27
Carolina as it was for President Obama to win Iowa,”
says Valerie Jarrett, a longtime adviser to both men.
The race changed overnight—literally. The next
morning, Buttigieg took a hard look at his numbers.
“By the time I went to bed that Saturday night, that
path was slipping away,” he said. His dropout and
endorsement triggered a moderate consolidation:
Senator Klobuchar suspended her campaign and en
dorsed Biden the same day; Senators Cory Booker
and Harris followed suit. Suddenly the race had nar
rowed to Biden vs. Sanders.
Three days laTer, it was practically over. On
Super Tuesday, March 3, Biden swept 10 of 14 states;
a week later, he won primaries in Michigan, Missouri
and Mississippi, establishing the contours of a multi
racial coalition that included Black voters, suburban
voters and inroads with the white working class.
Sanders may have enthralled the Twitterati, but it
was clear that swingstate voters saw Biden as the
one who could beat Trump. “Biden did not spend a
lot of time trying to appeal to the activist base of the
Democratic Party,” says progressive strategist Sean
McElwee, “and one of the things that turns out to be
true is that the oldschool people had a lot of pretty
decent ideas of how to make this work.”
Biden came out of the primary with a lead in the
polls but a slim staff, lots of momentum but little
money. “The campaign needed one of those defibril
lators you use on heartattack patients,” says one se
nior Biden adviser. So even as the former Vice President
stuck to his message, he shook up his team. He replaced
campaign manager Greg Schultz with veteran operative
Jen O’Malley Dillon, who had served as deputy cam
paign manager for Obama’s 2012 reelection and had
helped modernize the Democratic Party’s data program.
O’Malley Dillon set out to rescue a sinking ship that hap
pened to be floating in the right direction.
It wasn’t just that she had to refit; she had to con
struct something barely resembling a typical cam
paign. There would be no throngs of canvassers, no
big rallies, no fancy fundraisers. It was deemed too
dangerous for the 77yearold candidate to campaign
in person, so for months he did virtual events from his
home. Trump mocked him, but Biden again tuned out
the noise. He released a detailed plan to tackle the pan
demic and another for rebuilding the economy. Trump
went golfing as the COVID19 death toll approached
100,000; Biden commemorated the grim milestone
with a solemn twominute video message to the fami
lies of the dead. “I think I know what you’re feeling,”
he said. “You feel like you’re being sucked into a black
hole in the middle of your chest.”
Early on, O’Malley Dillon decided a traditional field
operation wouldn’t work during a pandemic. Trump’s
campaign was still knocking on doors and registering
voters, but Biden’s would be run almost entirely on
line. So even though her background was in field or
ganizing, O’Malley Dillon turned the Biden campaign
into perhaps the largest digital organizing machine in
American electoral history. Instead of outsourcing the
digital operation, she built it inhouse: turbocharging
the growth of Biden’s email list, spending millions on
online advertising and building a digital staff that was
15 times bigger than it had been in the primary, includ
ing many staffers from rival primary campaigns. For
mer Harris, Warren and Sanders staffers brought new
digital strategies into Bidenworld, particularly the
idea of a national distributed organizing model pio
neered by the Sanders campaign: an army of safestate
volunteers who could be digitally deployed wherever
the campaign needed them.
It worked. By September, the digital operation
was printing money: Biden and the Democrats raised
$364.5 million in August, the largest onemonth haul
ever by a presidential campaign, a record they broke
the following month with $383 million in September.
The pandemic made the race a referendum on
Trump and kept his failures in the headlines. The Pres
ident had “so many dropped balls,” says Republican
strategist Ron Bonjean, beginning with his “inability
to empathize with the American people about the situ
ation they’re in.”
By the fall, Biden had hit his stride: he was an an
alog candidate with a classic 20th century message,
running a 21st century virtual juggernaut. The digital
strategy allowed his team to keep a gaffeprone candi
date under wraps, shielding his missteps and blasting
WIS.
10
W. VA.
5
VA.
13
VT.
3
TENN. 11
S.C.
9
R.I. 4
11
PA. 20
OHIO
18
N.C. 15
N.Y.
29
N.H. 4
MASS.
1
MO.
10
MISS.
6
MINN.
10
MICH.
16
MAINE
3
LA.
8
K Y. 8
IOWA
6
IND.
11
ILL.
20
GA.
16
FLA.
29
CONN. 7
ARK.
6
ALA.
9
N.J. 14
MD. 10
DEL. 3
D.C. 3
Biden Trump
290 217
RESULTS. GEORGIA AND NORTH CAROLINA HAVE YET TOAP PROJECTION BASED ON STATES’ UNOFFICIAL
BE CALLED BY AP AS OF NOV. 11 AT 1 P.M. E.T.
