WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden’s advisers have promised anxious Democrats for months that he will gain an advantage over former President Donald Trump once verified voters get to work. And for months, the presidential race has remained stagnant.
With Trump’s criminal trial over, Biden’s team now sees a new opportunity to try and speed up efforts to woo undecided voters, using a growing campaign infrastructure to increase engagement with voters while sharpening his approach: Trump was more focused on himself than on them.
“The focus of this campaign is to remind the American people — and the voters we need to mobilize and convince — of their incredibly important choice and the clear and present danger that Trump presents,” a senior campaign official said. “For many people, this threat is not front and center. And we think it’s important to put that clearly front and center.”
The goal of the campaign is to set the stage for the first Biden-Trump debate on June 27 by delivering topical messages around key events and milestones. In some cases, as in a major speech planned for this week in France on threats to democracy, the message will be delivered by Biden himself. But in keeping with the campaign’s soft touch with hard-to-reach voters, the effort will also include key surrogates and local officials and community leaders for what Biden aides call “trusted ambassadors” — of women’s reproductive rights and the president’s economic vision.
“Our challenge now is to engage them if they don’t want to engage with us,” the Biden campaign said of polling voters. “I’m not waiting for them to conform, but rather to be there with a consistent message.”
It’s yet another test for a campaign that began to expand sharply after the president’s State of the Union address in March, promising a swing in polls that showed Biden trailing Trump in some key battlegrounds.
One longtime Democratic donor also noted that in private conversations over several months, Biden campaign officials said the president’s poll numbers would improve and his prospects bright once Trump became the presumptive nominee.
“It didn’t happen,” said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Some Biden aides argue that any momentum the campaign had begun to build after Biden and Trump effectively secured their party’s nomination in March stalled as the former president’s New York criminal trial dominated the airwaves. But the bigger challenge, according to the Biden poll, is Biden “actively grooming” the voters he sees as key to his winning coalition, particularly younger, minority voters. [the race] in ways we haven’t seen before.”
“They’re not as solidly behind the president as they were on Election Day 2020, and we’re confident they will be on Election Day 2020.” However, this is not because they were tempted by Trump,” the interviewer said. The Biden campaign’s task now, the pollster added, “is to show them and remind them what life was like when Trump was the last president and how bad a second term would be in order to raise the stakes. Even if they feel disaffected right now, that doesn’t mean there is not such a clear choice in this election.”
The campaign’s new approach began last week on Jan. 6, 2021, when police officers serving at the U.S. Capitol expanded to battleground states to hold events with local officials about what they called Trump’s attacks on democracy. In another key moment, Biden will make a big speech this week during a trip to France to mark the D-Day anniversary, linking the fight against authoritarianism eight decades ago with what he believes still needs to be done to protect democracy today. administrative officer.
On the eighth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, Biden’s team will hold events focused on gun safety, which polls show is a key issue for the young voters the campaign hopes to win over. Actions focused on reproductive rights will continue in Congress this week ahead of key votes on access to contraceptive care and the June 24 anniversary of the Dobbs decision, when Biden aides said the campaign will emphasize how Trump. three conservative justices nominated by the Supreme Court in Roe v. It led to the decision that struck down Wade’s abortion protections.
Still, campaign officials are wary of promising the swings in the coming weeks that have so far eluded them. The Biden pollster said that disengaged voters don’t act in a “light-switch” fashion, but “when you have these breakout moments, you have to win the moment and win over the messaging.”
“These earnings will increase,” they said. “It takes persistence and discipline and we do that and we don’t lose sight of the task.”
One problem for the Biden campaign, which is trying to calm jittery Democrats, is that the most engaged voters right now are also the most disappointed by a poll that shows the president has failed to gain traction. And each passing month has led to more and more public debate about the campaign’s strategy.
Biden campaign officials have countered those concerns, noting that while Trump’s trial has dominated the headlines, his staff in battleground states is now building relationships with voters who are disaffected by the campaign but believe he can win their support. They also argue that Trump’s conviction prevented his campaign from working in battleground states designed to test and move voters for the next five months.
“Of course we think about big moments as a way to catalyze and maybe energize this work, but it’s consistent. The point I will make about this is that Donald Trump is doing none of these things,” Biden’s campaign director, Dan Kanninen, said in an interview. “And they can’t make up for lost time.”
Biden’s aides said the campaign does not expect Trump to dwell on his historic 34-felony conviction. But as the former president tries to use it as a rousing event for his supporters, the Biden campaign sees an opportunity to turn it against him.
“All of this is just another repetition of the core message that one of these candidates is going to stand up every day and fight for you,” said another senior campaign official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “And a man gets up every day, talking and thinking only about himself.”