HOW TRUMP’S “SLEEPY JOE BIDEN” BECAME THE 46^TH AMERICAN PRESIDENT

 

                                  …The 46^th American President & Vice President

 

Biden’s promise was: “To Make America Good Again”

 

OK, we now have a winner in a 77 year old man that on November 20^th will turn 78.  Yes, Joe Biden and a Black/Asian woman, Kamala Harris, will replace a narcissistic, pathological liar and the former governor of Indiana in the White House.

But, have you wondered how this team actually won an election over a current president for his second term?  That event hasn’t happened in almost 30 years.

When you look into the details of Biden’s win, it’s pretty interesting and actually amazing.

First, consider the situations regarding the former vice president, who was running against a number of very successful and capable and younger candidates.  For instance, you had policy wonks like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  Then there was the very capable Pete Buttigieg and even Kamala Harris herself was in the presidential running.  How the heck, with those kind of candidates, did we end up with a 77 year old politician who had been a senator for 37 years and a VP for 8 years ??

If you followed the Democratic Primary race, the campaign really does become quite interesting.  Biden started his initial campaign with a video that said: “The fight against Trump is a battle for the soul of the nation”.  Biden has said that he had decided to run, only after what President Trump had said about the violence at the Charlottesville rally, saying that there were “fine people on both sides”, referring to the white supremacists and those that were demonstrating against them.

But the following story is the way Biden handled the campaign when the Democratic primary first began.

Biden trailed both Buttigieg and Sanders in their funding and in their outward passion.  In the initial actual voting, Biden came in fourth in Iowa, then fifth in New Hampshire.   

The constant criticism was that: “Biden’s like the president says….he’s Sleepy Joe.”  “Biden just wasn’t snappy enough and he doesn’t have many followers on Twitter”, as one reporter wrote.  “ But Joe knows who the real Middle America is, and it’s not what you first see if you’re a Twitter follower,.”  wrote another reporter.

The Biden campaign had decided that if they could only survive to South Carolina, they could get back in the running.  As it turned out, they did make it to South Carolina and they received the strong endorsement of the Southern King-Maker, House Representative, James Clyburn.  Biden carried the South Carolina race with decisive support from his Black voters.

The difference on the campaign trail was that Biden just did what he has always done in a campaign.  He listened to the voters as they confided in him the worst moments of their lives.  And that was because they knew that he had the loss of his first wife and daughter in a traffic accident and his son Beau to brain cancer.  As it turned out, it was that loyalty of the people he connected with that was the most important factor in the race.

South Carolina had become for Biden, what Iowa had become for Barak Obama in 2008.  That changed the race overnight.

Three days later, on Super Tuesday, Biden won 10 of 14 states.  And one week later, he won the primaries in Michigan, Missouri and Mississippi.

Biden had won a multi-racial coalition of Black voters, suburban voters and he made inroads into the American white working class.  That last one was an important group for Donald Trump’s win in 2016.

Yes, Biden had won, but he was then working with a very slim staff.  That was not what a winner needed to win the general election.

As a solid, long-time campaigner, Biden knew he had to get with up-dating his campaign.  He made the big change of replacing his campaign manager Greg Schultz with a veteran operative, Jen O’Mally Dillon.  She had been Obama’s deputy campaign manager in his 2012 re-election

She had also helped modernize the Democratic Party’s data program, and she was the right one for Biden at this time.

With the Covid-19 pandemic taking off, they decided it was too dangerous for a 77 year old campaigner to campaign in person.  So, for the first months, he did virtual events from his home basement. 

During this time, Trump continually mocked Joe, but Biden just tuned-out the president’s comments.

While Trump played golf, Biden released a detailed plan for dealing with the pandemic.  Then he released a plan for rebuilding the US economy.  But the Covid-19 death toll was now reaching its first 100,000 deaths.

O’Malley Dillon then decided the conventional field operation would not work during a pandemic.  She decided that Biden’s campaign would need to be run almost entirely on-line.  It became the largest digital organizing machine in American electoral history, and it was all built in-house.

They spent millions on online advertising and the digital staff was 15 times larger than it had been in the primary.  Staffers that had come from Harris, Warren and Sanders brought new digital strategies into “Bidenworld.”

It all worked, and Biden and the Democrats raised $364.5 million in August, the largest one-month haul ever by a presidential campaign; a record that they broke the following month by $383 million.

By the Fall, Biden had a 20^th century message with a 21^st century virtual massive force.

In addition, the pandemic had become a referendum on President Trump.

Trump’s inability to empathize with the American people about the situation they were in, that was just one of many dropped balls in Trump’s campaign.  The new digital strategy had kept what had previously been a gaffe-prone candidate under wraps.  It shielded his missteps, while showing his charming moments.

Then, when he decided to tap Kamala Harris as his running mate, Biden decided to first notify his supporters via a text message instead of the normal leaking to the press.  This also made him even further praised by his supporters.  In addition, it allowed the excitement of the nomination of the first Black woman Vice President to become another tremendous fundraising event of an additional $26 million over the next 24 hours.

By Fall, the Biden campaign would out-spend Trump 2 to 1 on the airwaves in the critical battleground states.  To guarantee their communication to the voters, they also recruited over 200,000 volunteer digital organizers that would send millions of text messages.

In side-stepping Trump’s attacks, Biden then developed and presented a robust climate-and-jobs plan with the help of some well-educated, youthful climate leaders .  Biden also supported the growing racial-justice protests, while he stayed away from the demanding “Defund the Police” calls.

Trump had totally failed in trying to tie the “socialist” title to Joe Biden.  And when Trump tried on national TV to Bully Biden in the first debate, it totally backfired and gave Trump the failure of the debate.

Biden’s campaign concentrated on those upper mid-west battleground states that he needed to win, and that’s what eventually happened.  The plan was to boost the urban and suburban turn-out that had not turned out in 2016, and this cut directly into Trump’s electoral margins.

The results speak for themselves.  After four years of chaos and division, as it turned out, America didn’t want a revolution.  It just wanted a competent president; a break from the chaos, with a comforting message and perhaps, a few quiet moments.

Joe Biden had completed his slow and steady march to victory, exactly as he promised he would.

Copyright G. Ater 2020