 years ago George Washington united a disorganized alliance of militias to fight for democracy.

“There the president will make the case directly that democracy and freedom — two powerful ideas that united the 13 colonies and that generations throughout our nation’s history have fought and died for, a stone’s throw from where he’ll be Friday, remains central to the fight we’re in today,” deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said.

Biden’s message in 2020 similarly focused on defending the nation from Trump. He did not have high popularity ratings then, either, but formed a coalition of voters to narrowly win states such as Pennsylvania and deliver him the White House. In recent swing state polls, Biden now trails Trump narrowly.

Trump has a commanding lead in the GOP field and has long been running a general election campaign against Biden. Biden’s campaign made no mention of other opponents in the briefing until asked by reporters.

The South Carolina visit will be Biden’s fourth this year. Vice President Kamala Harris will make her seventh visit to the state on Saturday.

At Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston next week, Biden is expected to call out white supremacy along with the assault on the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He’ll make an appeal to Black voters, whose support for Biden had decreased in polls compared with 2020. Biden is also losing support among Hispanic and young voters, polls show.

“We’re not going to wait and parachute into these communities at the last minute and ask them for their vote,” Fulks said. “We’re going to earn their vote. … We know that we have to communicate to these constituencies about what this administration has done. We have to communicate with these constituencies about the dangers that the other side poses.”

The campaign said it will hire staff in key states such as Pennsylvania in the coming months, and plans to have thousands of staffers doing voter outreach by early summer.

Biden and Harris are expected to ramp up their campaign efforts this winter, including events to bring attention to the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court on Jan. 22, and Biden’s State of the Union address in early February.