Presidential campaigns to focus on 7 key states
ATLANTA — Joe Biden and Donald Trump each won the White House by razor-thin margins in key states.
Now, with a reprise of their bitter 2020 campaign all but officially set after Super Tuesday, the two campaigns are unveiling their strategies for a matchup between a president and his immediate predecessor.
Both campaigns will fight the hardest in seven battleground states, five of which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden four years ago. Biden’s reelection campaign claims a jump on hiring staff and targeting swingstate voters. Trump campaign officials are finalizing a takeover of the Republican National Committee this week and looking to expand their field operation.
Biden and Trump will each hold events in Georgia on Saturday, a week after they did simultaneous U.S.-Mexico border trips in Texas. That’s a reflection of how closely their campaigns will bump up against each other but also how they will work for votes differently. Biden will be in metro Atlanta, home to a fast-growing and diverse population. Trump will visit rural northwest Georgia and the district of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a firebrand conservative discussed as a possible running mate.
BIDEN’S CAMPAIGN
Biden’s campaign has hired leadership teams of three to five people — each with deep, in-state political experience — in eight states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Of those, only Florida and North Carolina have twice gone for Trump, though North Carolina is seen by both parties as competitive. Both Biden and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won Nevada.
The campaign plans to expand those teams to as many as 15 people each, then bring on hundreds of paid organizers across the battleground map in the coming weeks. Those organizers, in turn, will be tasked with coordinating tens of thousands of volunteers.
Biden’s effort will feature “a large brick-and-mortar operation that we couldn’t do in 2020” because of COVID-19 restrictions, said Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground states director. That means returning to door-knocking and phone-banking with the campaign prioritizing the quality of voter contact rather than just the quantity. It will also train volunteers and give them the flexibility to influence their own social networks — promoting Biden’s campaign in non-traditional online spaces that can best sway their relatives, friends and neighbors.
“I see what we’re doing now as the smarter extension of what we learned in ’12 and also the smarter extension of what we learned in ’20,” Kanninen said, referring to both Biden’s victory and the successful reelection of thenPresident Barack Obama.
TRUMP’S GAME PLAN
For Trump, the next post-Super Tuesday step is to complete a takeover of the RNC at the party’s spring meeting that began Thursday.
The former president effectively will absorb GOP headquarters into his campaign, installing his preferred leadership with a priority on catching up to the fundraising and organizing operation that Biden’s reelection team shares with the DNC.
“It’s message and mechanics,” said Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita. “If we do what we’re supposed to do from the campaign standpoint, we’ll be able to really drive and increase the states where we are competitive.”
LaCivita, who is set to become the RNC’s chief operating officer while retaining his campaign role, listed seven of the same eight states the Biden campaign sees as battlegrounds. He clarified that he expects Trump to win Florida again but promised the campaign would not be caught flatfooted there.
He plans for the RNC to begin expanding its field operation and adding staff to coordinate voter outreach “immediately” after the leadership transition at this week’s party meeting. LaCivita and Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-inlaw, will represent the former president at the meeting in Houston. Lara Trump will become RNC co-chair alongside incoming chair Michael Whatley, the current head of the North Carolina party.
“As soon as we get in, everything changes, and there will be more of a focus on battleground states, as opposed to community centers in Jacksonville, Florida,” LaCivita said.
The committee has also hired political staff in 15 battlegrounds, including those with important House and Senate races, like New York, California and Montana, while beginning an early in-person voting and ballot harvesting initiative called “Bank Your Vote” in all 50 states, six territories and six languages.