By Aamer Madhani and Teresa Kay Albertson and Kim Norvell, USA Today–

Nearly a dozen years after being drubbed in the 2008 Iowa presidential caucuses, former Vice President Joe Biden returns to Iowa Tuesday to make the case that he offers Democrats the best chance of beating President Trump.

Early polls show Biden, who announced his candidacy last week, is leading the crowded field of Democratic contenders. He raised $6.3 million in the first 24 hours after launching his campaign, the largest first-day haul of any candidate in the Democratic field.

And he’s already racked up more than a dozen endorsements from members of Congress and the International Association of Firefighters, the first major labor group to announce their support for a 2020 presidential candidate.

Yet, the entry of Biden into the 2020 campaign isn’t exactly sending tremors through the Democratic field or the electorate in the very early going of the 2020 campaign.

“I love Joe Biden, but the candidates we have seen so far have just been … really good Democratic candidates,” said Scott McCormick, 74, an undecided voter from Ankeny, Iowa, who said Biden wasn’t among the top five candidates he’s mulling. “It’s going to be hard.“

Biden’s two previous runs for the White House crumbled early. He withdrew months before the 1988 Iowa caucus after allegations that he plagiarized part of a speech from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

He finished fifth in Iowa in his 2008 White House run and ended his campaign days after the caucuses. Biden stumbled early in the campaign when he described then-candidate Barack Obama as the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Biden now begins his third presidential campaign needing to demonstrate that he can avoid self-inflicted wounds and offer voters a compelling message that demonstrates how he’s best equipped to compete in battleground states for Obama voters who went for Trump in 2016, said Dennis Goldford, chairman of the political science department at Drake University in Iowa.

“Biden has more support among white working-class Americans, but nevertheless, what is he saying to them?” Goldford said. “That’s not clear yet.”

© Matt Rourke, AP Former Vice President Joe Biden departs from a forum on the opioid epidemic, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Thursday, April 11, 2019.Making his case

In announcing his campaign launch with a video message last week, Biden stayed away from plugging his already well-known biography or detailing policy goals. Instead, he called the upcoming election a “battle for the soul of this nation” and said that Trump’s years in office will be recalled as an “aberrant moment in time” for the country.

With a series of campaign events scheduled over the next three weeks, Biden is expected to begin to offer more depth to his policy vision. He held his first major campaign rally Monday in Pittsburgh at a union hall where he talked about boosting American workers by raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicare and rolling back tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

“The stock market is roaring but you don’t feel it,” said Biden, who is scheduled to travel to Iowa Tuesday and Wednesday for campaign events where he’s expected to hit on similar themes.

Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the moderate Democratic-aligned organization Third Way, said Biden, like all frontrunners, entered the race with a target on his back. Kessler, who is not backing any candidate, said Biden benefits from name recognition, affection from a sizable portion of the Democratic electorate and his service as President Obama’s vice president.

Still, Kessler said Biden enters the race in a somewhat different position that previous favorites to win the Democratic nomination.

“He’s not a frontrunner the way some Democrats have been in the past — where that person is seen as the hurdle you have to clear, say like Hillary Clinton was in 2016 and 2008, and Walter Mondale was in the 1984 race,” Kessler said. “The pundit class sees him as a weaker frontrunner, but I think the support for Biden is a lot more solid than he gets credit for.”

Nathan Teut, 37, an Iowa City resident who plans to participate in February’s caucus, said that he saw the prospect of a Biden presidency as an extension of Obama-era policies that would be a “stabilizing force” for the country

In addition to Biden, Teut said he’s giving serious consideration to South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“He’s not exciting, but he’d do a good job,” Teut said of Biden. “You can’t really get a more qualified person to run an administration.”

Attacks from all sides

Even before officially entering the race, Biden has been a target of Trump, who has dubbed him “Sleepy Joe Biden.” The president took to Twitter Monday ahead of his Biden’s Pittsburgh speech to say the former vice president “obviously doesn’t know that Pennsylvania is having one of the best economic years in its history, with lowest unemployment EVER, a now thriving Steel Industry (that was dead) & great future!”

Biden is now also facing incoming fire from fellow Democratic presidential hopefuls who are questioning whether the former vice president’s record demonstrates he’s the best champion of the middle class in the field of 20 Democrats.

Last week, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren highlighted Biden’s vote in the Senate backing the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, legislation that tightened rules on who could qualify for bankruptcy protection.

“At a time when the biggest financial institutions in this country were trying to put the squeeze on millions of hard working families who were in bankruptcy because of medical problems, job losses, divorce or death in the family, there was nobody standing up for them,” Warren told reporters at an event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I got in that fight because they just didn’t have anyone. And Joe Biden was on the side of the credit card companies.”

In a fundraising note to his supporters, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign took a thinly-veiled shot at Biden for holding his first fundraiser of the campaign at the home of a “corporate lobbyist.” David Cohen, a senior executive at Comcast, and his wife hosted the Biden fundraiser last Thursday, the same day Biden officially launched his campaign.

Rep. Seth Moulton, who also launched his campaign last week, called on Biden to apologize to Anita Hill, who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas’ 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Hill in her testimony detailed alleged sexual harassment by Thomas, and faced some misogynistic questioning by members of the all-male committee.

Hill spoke to Biden recently about the episode. She told the New York Times she was not satisfied with the conversation.

Biden, who was chairman of the Senate panel during Thomas’ confirmation, has expressed regret for how Hill was treated, but also stopped short of directly apologizing to Hill when asked about the matter in an interview on ABC’s “The View.” Biden said in an interview with “Good Morning America” set to air Tuesday that Hill “did not get a fair hearing.”

“She did not get treated well,” Biden said. “That’s my responsibility,”

More than half of Democratic-leaning voters — 54% — said that they have not yet decided on who to support in next year’s nominating contests, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published this week.

The fact that so many voters remain uncommitted to a candidate speaks volumes about where the Democratic electorate stands, said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, a progressive political action committee.

“He hasn’t yet presented a vision that will resonate with the modern electorate,” Chamberlain said. “The modern Democratic party and America is looking for fighters that want to fight the status quo, that want to fight against the power structures in D.C. While America wishes Obama were still president, no one is looking to go back to the old school Democrat platform of corporate rule. Joe Biden’s support that is there is shallow and malleable.”

Albertson reported from Des Moines, Norvell from Tipton, Iowa, and Madhani from Chicago.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Joe Biden is the 2020 Democratic frontrunner. Now he has a target on his back.