Joe Biden’s campaign sees a wide path to electoral victory in the presidential election and is not worried about the coronavirus pandemic keeping the candidate at home as it plans to make the 2020 election a referendum on President Trump.
Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, who previously led former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s bid and joined Biden shortly after he became the Democratic presidential nominee, projected confidence in the former vice president’s chances during a presentation to reporters on Friday.
“We are pulling ahead in Florida, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, and in Arizona,” O’Malley Dillon said. “If we kept these numbers, and we kept them through November, that would put us at 318 electoral votes.”
Trump or Biden must secure 270 electoral college votes to win the race in November.
Outside the six swing states most often discussed by political analysts, the Biden campaign is eyeing an expanded electoral map that breaks states down into three types.
There are those it hopes to protect that Hillary Clinton won in 2016: Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Virginia, and New Hampshire. It also hopes to win states that Trump won 2016, but that Democrats won in 2008 or 2012: Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, and Maine. Lastly, it is eyeing Republican strongholds that the Biden campaign sees as new battleground states: Arizona, Texas, and Georgia.
“I’m bullish about Arizona,” she added. The state, where Biden leads Trump in the RealClearPolitics average of polls by 4.4 percentage points, has tiled reliably Republican for decades but now has one Democratic senator: Kyrsten Sinema. The Biden voters in that state, O’Malley Dillon said, are those who voted for Romney and then Clinton, as well as Latino voters and those under 30.
Despite the coronavirus pandemic keeping campaigns from running normal operations, Biden is beefing up his staff and plans to employ 600 people in battleground states by June.
The presentation was a response to critics who say that Biden is not doing enough to campaign effectively as he is forced to stay in his Delaware home.
But the president’s performance during the coronavirus pandemic, Biden’s campaign argued, will help him make 2020 a “referendum” on Trump.
“The single biggest driver in terms of turnout and enthusiasm is actually going to be the percentage of people who have very favorable, very unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump,” said Biden senior strategist Mike Donilon.
