Biden's first 2024 ad warns of 'extremist' threat to democracy

President Joe Biden's campaign has released its first television ad for the 2024 election, warning of an "extremist" threat to democracy over images of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

The advertisement released on Thursday, titled "Cause," will get its first network showing on Saturday, the third anniversary of the historic assault by Donald Trump supporters, which left five people dead.

"All of us are being asked right now, what will we do to maintain our democracy?" the 81-year-old Democrat says in a passage lifted from a speech he gave in Arizona last year.

"There's something dangerous happening in America. There's an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy," says the ad, released early on social media.

During the one-minute ad, Biden does not mention by name former president Trump — the clear front runner for the Republican nomination.

But over swelling, dramatic music, the ad features repeated images of pro-Trump signs held by the January 6 rioters, as well as a hangman's noose brought by the protesters to the Capitol.

It also includes pictures of torch-bearing white supremacists at a rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

The Biden campaign is increasingly painting the election as a fight for American democracy against Trump, with the president set to give a speech on similar lines in Pennsylvania on Friday.

Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Republicans had "doubled down" on threats to undermine elections.

"This ad serves as a very real reminder that this election could very well determine the very fate of American democracy," she said in a statement.

No independent president since independence

Polls show Biden and Trump neck and neck despite the populist Republican tycoon, 77, facing multiple criminal trials, including one linked to the January 6 riot.

Other polls show many US adults agree that both Republicans and Democrats are doing a poor job representing the people and that a third party is needed.

Since its independence from Great Britain in 1776, the US has seen 46 presidents.

Not one of them was independent.

Out of the 46 presidents so far, 19 of them were Republicans, 17 were Democrats, 4 were from the Whig party, 3 were Democratic-Republicans, and 2 were Federalists.