If Democrats are waiting for President Joe Biden’s campaign to expand its presence in the swing states more clearly and faster, they should listen to this message from Biden’s team.
This is the message: We are not Barack Obama.
In their pursuit of reelection, Biden and Obama’s campaigns are taking a page out of Obama’s playbook. Obama, in his 2012 bid for reelection, mainly ignored the Democratic National Committee in favour of his own campaign machine.
Democrats who are demanding more offices and more personnel quickly are missing the point, according to Biden aides, campaign staffers, and state Democratic leaders who spoke with AWN. They also said that the president’s organisation for 2024 is coming together differently.
In 2012, state parties and local organisations were not considered, according to Ray Buckley, chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. It is my belief that you will observe the fruits of the president’s efforts to strengthen the state parties, as contrasted with Obama’s first term, in the near future.
After Trump’s victory in last week’s New Hampshire primary, the campaign’s goal of giving Biden another four years in the White House became more apparent. President Biden’s two senior White House staffers would soon be sent to the campaign full-time, according to the Biden team, which said that the former president had nearly secured the Republican candidature.
All of the states that are considered to be battlegrounds for Biden’s campaign were represented by the state leadership teams revealed by Thursday: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. The campaign is now conducting pilot programmes in two states—Wisconsin and Arizona—to test organising strategies that target youth, Black and Latino voters, and other important demographics; if these programmes prove effective, they will be expanded to other states.
“The people that they put together for the leadership team in Wisconsin are connected to just about every Democratic leader, officeholder, candidate and operative in the state,” remarked Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “Now everyone in Wisconsin’s Democratic Party knows who to call when they need a representative from the president.”
According to Biden’s fundraising report for the end of 2023, which was released on Thursday, the campaign had approximately $46 million in the bank and increased its workforce from 38 to 70 employees in the fourth quarter. But for some Democrats anxious about their chances in swing states, those kinds of figures—combined with assurances of increased ground presence—have only served to heighten their dissatisfaction with what they have witnessed thus far.
According to party strategists and leaders in key battleground states, their states’ current political machinery will be put to the test in November. That being said, the Biden team is aiming to take advantage of the Democrats’ strong showing in the most recent midterm elections in a few states that are anticipated to be highly contested and politically significant come November.
According to campaign officials, the goal is to increase voter participation in the upcoming presidential election in November by capitalising on the strong mobilisation that Democrats demonstrated in close Senate races in 2022 in states such as Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia, as well as in victory-filled gubernatorial campaigns in Wisconsin and Michigan.
For nearly a year, senior Biden aides have plotted a far more massive web outreach campaign, based on the theory that people are more influenced by the candidates whom their friends and family are endorsing.
Supporters of Joe Biden have long maintained that their plans are an adjunct to field organising rather than a replacement for it; yet, the campaign is hoping that their preparations will lead to a bigger online presence than the infamously digitally revolutionary Obama campaigns.
Unlike Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, state parties are willing to engage with the Biden campaign and the DNC this year, according to Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist in North Carolina.
The Obama campaign actively courted donors and employees while building its own infrastructure and strategies, while the president and his senior advisors, who were wary of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) because they perceived it as an element of the party establishment that Obama was aiming to challenge, largely let the current structure deteriorate.
While state parties were complaining about a lack of funding, some high-ranking DNC officials felt that Obama disregarded them. In addition, the Obama campaign had complete control over all legally mandated or fundraising-related DNC operations thanks to the appointment of Obama’s former White House political director as DNC executive director.
There was a lot of tension and rivalry in 2012 between Organising For Action and the state parties on a national level. “Rather than working together, it seemed like everyone was competing to see who could do what,” Jackson remarked. “It seems sense to depend on an existing infrastructure rather than construct a brand new vehicle,”
As the Biden team prepares for a fight with Trump, analysts believe that this dependence could help them save costs.
While that’s great and all, it’s time to start investing, according to several Biden campaign aides and many experienced Democratic operators who are cautiously watching from a distance.
They think it’s reasonable to save up for what will likely be a long campaign through November, but only up to a point; they want to see more done with the campaign that is already happening since they anticipate a tough struggle against Trump.
In an earlier interview with AWN, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina expressed his belief that the campaign spent excessively early on.
People are worried that some of Biden’s staff may have forgotten how important it was to mobilise during the pandemic in 2020, when Democrats mostly abandoned door-to-door canvassing and other conventional voter contact.
Those in the know about campaign operations also found it ironic that Biden’s 2020 general election campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, left the White House for the campaign’s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, in January, ostensibly to speed up field operations.
O’Malley Dillon was heavily involved with campaign operations while in the White House, but she is now going to transition into politics full-time. Several campaign insiders informed AWN that waiting for approval from high-ranking White House officials like Anita Dunn, O’Malley Dillon, and others frequently caused plans to be postponed.
Anxieties among Democrats have been building up recently over the reelection’s sluggish hiring and infrastructure development, according to a senior Democratic strategist familiar with Biden’s campaign strategy.
Some anxious Democrats interpreted the recent announcements of personnel from states such as North Carolina and Nevada, along with those of O’Malley Dillon and senior Biden advisor Mike Donilon, as a “move to shore up people’s confidence and signal there is a plan for state work and that the campaign is not going to be exclusively in Delaware,” they said.
