Republican strategists say Biden is too boring to demonize in 2022 midterm campaigns: report

• Republicans are struggling to vilify Joe Biden in their midterm campaigns, Politico reported.
• One strategist called the president "boring."
• The GOP is instead likely to try to portray Biden as a tool of the hard left, the report said.

Republican strategists are struggling to figure out ways to portray President Joe Biden as a bad guy in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Politico reported Monday.

Opposition campaigns generally focus on the shortcomings of the sitting president as they seek to damage the incumbent administration, but with Biden it's been a challenge to do so, GOP strategists told the outlet.

"Biden is not a good bad guy," Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist and strategist, told the outlet. "Obama was a haughty professor … The Uncle Joe life story that he has - the tragedy, the losses, the obvious empathy the man has, I think that's all legit. So, it's hard to demonize him."

John Thomas, a Republican strategist who is working on campaigns to get Republicans elected to the House, told Politico that because Biden was "so boring," he's "not as scandalous."

Strategists and GOP officials told the outlet that Biden just didn't evoke the strong emotions that his two predecessors in the office - Barack Obama and Donald Trump - did among swaths of the electorate.

Instead, Republicans are likely to try to reprise one theme of last year's presidential campaign and seek to portray Biden as in thrall to the hard left on issues including immigration and policing.

Thomas said that while Biden "certainly is relevant" as the head of the party in power, "there are bigger bogeymen" and Republicans didn't "need him as our No. 1 foil."

Biden has sought to draw a deliberate contrast between Trump and himself, with the Trump administration consuming the attention of the media with its daily cycle of scandals and provocations.

The Biden administration has so far steered clear of major outrages, the president's public appearances have been carefully controlled, and the administration has focused on delivering its domestic agendas.

The Republicans will be seeking to regain control of the House and the Senate in the midterms, and stymie Biden's domestic agenda.

In the 2018 midterms, Democrats won back control of the House, having portrayed the election partly as a referendum on Trump's divisive leadership style.