2020
ELECTIONS
Dems warm to Biden’s bunker strategy
Since the former veep launched his stay-at-home
campaign, his lead has grown to double-digits in national polls.
Presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has largely held campaign events out
of his basement in Delaware since the coronavirus lockdowns began in March. |
JoeBiden.com via Getty Images
By MARC
CAPUTO and CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO
06/24/2020
07:28 PM EDT
Donald
Trump accuses Joe Biden of hiding in a basement ‘sanctuary.’ The president’s
campaign issues daily tweets and press releases about the number of days that
have elapsed since Biden last held a press conference. Republican allies have
taken to referring to the former vice president as “Punxsutawney Joe,” a
reference to the Pennsylvania groundhog whose emergence from his burrow is
cause for an annual celebration.
Yet none of
it has managed to flush Biden far from his Delaware residence — and Democrats
are just fine with him being a homebody.
In the
three months Biden launched his stay-at-home campaign from his cellar TV
studio, his lead has grown to double-digits in national polls while Trump has
pin-balled from crisis to crisis. While the president’s approval ratings have
suffered under the weight of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, an economic
recession and protests over racism and police brutality, Biden just posted his
widest lead yet — 14 percentage points, according to a New York Times/Siena
poll released Wednesday.
“Trump is
running against Trump. And it's smart of Biden to not get in the way of that,”
Hilary Rosen, a consulting partner of top Biden adviser Anita Dunn, said in
echoing the sentiment in the campaign. “It’s become a referendum on Trump’s
behavior.”
Democrats
who were once alarmed that Biden needed to do more are suddenly perfectly happy
with a schedule that keeps him as close as possible to his Wilmington,
Delaware, home most days. Only recently has he begun to make forays beyond his
own neighborhood.
First came
an appearance at a nearby Memorial Day wreath-laying ceremony. Then, over the
past month, he made three socially distant campaign stops in his home state and
three more across the border in and around Philadelphia, once the home of his
now-disbanded headquarters and the most-important city for Democrats hoping to
flip Pennsylvania blue again. In between, Biden flew to Houston for a private
event with the family of George Floyd, the black man whose killing under the
knee of a white police officer last month led to nationwide protests and
galvanized a moment.
On
Thursday, Biden will make the short drive to Pennsylvania once again, this time
to Lancaster, a county that Trump won handily over Hillary Clinton in 2016, to
meet with families who benefited from President Obama’s healthcare overhaul and
detail his own proposals to expand access. Travel time? A little over an hour
by car.
Biden’s
advisers, operating on the principle of not fixing things that aren’t broken,
say they have little intention of trying to match Trump in the volume of events
he holds or news he produces. They contend that an exhausted electorate wants a
return to normalcy and competent governance.
“Since Joe
Biden got in this race 14 months ago, he has offered a consistent vision for
where this country needs to go and a clear contrast with Donald Trump on how he
will get us there,” said campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo. ”You see it not just
in how Vice President Biden speaks — offering a vision to unite this country,
rather than Donald Trump's divisive and erratic behavior — but in how he acts.
Unlike Donald Trump, our campaign isn't going to put our supporters in grave
danger just because rallies are fun. We are campaigning aggressively, but
smartly.”
The
campaign is betting that Biden’s method of responding to the coronavirus –
preaching the need for social-distancing and mask-wearing while talking about
unity and empathy— will contrast sharply with Trump, who has refused to wear a
mask in public, downplayed the threat of the pandemic’s duration and doesn’t
spend much time expressing sympathy for the nearly 122,000 Americans who died
from Covid-19.
The
contrast was by design and necessity. Since Biden was forced to shelter at home
before the March 17 primaries, his advisers have clung to the belief that Trump
wouldn’t be able to rise to the moment. They ignored calls to have dueling
press conferences refuting the president’s daily briefings. In the end, the
strategy of ceding the media spotlight to Trump paid off. After the president
mused aloud about whether people could inject bleach to cure themselves of
coronavirus, it became clear the White House press briefings were doing more
harm to his approval ratings than good and Trump stopped doing them.
During that
time, the president missed the opportunity to drive up Biden’s negatives —
despite a multi-million ad blitz against Biden — and the presumptive Democratic
nominee remains an elusive generic opponent.
“A generic
Democrat is automatically perceived to be a viable alternative to the
president, with no liabilities, drawbacks, warts, no handicaps,” said top
Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said. “Voters haven’t gotten to know Biden
any better. And that has been good for Biden.”
Recent
polling reflects how wide the gap has grown. In March, when Biden first
sheltered in place, polls showed him with a 6-point lead over the president,
according to the RealClearPolitics polling average — his advantage was smaller
than Hillary Clinton at a similar point in March 2016 after she emerged as the
de facto Democratic nominee for president.
Now, three
months later, Biden has widened his lead to 10 points — three points better
than Clinton’s margin at this point in 2016. Polls also show that Biden’s
favorability rating is higher than Clinton.
Biden’s
time away from the trail has also proven to be lucrative for his campaign.
Democrats have responded by sending tens of millions of dollars to their party
and Biden’s campaign, which is suddenly flexing its muscle as a small-dollar
juggernaut, raised more money than Trump’s in May.
Over the
same period, Biden has shied away from numerous national TV interviews in favor
of talking to local press, especially in swing states. The local hits make it
harder for Republican groups to monitor Biden on TV and catch the gaffe-prone
candidate making a mistake on video, the life blood of a campaign that is
intent on portraying the former vice president as feeble-minded and weak.
“There’s no
rule in politics that says you have to be omnipresent. In fact, sometimes it’s
strategically wiser and more effective to be less visible but more impactful
when you are visible,” said Ian Sams, a Democratic consultant who worked on
Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Some Democrats
worry that in playing it safe Biden is squandering opportunities to attract
more millennials and liberal voters by not taking more aggressive positions on
issues like police reform.
“I
appreciate that Biden has expanded his base. I think it’s mainly because he has
played it safe,” said Yasmine Taeb, a Democratic National Committee member from
Virginia. “He’s made some public statements in the wake of the protests, but
for the most part he’s also taken advantage of the pandemic and he’s laid low.
“That may
be working for him now, but the American people, the grassroots, we’re also
looking for a bold leader,” she added. “We want someone out there and demanding
justice and being as angry and as passionate as the rest of us.”
Still, the
need for social distance aligns well with his campaign’s strategy of limiting
press access to the candidate. And, unlike in Trump’s case, big rallies were
never Biden’s forte anyway.
Trump’s
Tulsa speech last week revealed just how difficult it has been for him to
attack Biden — when Trump mentioned him, he was booed far less passionately
than when Trump attacked liberal Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and
Ilhan Omar.
All of it
has caused the Trump campaign to heighten their attacks on Biden in an attempt
to draw him out. Trump last week began embarking on a media blitz, granting
interviews with Washington reporters as the campaign and its allies began accusing
the Democrat of ducking the media.
“It's been
82 days since Joe Biden held a press conference,” Trump campaign manager Brad
Parscale tweeted Tuesday, adding the hashtag “#HidenBiden.”
The day
before, the campaign said via email that Biden was ducking press conferences
“because his handlers are likely terrified of him attempting to answer
questions about the economic pain his resistance to reopening is causing.”
Trump’s
campaign has also challenged Biden to an extra round of debates. The Biden campaign,
however, said it wants Trump to commit first to the three traditional events
hosted by the Commission on Presidential Debates.
Doug
Herman, a Democratic strategist in Los Angeles, said Biden has time until the
convention to ramp up his events and presence on the trail — if he wants. But
the more important objective, he said, is for the former vice president to
maintain a steady public presence without needlessly taking Trump’s bait.
“Joe Biden
is the most personally relatable leader in America today in terms of his
ability to empathize with people in pain,” Herman said. “And there’s a lot of
economic, racial and health-related pain in this society. “Events that portray
his strengths on all three of those issues are really good for the campaign to do.”
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