Biden tries to build victory old-school style, one brick-and-mortar campaign office at a time - The Boston Globe (2024)

Biden campaign officials have sought to leverage their early cash advantage over Trump (one that likely is shrinking after huge fund-raising hauls recently reported by the former president following his conviction in New York) to build the physical infrastructure they believe will pay dividends in a tight race. They now boast more than 175 Democratic campaign offices spread across Wisconsin and seven other battleground states.

“It’s going to get down to knocking on doors the old-fashioned way,” Biden told staffers and volunteers during a March visit to the Democrats’ new state campaign headquarters in Milwaukee. “No, it really is.”

That might seem an antiquated approach in the age of social media, like something straight out of Biden’s first Senate race in 1972. But his campaign is trying to blend modern online tactics with time-tested, on-the-ground strategies to find and motivate people who have yet to tune in to a 2020 re-run election.

“We are in an environment where the voters who will truly decide this election are not yet engaged. They’re not paying attention to political media. They’re not watching cable,” said Dan Kanninen, who directs the Biden campaign’s battleground states effort. “They need to be found, and you’ve got to work hard to get in front of them and to have a conversation with them.”

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Democrats largely ceded the ground game to Republicans in 2020, limiting door-to-door canvassing and in-person organizing events because of the pandemic, said Nathan Gonzales, editor of Inside Elections, a nonpartisan publication that covers presidential and congressional campaigns. The focus on campaign offices shows they’re determined not to do that again.

“A modern campaign should be trying to leverage outreach to voters in any way possible,” Gonzales said, noting the Biden campaign has enough money — $84 million at the end of April — to open and staff offices without limiting advertising and other priorities. “In close states, everything matters.”

Biden narrowly trails Trump in polling averages in the major battlegrounds, including by 1 percentage point in Wisconsin, according to analytics website FiveThirtyEight.

The Biden campaign said it has 700 total staff in those eight states ― Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona — and four other second-tier ones: Maine, Minnesota, Virginia, and Florida. The costs for the coordinated efforts, which it did not detail, are shared among the Biden campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the state party where the offices and staff are located.

“We’re going to compete for voters wherever they are, and cutting margins in red counties is exactly what Donald Trump did to Democrats in 2016 in reverse,” Kanninen said, referring to Trump’s narrow victories that year in the so-called blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. “The lack of presence in some of those areas, I think, really hurt Democrats. Something we have done much, much better as a party, and this campaign has embraced fully, is the need to be everywhere.”

Officials from the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, which also are running a coordinated effort, said they have an “aggressive and experienced operation” to turn out votes, but would not provide specifics.

“We have paid staffers and volunteer-powered field programs in every battleground state, and they are expanding daily,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Still, the Biden team is confident it has an advantage with its early investment in battleground state infrastructure. While Trump and his allies might catch up on fund-raising, Kanninen said, “they will not be able to buy back the time.”

“We will have the months of developing relationships that they will not have, and I believe firmly that comes home to roost in the fall when it really counts,” he said.

Democrats began spreading more seeds in that effort on Saturday in Eau Claire, a city of about 70,000 that is a Democratic stronghold in mostly Republican northwest Wisconsin. About 20 volunteers gathered at the party’s headquarters on a drizzly morning, downing fresh-brewed coffee under the gaze of a life-sized Ruth Bader Ginsburg cardboard cutout before heading out to knock on doors in the campaign’s first canvassing ahead of the November election.

“I have never seen our office so filled in June on kind of a rainy day with people willing to go out,” local Democratic state Representative Jodi Emerson said after giving the volunteers a pep talk. “I mean, that’s like August excitement, September excitement that we had in there.”

The Eau Claire County Democrats office has been in the same location—a clapboard-clad former corner grocery store in a residential neighborhood — since about 2016. In addition to dozens of new field offices in battleground states, it’s among many existing ones that the coordinated campaign also is using as a base to boost Biden and other Democratic candidates, such as Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin.

The coordinated campaign has three field organizers in the region. One of them is Camden Hargrove, 34, of Menomonie, who is responsible for Dunn, St. Croix, and Pierce counties. Trump won each by at least 13 percentage points in 2020, although Biden narrowly won the state by about 21,000 votes. Each county has a Democratic office — two are new this year — that help the party connect with voters while providing a place for volunteer training sessions, candidate forums, and storage for campaign signs.

“We’ll just be in the office and people will come in and just say, ‘Hi,’ check it out. ... They’ll get signs. They’ll ask questions,” Hargrove said. “Some people walk in and tell us Republican things that are happening to keep on our watch screen.”

A big reason for the party’s presence in Republican counties is simply to let Democrats know they’re not alone, Hargrove said. Proudly declaring their blue allegiance was part of Huff’s pitch on Saturday at the Dunn County Democrats’ fund-raiser: a lunch, bake sale, and silent auction in a park pavilion on the shore of Lake Menomin. The tree-lined path to the event was bracketed by Biden campaign yard signs.

“We have to do everything we possibly can to get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris reelected,” Huff told the crowd of about 75 people as they dug into their stir-fry lunch, with root beer floats available to wash it down. He urged them to take free yard signs so they could plant their own small Democratic flag in the Republican county — even if it might subject them to harassment from their Trump-supporting neighbors.

“I was talking to somebody earlier today who said she feels a little bit uncomfortable putting up a Biden sign,” he continued. “That’s the kind of discomfort we all have to go through for the next few months, because if you don’t feel any discomfort, you can’t get people elected in western Wisconsin.”

Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.