President Joe Biden apparently plans to use hundreds or even thousands of surrogates around the country to campaign for him because he has "a demanding day job," according to NBC News. 

Apparently, veteran operatives have said Biden will use these allies even more than most other candidates for re-election have done, other than maybe William McKinley in 1896, who reportedly had 1400 of them.

Biden doesn't even have a campaign headquarters yet, but if it isn't in Delaware, he'll probably never be there anyway. The surrogates are more important because he won't be tied to one location if he's got them out everywhere plugging him for 2024.

“President Biden, as he has proven this week, is very busy being president,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told journalists while he was overseas earlier in the month. (Coons is one of the surrogates.) “Our president has assembled a group that includes some truly promising up-and-coming leaders from across the country.”

Pros and cons

NBC News thinks surrogates are a win-win, because the candidate gets support and multiplication of their campaign efforts, and the surrogate gets more of the national spotlight and experience on a larger stage.

They do admit that it can be messy when surrogates go off-script and that people naturally want to see the actual candidate more than just a representative.

But Biden doesn't really have a choice. In 2020, he could hide behind COVID and stay in his basement on Zoom. That's a big part of how he got elected, but that time is over now.

People expect him or someone connected to the campaign to show up in person and, well, campaign. You can bet the GOP nominee is going to be all over it, even if it turns out to be the governor of one of the largest U.S. states.

Better plan

It certainly seems like a better plan than putting Biden out there on his own, anyway, since his approval rankings have tanked and people seem to (rightly) blame him for the current economic problems.

It seems like a much better plan to run the Democrat Party against whoever the GOP nominee is, than to make a weakened octogenarian the face of a Democrat presidency--even if he is the president. Nobody wants to elect the neighborhood's "Get off my lawn" guy or the one wandering the neighborhood in his underwear as a leader, so they'd better hope these surrogates can get the job done.