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and whether his decision not to campaign more in
person was a missed opportunity.
Biden was buoyed by a vast grassroots movement:
the Trump era has seen a frenzy of political action,
with thousands of newly motivated activists leading
local political groups. Middle-class women gathered
their Facebook friends to drink wine and make can-
vassing phone calls; disaffected Republicans waged a
multimillion-dollar campaign to mobilize their peers.
A weak fundraiser who ended the primary essentially
broke, Biden shattered general-election fundraising
records—his campaign hauled in $952 million, dwarf-
ing the incumbent by more than $300 million—as
liberals showered donations on him and the party’s
congressional candidates.
But Trump had his own army of enthusiastic sup-
porters. His massive rallies—held at cavernous air-
port hangars and sports arenas with no social distanc-
ing and limited mask wearing—were not just aimed
at flattering Trump’s ego or creating images of enthu-
siastic throngs for local and national media. Republi-
can National Committee (RNC) teams perched out-
side each event, registering new voters and creating
a database of supporters. “ People sometimes pooh-
pooh the rallies and say there’s really no campaignand gaffes stuck unerringly to the script. Many lines
in his final TV ads were identical to what he said when
he launched his campaign a year and a half before.
Unusually for a general-election candidate, Biden ac-
tually saw his standing with the public improve over
the course of the campaign. Only about 10% of the
ads aired by Biden’s campaign and allies were attacks
on Trump, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.
His campaign believed that his themes of unity, com-
passion and expertise were an implicit rebuke to the
incumbent. “The message has been incredibly con-
sistent: an implicit contrast between Trump’s char-
acter flaws and their consequences for real people,”
says Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, a veteran
of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “Trump is self-
absorbed and chaotic; Biden is the opposite: in it
for others, stable, the antidote to everything Trump
represents.” But Democrats now wonder if Biden,
like Clinton before him, put too much emphasis on
character and not enough on kitchen-table issues,
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The different style of the campaigns—
and of their supporters—was echoed
in their Pennsylvania offices