Biden team eyes Delaware for 2024 campaign HQ -sources

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U.S. President Biden attends White House Conservation in Action Summit at Interior Department in Washington
U.S. President Joe Biden arrives to speak at the White House Conservation in Action Summit at the Department of the Interior in Washington, U.S., March 21, 2023. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

WASHINGTON, March 22 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden's team is leaning toward basing his 2024 re-election campaign in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, and is considering at least three people to serve as his campaign manager, Democratic sources familiar with the matters said.

Biden, who has said he intends to run for re-election but has yet to make a formal announcement, travels regularly on weekends to Wilmington, making it a natural place for political work outside of the White House in Washington.

Philadelphia, home to Biden's 2020 campaign operations, has also been under consideration, the sources said. Biden spent part of his childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and travels regularly to the political battleground state for events.

“We’re aware that there is no deficit of people who speculate, but very few individuals are actually knowledgeable about any of this,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in an e-mail.

The president is considering at least three people for the role of campaign manager, according to Democratic sources familiar with the deliberations.

The candidates include Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and a deputy campaign manager of Biden's 2020 campaign, Jenn Ridder, who served as national states director for Biden's 2020 campaign, and Sam Cornale, executive director of the Democratic National Committee.

Senior White House advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn are expected to be closely involved in political strategy going into the re-election as well.

Jen O'Malley Dillon, who served as Biden's campaign manager in 2020, has ruled out returning to the role in 2024, two sources said.

Now deputy chief of staff at the White House, she will be influential in selecting who takes the reins for the 2024 race, one source said.

(This story has been corrected to change the surname of potential Biden campaign manager to Ridder, not Ritter, in paragraph 5)

Reporting by Jeff Mason, Nandita Bose and Jarrett Renshaw Editing by Alistair Bell

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Jeff Mason is a White House Correspondent for Reuters. He has covered the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden and the presidential campaigns of Biden, Trump, Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. He served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association in 2016-2017, leading the press corps in advocating for press freedom in the early days of the Trump administration. His and the WHCA's work was recognized with Deutsche Welle's "Freedom of Speech Award." Jeff has asked pointed questions of domestic and foreign leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un. He is a winner of the WHCA's “Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure" award and co-winner of the Association for Business Journalists' "Breaking News" award. Jeff began his career in Frankfurt, Germany as a business reporter before being posted to Brussels, Belgium, where he covered the European Union. Jeff appears regularly on television and radio and teaches political journalism at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and a former Fulbright scholar.

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