“We’re Not Selling Hysteria”: Inside the Cold Calculation and Unyielding Optimism of the Biden Brain Trust

Getting trusted friends to share political content, both digitally and face-to-face, could be extremely valuable. It is also difficult. Last fall, the Biden campaign launched pilot relational organizing programs in Arizona and Wisconsin, battleground states that went for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 and are up for grabs again. The results of a pilot effort in North Milwaukee are one reason for optimism that the campaign can reach middle-class Black voters, whom polls have shown drifting to Trump. A veteran Democratic strategist is more skeptical. “It makes sense in theory,” he says. “The problem is it’s all anecdotal. We don’t know enough yet to say it works. I mean, you have an entire voting population that gets their news from TikTok, right? Which is why most campaigns now, we just push all the buttons. We pay for more door-to-door canvassing, we pay more for texting, we pay more for phone banks, we pay more for digital. But no one—not Republicans, not Democrats—is confident anymore on what messaging works.”

There’s no Biden campaign signage on the office building exterior—a choice both sensible and depressing during this polarized, potentially violent election season. Inside, conversations are low volume, the vibe all-business; the one whimsical touch is conference rooms named for national parks, which is either a healthy reminder or a cruel taunt that there’s a world outside of the campaign. Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s winning 2012 reelection bid (with O’Malley Dillon as a top aide), says the low-key headquarters location, at a distance from the political and media din of Washington, was a wise move. “The hardest thing is the pressure. Every single day, people are asking them about polls that don’t have them winning,” Messina says. “And something I think we did well in Obamaland was stay focused and keep our heads down and build the beast. That’s exactly what they’re doing, and doing really well. They’re raising a great amount of money. They are starting to be really active on social media. They’re staffing up in the battleground states. And they understand exactly what the narrative they need is.”

As Flaherty was talking web algorithms, an old-school press release was going out from another office, taunting “Broke Don” Trump for trailing the president nearly four-to-one in cash on hand and for “hiding at his country club,” while Biden crisscrosses the nation. The tone is more barbed, but the theme is one you hear again and again from Biden’s top staff: We are constructing the kind of campaign apparatus that will deliver in November, while Trump isn’t.

In March alone, the campaign says, it launched a $30 million, six-week paid media campaign; deployed 20,000 volunteers who sent more than 2 million texts and made more than 385,000 calls; and opened 100 new offices. “We’ve opened up our Maryvale, Arizona, office, in the heart of the Latino community,” Rodriguez says. “In Nevada, we have four offices. Trump doesn’t even have one office open in the state.” “They’ll try to buy some sort of field operation at the very end,” Kanninen, 45, says. “That’s never very effective. And so I want to press the advantage that we have now.” “On the metrics that matter most right now,” says Michael Tyler, Biden’s 37-year-old campaign communications director, “your ability to raise the resources, to build the infrastructure that’s going to help decide the path to 270, this campaign is on its front foot relative to him.”

All of which is correct. It is also true that Democrats have won the bulk of recent contests, from the 2022 midterms to a March special election for a state house seat in deep-red Alabama. There are signs that the campaign’s efforts are gaining traction: Since March 1, at least 24 national polls have shown Biden beating Trump, and a recent Bloomberg poll showed an increase in swing-state voters saying the economy is on the right track. And as Trump is stuck in a New York courtroom defending himself against charges of hiding payments to Stormy Daniels, Biden has been out on the campaign trail.

The pattern would be more reassuring, though, if it were up against someone other than Trump, for whom the normal rules of political gravity never seem to apply. As would another article of faith inside the Biden campaign: that once Democratic and undecided voters hear about all the great stuff the president has done for them in his first term, and they truly understand his superiority compared to Trump, of course they’ll come around to Biden’s side. “Not a lot of people have a full understanding of all that he and the vice president have been able to deliver,” Rodriguez says. “Reminding people of what he’s done,” a campaign operative says, “and what the contrast will be moving forward is just a key part of the story that you need to tell to every single demographic, young people in particular.” A Democratic strategist who led a high-profile, winning 2022 midterm campaign scoffs. “I think Biden has totally lost young people, like, aggressively,” the strategist says. “No one I knew under 30 was excited about Biden before October 7, and now all the people on the left are just gone. Maybe some will come back when the choice between him and Trump is clear. But I’ve seen enough focus groups in purple states. People are just so unenthusiastic.”

Yet the younger voter dynamic is highly complicated, and there are indications that Biden’s early and continuous outreach may be having an impact. A recent Harvard poll showed the president with a 19-point lead over Trump among likely voters age 30 and under; other data indicates that dismay over the Israel-Gaza war has had minimal impact. That’s the relatively good news. The downsides are that Biden benefitted from record youth turnout in 2020, something that is unlikely to be duplicated this November, and that Biden was shedding younger voters even before the Israel-Hamas war. The president’s campaign is banking on the contrast with Trump to fill some of the gap. It also believes that parochial concerns outrank Gaza for most younger voters. “People say, ‘They have to fall in love or they won’t show up.’ That’s actually not true,” a second Biden campaign strategist says. “They’re economic voters, but they’re also strategic voters.” Perhaps they’ll notice that lately Biden has been canceling billions in student debt. “Virginia most recently was young voters,” Rodriguez says, referencing last fall’s Democratic sweep of the state’s legislative races. “They are showing up. They know what’s at stake. Abortion—a huge issue for our young voters. If this is something that can be taken away, what else can be?”