WASHINGTON – For months, President Joe BidenTrump’s advisers have promised eager Democrats that once verified voters begin to get involved, he will gain the upper hand over former President Donald Trump. And for months the presidential race remained stagnant.
With Trump’s criminal trial over, Biden’s team now sees a new window of opportunity to try to accelerate efforts to attract disinterested voters, using their growing campaign infrastructure to increase voter reach while at the same time , sharpen his approach to voters: that Trump is more focused on himself than on them.
“What this campaign is very focused on doing is reminding the American people — and the voters we have to mobilize and persuade — of the incredibly important choice they have and the clear and present threat that Trump poses,” said a senior campaign official. . he said. “This threat for many people is not in the spotlight. And we see it as obviously our imperative to put that front and center.”
The campaign’s goal is to lay the groundwork for the first Biden-Trump debate on June 27 by driving specific, issue-specific messaging around key events and milestones. In some cases, Biden himself will deliver the message, as happened with a major speech planned in France this week on threats to democracy. But consistent with the campaign’s soft touch on hard-to-reach voters, the effort will also involve key surrogates and what Biden aides call “trusted messengers” — local officials and community leaders — to highlight issues such as threats to women’s reproductive rights and the president’s economic vision.
“Our job right now is to engage them when they don’t want to engage with us,” a Biden campaign pollster said of voters. “I’m not waiting for them to tune in, but instead I’m there with a persistent message.”
It’s yet another test for a campaign that began rising dramatically — and promising a shift in polls that continue to show Biden trailing Trump in some key battleground states — after the president’s State of the Union address in March.
A 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 would improve once Trump became the presumptive nominee.
“That didn’t happen,” this person said, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak freely.
Some Biden aides argue that whatever momentum the campaign began building after Biden and Trump effectively secured their party’s nominations in March has stalled as the former president’s criminal trial in New York dominated the airwaves. But the Biden pollster said the biggest problem is that voters they see as key to Biden’s winning coalition — especially younger and minority voters — are “actively tuned in [the race] in ways we’ve never seen before.”
“They are not fully entrenched behind the president in the same way they were in 2020, on Election Day, and in the way we feel confident they will become on Election Day. But it’s not because they are tempted by Trump,” said the researcher. The Biden campaign’s task now, the pollster added, is to “show them and remind them exactly what life was like when Trump was president the last time, and how much worse a second term will be, to raise the stakes of the election so that Even if they feel dissatisfied right now, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a very clear choice in these elections.”
The campaign’s new approach began last week, when law enforcement officers who served at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, fanned out across swing states to hold events with local officials about what they called Trump’s attacks on democracy. In another key moment, Biden will deliver a major speech during a trip to France to mark the anniversary of D-Day this week, connecting the fight against authoritarianism eight decades ago to the work he believes must still be done to preserve democracy today. according to an administration official.
On the eighth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, Biden’s team will hold events focused on gun safety, which polls show is an important issue for the kind of younger voters the campaign hopes to win over. And there will be a steady pace of events focused on reproductive rights starting this week, ahead of a key congressional vote on access to contraceptive care and in the lead-up to the June 24 anniversary of the Dobbs ruling, when Biden aides said that the campaign will highlight how Trump’s campaign nomination of three conservative judges led to the Supreme Court ruling that overturned abortion protections in Roe v. Wade.
Still, campaign officials are careful not to promise the kind of change in polls in the coming weeks that has so far eluded them. The Biden pollster said disengaged voters don’t act as a “light switch” but “when there are these breakthrough moments, we need to win the moment and win the message.”
“These gains will be incremental,” they said. “It takes persistence and discipline, and that’s what we’re doing and not losing sight of the task.”
One problem for the Biden campaign in trying to reassure nervous Democrats is that currently the most committed voters are also the most frustrated with polls that show the president is unable to gain traction. And each month that passes only provokes greater and greater concern among the public about the campaign’s strategy.
Biden campaign officials counter those concerns by pointing out that while Trump’s trial dominated headlines, their people on the ground in swing states were building relationships with voters who may not be enthusiastic about the campaign now, but whose support They believe they can be conquered. They also argue that Trump’s trial prevented his campaign from carrying out on-the-ground work in swing states designed to try to mobilize voters over the next five months.
“We certainly think of big moments as a way to catalyze and perhaps energize this work, but it’s consistent. And what I want to say about that is Donald Trump is not doing any of that,” Dan Kanninen, Biden’s swing states director, said in an interview. “And he can’t buy back the time they lost.”
The campaign does not expect to dwell on Trump’s historic 34-count criminal conviction, Biden aides said. But as the former president tries to use this as a galvanizing event for his supporters, the Biden campaign sees an opportunity to turn it against him.
“All of these things are yet another iteration of the core message, that one of these candidates gets up every day and fights for you,” said another senior campaign official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “And a person gets up every day, talking and thinking only about himself.”
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
