WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign promises to hold on to states that won him the White House in 2020, but also compete in places he lost like North Carolina and increasingly Republican-dominated Florida, as long as whatever he says is “a number of viable paths to the 270 electoral votes” needed to get four more years.
Offering her first extensive comments on strategy since being named Biden’s campaign manager last month, Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote in a note to “stakeholders” that the 2024 race presents “significant opportunities to increase support democrat”. It was released while Biden was traveling in Japan, but is skipping previously planned later stops in Australia and Papua New Guinea to focus on debt limit talks in Washington.
Rodriguez said the re-election campaign is planning early investments to try to retain battleground states that Biden won in 2020, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and New Hampshire, and to keep Georgia and Arizona, which had not voted Democrat in a presidential race for decades. before three years ago.
But the campaign will also “look to expand the map even further into states like North Carolina and Florida,” and Rodriguez said both would be included in a “7-figure” ad buy that included investments in a range of states ranging from lants
Biden’s re-election campaign is based on asking Americans to allow him to “finish the job” he started, and has sought to paint “extreme” Republicans like former President Donald Trump and supporters of his “Make America” movement. Great Again” as threats to the American core. political values.
Trump is now seeking the White House for a third term, and while Rodriguez’s memo did not mention him by name, he did predict that Biden would “once again prevail over the extremist MAGA agenda.”
Biden’s political advisers have long argued that Biden beat Trump once and can do it again. If someone else captures the GOP presidential nomination, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely seen as one of Trump’s top alternatives, Biden’s team maintains that the same strategy can work, as most mainstream Republicans have done little to distance themselves from the MAGA movement.
Although Rodriguez’s memo makes no mention of it, contrasting Biden with his opponent may be the president’s strongest re-election tactic. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last month found that only about half of Democrats believe Biden, 80, should run again, even though the 81% said they would at least probably support him in the 2024 general election if he is the nominee.
The memo says the re-election campaign plans to spread its message online and through face-to-face contact with voters, but will rely heavily on tapping into voters’ existing social circles.
“While trust in the media may have eroded, trust in people’s personal networks has never been stronger,” Rodriguez wrote. She promised that the campaign will “engage early and often” with her traditional supporters among women, as well as black, Hispanic and Asian American voters and young people who did not show up in the 2022 midterms. note also says that organized labor “will be fundamental to our electoral success.”
Biden’s re-election campaign says he plans to try to make gains among target voter groups in next year’s race. That includes building on 2020, when Biden “made small but critical gains among rural and white working-class voters in battleground states.” It also notes that Democrats saw support increase slightly in these demographics during last year’s midterms in “states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin, and hold steady in Georgia and the Carolinas from the North”.
The memo says strong suburban support helped lift Biden to the 306 electoral votes he won in 2020, and there could be room for growth among those voters, who may be buoyed by the Court’s overturn Supreme from the Roe v. Wade decision.
National Democrats have remained strongly united behind Biden. In the party’s presidential primaries, he faces only token opposition from self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. That means, Chávez wrote, that the re-election campaign “is able to leverage the party’s infrastructure from day one, including tools, technology and people, which means we’re not starting from scratch.”
