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A house of many basements: Biden’s media strategy and why it’s working

It’s got nothing to do with basements and everything to do with reaching American voters where they live now.

By Michael Eric RossPublished 4 years ago 7 min read
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Good retail politics means reaching for the voters in the basements where they live.

It’s been more than briefly fashionable to dismiss or distill the current pandemic-driven style of former vice president Joe Biden’s presidential campaign as a war being waged from his basement in Delaware. The Trump 2020 re-elect campaign, denied the chance to go after Biden on traditional campaign turf (the country itself), has doubled down on the Biden-in-the-basement meme, alleging that Biden’s phoning it in, taking shots at President* Donald Trump from the equivalent of a bunker in New England.

But the cheap shots didn’t take for very long. The basement-bunker myth was wrong, of course: Biden's been on the road for months, in various small-scale campaign events at towns in Iowa and Pennsylvania, and others besides. But the Biden 2020 team took the lemons of a challenge – seeking common ground with a bitterly-divided American people in an election year, amid a raging pandemic – and made some potent political lemonade. What may have started as a one-off campaign video has yielded dividends as a memorable, ongoing 21st-century gloss on the fireside chat, one that’s helped make the former Obama vice president a prohibitive favorite in the race for the White House.

Trump has been flashing around the country, the guest of honor at various sparsely-attended rallies, carpet-bombing supporters with the pomp and panache of the presidency. Biden has countered with a quieter, more measured, more circumspect campaign style, one that dovetails with the pace of American life during COVID-19. Why’s it been working so well?

Biden’s media strategy works because it’s responsive. Team Biden, faced with an unprecedented communications challenge, had the good sense to look at it as an unprecedented communications opportunity. Before the coronavirus, neither political party gave much if any thought to changing the political-convention business model.

Then COVID exploded into our lives. Because of it, the Biden campaign made the pivot to an alternate convention that seems poised to break new, necessary ground. For the campaign and the Democratic National Committee, there seemed to be a two-fold objective not quite as challenging as levitation, but daunting enough: (1) Build a nominating convention that reflects the big-tent party Democrats have conjured, and lived, for generations. (2) Then, bolt that vision of the party onto the convention amid an emerging reality of new social and spatial behaviors sparked by the coronavirus pandemic.

How well the Democrats execute on that vision, we’ll find out in Milwaukee starting Aug. 17. But they’ve made the right moves at about the right time, sensitive to the changes to come. On Aug. 5, the Biden campaign announced that the former vice president would not be appearing in Milwaukee. Nor, apparently, will anyone else, out of an abundance of COVID-related caution.

CBS News reported: “The party said in a statement that it's scrapping plans for anyone to speak from the Wisconsin city and instead will have invited speakers appear remotely from their home states, citing consultation with public health officials and experts[.]”

Team Trump, meanwhile, was back-footed from the jump, has lurched from one proposed convention location to another, lamely reacting to the crisis according to Trump’s impulsiveness and the Trumpian reality distortion field within which the worst public-health crisis in 100 years will one day just go away. Plans for a GOP convention in Charlotte, N.C., fell through; then the second choice of Jacksonville, Fla., didn't happen, because of fears about a super-spreader event at the Big Event Trump covets. Trump said more recently that he's considering making his Aug. 27 acceptance speech from somewhere on the White House grounds.

Biden’s media strategy works because it’s thoughtful. Much of Biden’s recent campaign strategy has been recognizing the gravity of the pandemic as it affects the nation — and reacting in a way that reflects caring about what the country’s going through. George H.W. Bush once infamously threw shade at “the vision thing.” Joe Biden deeply understands the need for the empathy thing, at a time when the nation never needed it more. It’s not about measuring the tragedy by the metric of economics or geopolitical objectives. It’s about making the human connection. It’s about knowing what hurt feels like.

Team Trump, meanwhile, has shown a phenomenal inability (or unwillingness) to relate to what the nation is experiencing now. It has sidelined any consistent outward showing of sympathy for the victims of the pandemic, all but characterizing them in the context of collateral damage — never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity for emotional outreach. It is what it is indeed.

Biden’s media strategy works because it’s cost-effective. Among the more fruitless comparisons of this election cycle has been head-to-head matchups of ad buys for the Biden and Trump campaigns. Throughout the year we’ve seen lopsided amounts of money, with Trump campaign ad spends topping those of Team Biden. What’s been less widely explained, or explored, is how that imbalance has been overcome lately, and how that process made the Biden campaign one of the more cost-effective presidential campaigns in history.

You can’t compare what the campaigns are spending without looking at how well the campaigns have been working.

In the spring, Trump presided over the open-mike afternoons at the COVID Club (aka the James Brady Press Briefing Room) — with Trump a party to one unforced error after another, fumbling the worst U.S. public-health crisis in a century. All of it went a long way to cementing Trump’s image as an inept, bellicose master of ceremonies of an event whose gravity he didn’t even understand.

This was a series of bully-pulpit moments, the perfect time for a capable president to take command of the situation (as much as possible), and at least present the picture of a leader, offering a taste of the anodyne and the upbeat to an exhausted, frightened, angry nation. But Trump whiffed at the plate, wasting an unprecedented media moment at the worst possible time.

◊ ◊ ◊

Sooner or later, in the depth of any given crisis, the ability or inability to lead will be glaringly obvious. It wasn’t so long ago when Biden 2020 was all but given last rites – when it was assumed that the man in the basement would be buried there with his presidential aspirations. You’ve heard any number of metaphors for high-functioning campaign poverty (Bidens campaign is running on fumes! Hunting for money in the couch cushions!).

And then along came COVID-19.

Disaster has a way of being a great leveler of fortunes and dreams, and so it’s been since the end of February. That’s about when Biden’s standing imagery of probity, common sense, rational thinking, practical politics and coolness under fire went from being a general campaign persona to one that adapted very well to the specific emergencies of this American moment.

Biden embraced using Twitter to offer ideas and opinions, from the understated aside to more intellectually muscular statements. The Biden campaign also got a big assist from The Lincoln Project, a group of former Republican campaign ops united against Trump. Visually effective, emotionally powerful Lincoln Project videos have been part of the campaign mediascape for months, compounding the power of the campaign's own ads with pro-Biden support from an unexpected source.

Fast forward to early July. The New York Times reported that the Biden campaign beat Team Trump in second-quarter fundraising, pulling in $141 million for the month of June. And the president of the United States has been trailing Biden badly in all the other ways that matter, from standing in the opinion polls to the civic optics of wearing a mask in public.

◊ ◊ ◊

The see-saw of fundraising will continue for a while, with each campaign trading first and second place from now to the end. In an Aug. 6 fundraising email to supporters, for example, Biden 2020 reported that the Trump campaign outraised Biden in July by $25 million. But the battle lines are clearly being drawn. We can see the trend in the increasingly pro-Biden polling that’s been building since the spring.

And we can thank the president* for the arc of that polling, indicators from across the country of a new national mood – a mood reflected in the latest national forecast maps for the November election. NPR’s electoral map forecasts a handy 297-170 landslide for Joe Biden. NBC News’ map, out the same week, was even more lop-sided (334 Biden -125 Trump, with 79 tossups!).

In this singular year, shovel-ready money may not be the all-powerful, dispositive campaign commodity it usually is. With electoral-map forecasts like those, it doesn’t have to be: Presidential ineptitude is a force multiplier for Team Biden. Has been all year long. The candidate and the campaign know you can do pretty well releasing videos from a Delaware basement (or anywhere else). In this singular downbeat year, good retail politics means reaching for the voters in the basements where they live.

politics
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About the Creator

Michael Eric Ross

Michael Eric Ross writes from Los Angeles on politics, race, pop culture, and other subjects. His writing has also appeared in TheWrap, Medium, PopMatters, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, msnbc.com, Salon, and other publications.

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