President Biden’s young re-election team expects to gain more support from independent and Republican voters in 2024 election in part by reaching out to white, rural and suburban voters, targeting two southern states now dominated by Republicans, and building support among Latinos, who show a growing preference for GOP candidates.
The strategy, outlined in a memo released during the re-election campaign on Thursday, comes as Mr. Biden’s overall approval rating remains in the low 40s amid weak enthusiasm for his candidacy among fellow Democrats, declining support among independents and little support among registered Republican voters. on a recent CBS News poll and surveys by other national publications.
But Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez-Rodriguez says the president enters the 2024 fray “in a remarkably strong position,” given Strong testimony from the Democratic Party Art by-elections it allayed concerns about a larger Republican majority in the House after two years as president.
“Democrats won the election in 2022 despite turnout that was more Republican than 2020. This shows that under the Biden administration, we have gained the support of Republicans and independent voters who previously did not vote for Democrats,” Chavez writes Rodriguez.
She notes that Democrats have at least one competitive statewide race in seven of the battleground states that determined the 2020 presidential election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — particularly highlighting recent victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court a Democratic-backed candidate who has drawn voters in critical suburban Milwaukee districts, and Democrats are winning mayoral races in Jacksonville and Colorado Springs as signs of “the real power we have by 2024.”
So how does the campaign plan to return the 306 Electoral College votes it received in 2020?
Having reinforced the “blue wall” of the industrial states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; reinvest in Nevada and New Hampshire, two states Republicans continue to believe they can wrest from Democrats; again prevailing in Arizona and Georgia; and by investing more resources “in states like North Carolina and Florida,” the memo said. The company is already spending millions of dollars to run television ads in all of those states except New Hampshire.
Mr. Biden lost North Carolina by 1.3%, and Democrats have not won the Tar Heel state in a presidential contest since Barack Obama in 2008. Former President Donald Trump won Florida by 3.3% in 2020, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was re-elected last year by 19.4%. Florida Democrats say weak enthusiasm for their candidate, Charlie Crist, and moves by the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature to overhaul election laws have helped lower the party’s turnout, which could easily be lifted in a presidential election year if the Biden-Harris campaign invests in the state.
But in the final weeks of the 2020 election cycle, billionaire Mike Bloomberg personally invested $100 million to help Mr. Biden win Florida — to no avail. In 2024, several hundred million dollars in advertising and campaign costs will likely need to be spent on re-election campaigns and aligned super-party parties, according to party strategists.
Winning the nine states initially targeted by the Biden-Harris campaign will require building on “small but important gains among rural voters and white working-class voters in battleground states” in 2020, according to the memo. And while the president won over suburban voters, “we know there’s an opportunity to expand that suburban coalition in the face of extreme Republican policies” — especially abortion rights, the memo said.
The campaign is also encouraged by minority voter support, which “remained relatively stable between 2020 and 2022, particularly in critical 2024 battleground states.” But a growing segment of Latinos, especially young men in Florida, Nevada and Texas, are eschewing traditional Democratic support.
And yet the campaign correctly points out that Hispanic support “showed real stability across the country in 2022, from Arizona and Nevada to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.” The outpouring of support along the US-Mexico border is a nod to widely publicized Republican predictions that the GOP would sweep the three competitive House districts represented by the RGV. In the end, enough traditionally Democratic voters in predominately Latino districts won by narrow margins in two of the three races. And Arizona Democrats won close victories across the state thanks to a growing bloc of young, liberal Latinos.
How the Biden-Harris campaign plans to reach voters — and how much money it will spend — remains one of the big unanswered questions in the early weeks of the re-election bid. Chavez Rodríguez offers few new clues beyond admitting, “Today’s media environment has never been more fragmented.” Instead, she signals the campaign’s hope for micro-targeting of voters who support it through digital means, using unexplained “innovative strategies to break through and connect with voters where they are.”
That likely includes aggressive use of TikTok, a platform owned by Chinese firm ByteDance that faces a sustained push from the White House and a bipartisan coalition on Capitol Hill to heavily regulate, if not outright ban, the social network from government devices. and potentially to children. And the company regularly releases short digital videos that tout the president’s accomplishments or seek to highlight new policy priorities.
In a nod to the long-standing view of Biden’s political aides that he is a historically underrated and underappreciated political talent, the reelection team is urging his supporters to anticipate, if not enjoy and use, scrutiny of his strategy.
“Our campaign is driven by the lived experience of the American people, not political echo,” Chavez Rodriguez writes. “The polls and pundits have underestimated Joe Biden his entire life, and he’s proven them wrong time and time again.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-campaign-initial-plans-to-win/
