Biden wants to pump energy into the campaign after a fiery national address

In his State of the Union address, President Biden outlined a campaign blueprint for the next eight months, labeling Donald J. Trump a threat to democracy, promising to protect abortion rights and reassuring voters who fear he is too old is. for the job.

The president’s speech in the House of Representatives on Thursday, which could echo his remarks this summer at the Democratic National Convention, heralded the start of what his campaign said would be a furious period of revival after months of inertia.

Biden will campaign in suburban Philadelphia on Friday afternoon and in Georgia on Saturday, before traveling to New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan next week, his campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said on Friday. Vice President Kamala Harris will appear in Arizona and Nevada, Ms. Chávez Rodríguez said.

“The general election is just starting to take shape for voters across the country, and we are taking this moment to meet them where they are,” she said.

On Friday morning, the Biden campaign also announced a $30 million ad campaign over the next six weeks. Campaign aides said they expected to hire 350 new staffers and open 100 offices in battleground states over the next month — an announcement likely to quell some of the public and private grumbling from allies that the president’s operation is moving slowly.

The morning after the president cast the election as a choice between him and Mr. Trump on democracy and freedom, his aides sought to compare what they described as their robust operation to what the former president had built.

“Trump’s bleeding money,” said Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the president’s campaign chair, who left the White House last month to functionally take over his reelection effort. “He’s really behind on building the infrastructure you would expect from a former president. He’s really not focused on building new people on his side.”

On a call with reporters Friday, Biden campaign aides did little to hide their frustration over political news media reporting and nervous whispers from Democratic allies about polls showing the president trailing Trump nationally and in key battleground states.

The campaign spent $25 million on political ads in battleground states last fall, an effort promoted as its first-ever investment, only to watch Biden’s election numbers deteriorate as the year progressed.

Mr. Biden’s aides rejected such public surveys — which largely match private polls of fellow Democrats — saying their internal measures of political engagement showed Mr. Biden faring better.

“I think this is a really important way to look at this more broadly,” Ms O’Malley Dillon said. Polls, she added, are “a flawed measure if taken in isolation.”

The campaign said it would bill Mr. Biden’s increased travel, new advertising and additional hiring as a “month of action” under the slogan “I’m on Board” — something of an echo of the “I’m With Her ‘-meeting. The slogan that defined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The big question for Mr. Biden as he storms the battlegrounds is how far he can repeat the energetic 67-minute performance he delivered on Thursday.

Overnight, the 81-year-old Biden responded to doubts about his age that have emerged even before the start of his campaign, with polls showing his age as one of voters’ top concerns even within his own party. That political weakness has been accentuated by occasional stumbles, falls and verbal stumbles that are spread on social media far faster than any triumphant excerpts from his speeches.

He has also been a somewhat intermittent messenger on the issues that form the backbone of his case against Mr. Trump: abortion rights and democracy.

He has given several speeches about Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but has not made a sustained effort to make protecting democracy the center of the American political conversation. He also abandoned his 2022 voting rights push after about a week after facing resistance in Congress. And as a practicing Catholic, he has long felt uncomfortable talking about abortion.

The speech showed Biden’s efforts to rebuild the coalition that made his 2020 victory possible. That triumph united left-wing progressives with moderate Republicans who had alienated themselves from Trump.

Even though there was little outreach for the Trump coalition on Thursday night, there was something for every part of the old Biden coalition — including a significant portion of economic policies that align with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ progressive platform. Mr. Biden attacked billionaires and talked about raising the minimum wage, increasing the power of unions and lowering health care costs.

He did have a chilling moment when he called an undocumented immigrant accused of killing a Georgian woman “illegal,” a term far more common among right-wing Republicans than Democrats. And while he announced new U.S. efforts to provide aid to Gaza, he did not call for an immediate ceasefire or suggest he would cut aid to Israel, as critics of the conflict have demanded.

Although Mr. Biden spoke at greater length about the death toll and suffering in Gaza than on other occasions, that part of his speech was not well received by those who have organized recent primary campaigns for “unpledged” votes to protest his Israel policies . . In Michigan, Minnesota and, most recently, Hawaii, increasing percentages of Democratic primary voters have expressed their opposition to the war.

Still, there is little doubt that Mr. Biden and his team plan to make the coming months not a referendum on his presidency, but a focus on the dangers of what the country would look like if Mr. Trump returns to power come. His speech was notable for its focus on Mr Trump – who brought up Mr Biden more than a dozen times, albeit not by name.

Perhaps no moment illustrates how Mr. Biden wants to frame the 2024 election than when he predicted that the anger that fueled Democratic victories after the Supreme Court overturned a federal right to abortion would continue unabated until November.

“It is clear that those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no idea about the power of women,” Biden said. “They found out when reproductive freedom came up: we won in 2022 and 2023, and we will win again in 2024.”