Donald Trump’s resounding win on Monday night has been portrayed as a triumph for the former US president and bad news for those who hoped his attempt to return to the Oval Office would show signs of floundering at the first jump.

Iowa’s Republican caucuses are hardly representative of the nation as a whole but as the first state to actually cast votes in the 2024 nomination contest, its results were eagerly anticipated across the political spectrum. As they trickled in one message was clear: among Republicans Trump’s message is still powerful.

Related: Trump wins big in Iowa as Republican contest kicks off 2024 presidential race

Top Democrats, however, did not immediately react to the results with the same level of dismay that might be expected from the dramatic return of their nemesis. Instead it was heralded as an early beginning to the national battle for the White House.

Much reporting suggests Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign team wants to face Trump over other challengers. Doing so would allow them to campaign more on the threat Trump poses than the virtues of Biden himself – a historically unpopular president at this point in his term, blamed for his age, the fact that gas prices were once high, and perhaps more pressingly his support of Israel in its offensive in Gaza following the Hamas attacks in October.

Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis both often poll better in a hypothetical matchup with Biden than Trump does. And while various polls show Trump currently edges Biden in several swing states, Biden actually beat Trump once already in 2020. The unstated core of Biden’s campaign is a message that he can do so again.

In that light, the earlier Trump sews up his apparently inevitable nomination, the more time Democrats have to persuade the US electorate that voting for Biden is the lesser of two evils.

Indeed, Biden seized on the Iowa results immediately to begin fundraising.

The vice-president, Kamala Harris, who took the opportunity of Martin Luther King Day to attack Trump on his threat to democracy, followed up by emphasising Trump’s central role in overturning Roe v Wade and ending federal protection for reproductive rights – something Democrats could not pin entirely on either DeSantis or Haley, though both also oppose abortion.

Steve Cohen, a Memphis congressman who is the ranking member of the aviation subcommittee, weighed in as well, with an unsubtle example of the general anti-Trump 2024 message:

Many other Democracts held off from commenting, although Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii who chairs the Senate committee on Indian affairs, lambasted DeSantis and Haley for their poor campaigning.

While the Republican race is not technically over, with a clear frontrunner now in place it is seen as likely that many more Democrats will join the president and vice-president in focusing their messaging squarely on Trump, regardless of how long Haley and DeSantis cling on.