Biden Campaign Manager Sees Blueprint for 2024 Success in the 2022 Midterms

Joe Biden’s newly installed campaign manager argued in a memo released Thursday that Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections gave the party a blueprint to enter “this cycle with a number of viable pathways” to victory in 2024.

Julie C. Rodriguez, a former top adviser to the president in the White House who officially began her top campaign job this week, cited the 2022 midterms throughout the four-page document, a sign of how Biden and other Democrats will look to recreate the messaging and tactical decisions that helped the party hold onto the Senate and limit losses in the House last year.

“There are significant opportunities to grow Democratic support,” she wrote in what amounted to a rosy outlook on the campaign’s prospects. “In 2022, Democrats won elections in spite of a turnout environment that was more Republican than in 2020. This shows that, under the Biden administration, we have gained support from Republican and independent swing voters who had not previously voted for Democrats.”

In total, 2022 is mentioned ten times in the document.

Democrats made a series of successful messaging and tactical decisions in 2022 that are likely to be recreated two years later. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Democrats made abortion central to their campaigns, using the issue to put Republicans on defense with independent voters and arguing it was an issue of personal freedom. Democrats were also aided in 2022 by competitive, messy Republican primaries – often fueled by former President Donald Trump’s involvement – that left eventual Republican nominees in key races wounded when turning to face the broader general election electorate.

The memo also highlights more electoral wins for Democrats, including Donna Deegan becoming only the second Democrat in 30 years on Tuesday to be elected mayor of Jacksonville, once seen as a Republican stronghold. Rodriguez writes that the wins “point to the real strength we have going into 2024.”

Rodriguez broke the electoral map into so-called “blue wall” states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; states Democrats defended in 2020 like Nevada and New Hampshire; states Biden and Harris picked up in 2020 like Arizona and Georgia; and states like North Carolina and Florida, where they hope to compete.

On demographics, the campaign manager wrote “communities of color… will be central to our victory in 2024” and touted the “small, but critical gains among rural and white working class voters in battleground states” that Biden made in 2020. She went on to argue that there was “room to grow” with suburban voters in 2024 that she claimed are “motivated by Republican attacks on reproductive rights” and pledged the campaign would “focus on reengaging young voters who voted in 2020, but skipped the midterms.”

Rodriguez, citing a media environment that has “never been more fragmented,” said the campaign will focus on ways to “connect with voters where they are” because “trust in people’s personal networks has never been higher, or consequently, more important.”

“Our organizing program will focus on leveraging people’s personal networks, through amplifying core messages online, and having personal conversations offline,”  the campaign manager wrote.

The memo also explicitly disregards polls that show Biden, 80, in a weaker position headed into his historical reelection as the oldest president ever to seek a second term. An NBC News poll released in April but taken before the president announced his reelection found that 70 percent of Americans did not think Biden should seek reelection, with 51 percent of Democrats holding that view.

“Driving our campaign are the lived experiences of the American people, not the political echo chamber. Polls and pundits have underestimated Joe Biden his entire life, and he’s proved them wrong time and time again,” Rodriguez writes.
Left unmentioned in the memo are a number of issues Biden will surely face in his fourth run for the White House, including his age. According to the same NBC News poll, nearly half of the respondents who said Biden should not seek office again, citing his age as a “major” reason for that feeling.