{UAH} TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT - WHERE SLEEPY JOE WENT WRONG

Too close for comfort: Where Biden went wrong

by Emily Larsen, Political Reporter | 

 

November 05, 2020 10:53 AM

 

 

Joe Biden and President Trump are still trying to win the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to claim the White House starting in January. And the tight margins in a nail-biter election are too close for comfort for many Democrats who were hoping for a blowout win.

There were several troubling signs for Democrats. Trump won millions more votes than he did in 2016, and exit polls showed that he increased his standing among minority voters. Meanwhile, Republicans may keep their majority in the Senate. And while Democrats are poised to keep their House majority, the party lost seats instead of achieving an expected gain.

How did the unthinkable, a Trump win declared on election night, come within striking distance of happening again?

Flush with cash and leading in the polls, Biden’s campaign was confident about his chances and moved to expand the electoral map rather than focus attention on must-win states. In the final days of the campaign, Biden visited Georgia, Iowa, and Ohio, and Harris visited Texas. Trump won the last three states and is leading in Georgia as the state continues counting votes.

The day of the election, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon declared that Biden had so many paths to victory that even if Biden lost both Florida and Pennsylvania, he could still win the election — which is still a distinct possibility but leaves Biden with fewer paths to victory than he had two days ago.

Some polls showing the former vice president and 36-year Delaware senator leading Trump turned out to be faulty. A Washington Post/ABC Wisconsin poll had Biden ahead by 17 points. Actual results show him less than 1 point ahead of Trump, and the Trump campaign has said it will request a recount in the state.

Other warning signs peeked through.

At the top of the list of criticisms was Biden’s “basement strategy.” Restrictions on gatherings and travel due to COVD-19 allowed Biden to conduct most of his general election campaign remotely via videoconference from his home in Wilmington, Delaware.

Even when Biden started traveling more in the final months of the campaign, hosting COVID-save “drive-in” rallies and small roundtable conversations, he lagged far behind Trump in days of travel and number of events. The Biden campaign limited the number of people at his campaign events, disappointing some Biden supporters and hampering his ability to show enthusiasm for his ticket.

In fact, most of Biden’s campaign strategy centered not on his own policies, record, and leadership, but on Trump — committing to making 2020 a referendum election on the president. Over and over again, Biden voters told the Washington Examiner that dislike of the president was the main motivating factor for their vote, while Trump’s campaign flaunted poll numbers that showed Trump voters were much more enthusiastic about the president.

The coronavirus pandemic also prompted the campaign and Democratic National Committee to halt in-person voter outreach until September and relied on text messages and phone calls to voters while Trump’s team continued mass door-knocking. When the campaign did pick up in-person canvassing, sometimes activities only involved dropping a flier on a door.

Still, Dillon stood by the campaign’s decision.

“We canvassed in-person to tens of millions of voters in the last weeks of the election alone,” she said in a briefing on Wednesday. “But we did it in a safe way. We made sure that we were not putting our volunteers or any voters at risk. We ensured we had appropriate PPE and training, and that we were incredibly thoughtful about that process.”

Lack of movement insulated Biden from interactions with the press. The dynamic benefited Biden much of the time and helped limit verbal slip-ups from the self-described “gaffe machine.” But sometimes it backfired, making Biden appear as if he was hiding from tough questioning.

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Trump nominated originalist Amy Coney Barrett, his campaign repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether he supported calls from other Democrats to add seats to the Supreme Court and pack it with justices favorable to the Left. He eventually said that while he is “not a fan” of court-packing, he would create a bipartisan commission to study court reform issues if elected.

Biden made racial justice a cornerstone of his campaign as Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation over the summer. He promised to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court and chose California Sen. Kamala Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, to be his running mate. Yet, exit polls showed that the Democratic ticket’s support among minority voters was slightly lower than in 2016.

The biggest shock was lackluster support from Latino voters, particularly in the battleground state of Florida, which Trump won. Hillary Clinton won the populous Cuban center of Miami-Dade County 63% to 34% in 2016, but Biden fell to winning it with only 53% to Trump's 46%, contributing to his loss across the state.

Biden’s campaign faced criticisms for not engaging enough with minority communities early enough or creating the infrastructure to turn them out to vote. Last December, Biden’s senior Latina adviser resigned out of frustration that the campaign was not doing enough to reach that community. Some organizers sounded the alarm on minority communities in Florida not turning out at high enough levels during early and absentee voting.

Dillon disputed that Biden failed to reach those voters well enough.

“Obviously, in Florida, Donald Trump over-performs his numbers with Cuban American voters, and the vice president did not underperform. We just saw Donald Trump increase his support with the Cuban American vote,” the campaign manager said on Wednesday.

Biden's statements that black voters who vote for Trump “ ain't black” and that the Latino community was diverse “unlike the black community” became points of attack for his critics and opponents.

Those gaffes, along with frequent verbal stumbles, helped Trump and his allies sow doubts about Biden’s mental capacity and whether the 77-year-old could effectively lead the country.

Disdain for Trump helped Biden unite various factions of the Democratic party, avoiding the dynamic from 2016 in which disgruntled fans of Bernie Sanders voiced opposition to the Democratic establishment. Biden’s embrace of their policies — he adopted proposals from Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont on student debt forgiveness and bankruptcy policy, and “Green New Deal” advocate New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez co-chaired a committee that crafted the party’s climate policy platform — helped keep Democrats united in their mission to remove Trump from the White House.

After running as a more moderate option in the primary, his leftward lurch made voters nervous. After Biden declared in the final presidential debate that he planned to “ transition from the oil industry," two vulnerable Democratic members of Congress publicly distanced themselves from him — and both of them lost reelection.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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