BOMBSHELL: Biden’s Campaign Is Ready To Go After 3 Longtime GOP Strongholds
huffpost.com
The campaign plans to hire more than 600 organizers by the end of June.
By Kevin Robillard
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden plans to contest Georgia, Arizona and Texas as he campaigns against incumbent Republican Donald Trump, his campaign manager told reporters Friday.
“We believe there will be an expanded map in 2020,” Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon said in a news briefing. “We believe that there will be battleground states that have never been battleground states before.”
Biden and Trump are battling to reach 270 electoral votes. The easiest way for Biden to reach that mark would be to flip back three states Trump won in 2016 after they had gone Democratic for decades in previous presidential elections: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Those three states — along with Florida, North Carolina and Arizona — are considered the core battlegrounds for 2020 by strategists in both parties.
The Biden campaign also indicated it hoped to contest Ohio and Iowa ? two other Midwest states where Trump romped in 2016 after President Barack Obama won them four years earlier.
Biden has a consistent lead in public polling both nationally and in key swing states, and O’Malley Dillon and another top Biden aide, Mike Donilon, were bullish on their chances to defeat Trump.
“If we kept these numbers, and we kept them through November, that would put us at 318 electoral votes,” O’Malley Dillon said.
The Biden campaign has faced criticism for not staffing up more aggressively in crucial states, but O’Malley Dillon said that top aides for each state would be in place by June, with plans to send 600 organizers to those key states soon after.
In particular, O’Malley Dillon said she was “bullish” on Arizona, where Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema had a breakthrough victory in 2018 and where public polling has given Biden a consistent advantage over Trump.
Polls have been less optimistic in Georgia and Texas, two states with expensive media markets where breakthroughs narrowly eluded Democrats two years ago, though two Republican internal polls released this week show Biden within striking distance of Trump in the Peach State.
In particular, the Biden campaign highlighted Trump’s erosion with seniors, noting Biden now has an advantage with voters over the age of 65 after they broke overwhelmingly for Trump four years prior.
O’Malley Dillon said they expected there would be some on-the-ground campaigning and canvassing during the election. But she said the campaign “will never make any choices that put our staff or voters in harm’s way.”
“Our expectation is we will have people on the ground in this campaign doing the traditional work of organizing, but we will do that when safety allows, and we will not do that a day sooner,” O’Malley Dillon said. “And that might mean different things in different places.”
The Biden campaign also revealed that it and the DNC have a combined $103 million on hand, greatly trailing the Trump campaign and the RNC’s $255 million bank account. Trump and the RNC only narrowly outraised Biden and the DNC during the month of April, banking $61.7 million to the Democratic haul of $60.5 million.
The Trump campaign responded to the call by mocking Biden’s efforts.
“Joe Biden can’t put on a simple webcast without catastrophic technical failures so it’s hilarious that he thinks he can command an organized national campaign,” Trump communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement that attacked Biden for supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement and for working with liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on energy policy.
“President Trump is building a winning coalition even stronger than 2016 and is increasing his support among Black and Latino voters, which will help him expand his map and post a bigger victory than the first time,” Murtaugh added.
Donilon, meanwhile, emphasized Trump’s consistent unpopularity.
“One thing that’s a fact of life in this campaign is Donald Trump carries a very unfavorable rating in the mid- to high 40s,” he said, which he described as “the single biggest driver” of the campaign.
“I think one of the most remarkable things about this campaign so far is that the Trump campaign themselves would admit they could not win a referendum on this presidency in this country today,” Donilon said. |
