At the beginning of the year, it didn’t look like President Biden would be re-elected. But in recent weeks, the race for 2024 with Donald Trump has become more competitive as the Biden team ramps up early organizing in key battleground states.
Some Democrats are getting more optimistic about Biden’s chances of beating former President Trump, who is expected to be the Republican nominee for president. This is because he has recently done better in polls since his State of the Union speech and his campaign has more people working on the ground.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Sharif Street, chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. Street told Newsweek, “Things look good, but we can’t get too excited.”
Recent polls show that Trump is ahead in some key states, which Trump’s team says gives them a lot of confidence in their ability to win the election.
But within the Democratic Party, there is growing confidence that a better campaign operation could help Biden get past his historically low job approval numbers and the public’s ongoing doubts about his age and fitness for office.
The Biden campaign has more staff and better infrastructure than Trump’s. This is probably most clear in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, three states that had a big impact on the last two presidential races and will again in 2024.
The Biden team said last month that they were going to open 44 field offices in Wisconsin. The campaign has set up 14 offices in Pennsylvania and says it wants to open 30 more in Michigan. The Biden campaign also has senior staff in place and has run ads in all three states as well as other battlegrounds like Nevada and Arizona. These ads are part of a larger effort to reach Black and Latino voters, as well as other important voting groups.
Vince Galko, a Republican strategist with a lot of experience in Pennsylvania, said, “Biden has the edge when it comes to the ground game.”
“We have the message, the operation, and the money to propel President Trump to victory on November 5,” he said.
When asked for a response on this story, the Biden campaign said no.
Several sources say that officials at Biden’s campaign offices in Wilmington, Delaware, have worked closely with state Democratic Party leaders to plan the senator’s campaign travel so that he can spend as much time as possible with voters outside of Washington, D.C.
The most recent example is Biden’s trip to Saginaw, Michigan, for his campaign. Sources involved in planning say that the president went to the city last month after Democrats and state campaign staff in the area asked the national team to boost support in a county that Biden just barely won in 2020.
Campaign officials, state Democratic leaders, and others told Newsweek that the close cooperation has led to a battleground plan for getting Democrats and independents to vote for Biden in the fall. Ben Wikler, head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said that it means getting more Democrats to vote and weakening Trump’s hold on areas that lean to the right.
“Our goal will be to reduce the Republican margin of victory in rural areas, keep moving the suburbs from red to blue, and expand turnout and vote margins in blue parts of the state,” said Wikler.
