If Donald Trump’s digital media operation is, as his campaign manager Brad Parscale described it this week, a “Death Star,” the consensus seems to be that Joe Biden’s digital presence more closely resembles Jar Jar Binks.
Trump has 80 million Twitter followers; Biden has 5 million. Trump’s Facebook page has 27.5 million likes; Biden’s has less than than 2 million. “From mid-March to mid-April,” Karl Rove noted in his Wall Street Journal column this week, “Mr. Trump had seven times the social-media interactions, 620 million to Mr. Biden’s 87 million.” Biden’s live-streamed events, such as his first “virtual rally” on Thursday, are often hampered by technical glitches. It’s bad enough that David Axelrod and David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign gurus, took to the New York Times to vent that Biden must “transform a campaign that lagged behind many of his Democratic competitors during the primary in its use of digital media.” To put it succinctly, as a New York Times headline declared last month, “Biden Is Losing The Internet.”
Maybe he is. So what?
Political operatives and journalists have a tendency to size up campaigns based on the size of their campaign apparatuses. Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign looked indestructible because his digital footprint was so enormous, he could generate a huge crowd almost anywhere he went. Mike Bloomberg seemed unstoppable because he had hired thousands of field staff, stuffed mailboxes and flooded the airwaves. Now Trump looms large because of his massive war chest and his campaign’s digital savvy, and Biden’s campaign has responded in recent days by hiring several prominent digital strategists from the campaigns of former rivals Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke.
But piles of money and social media engagements don’t matter if your fundamental argument falls flat.
The path Biden blazed to the nomination — culminating in his Super Tuesday blowout — provided a real-time political science experiment, testing whether grassroots online organizing, paid media or free media is most important for a successful campaign. Sanders was the organizing champ, having built a massive digital operation that cultivated nearly 12 million Twitter followers, almost 2 million small donors and a grassroots army that knocked on 2 million doors. Bloomberg literally owned paid media, drowning out all competitors with more than a half-billion spent on TV, radio and digital ads. (This included paying online influencers to produce ironic memes.)
Then there was Biden. His campaign was nearly broke. His field offices were often desolate, sometimes nonexistent. But between his Saturday night victory in South Carolina and the morning of Super Tuesday, his free media was pure gold. He didn’t just win South Carolina and secure key endorsements from three former rivals; he amplified his core messages to deafening levels in mainstream media. Data had long showed Democratic voters wanted a candidate who could win and could govern in a pragmatic, bipartisan way. That was Biden’s longtime pitch, and the final days of the competitive primary showcased top Democrats embracing it.
Simply put, Biden won the argument. And he’s still winning it.
From mid-March to mid-April to today, despite Trump’s much-ballyhooed digital advantage, Biden has maintained a stable lead in nearly every national and swing state poll. In the past four national polls, Biden’s lead has ranged from 3 percentage points to 9 points. While in theory Trump can still win the Electoral College while losing the national popular vote, current swing-state polling suggests he won’t. The Electoral-Vote.com snapshot of the latest state polling gives Biden a whopping 352–148 Electoral College lead.
Biden is not a one-man content machine. His theme of restoring the “soul of America,” does not lend itself to shareable, snackable social media memes, or outrage-inducing Facebook debate threads. And while he can be a good theatrical performer with the right material (he was a solid straight man with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a 2014 video skit), reaching online comic heights while social distancing is challenging. Watching Biden play “Go Fish” with Keegan-Michael Key was not as exciting as watching Key play Barack Obama’s “anger translator.”
Axelrod and Plouffe appear to understand this, and recommended that Biden lean on high-profile surrogates with more social media followers to “carry the load.” Nothing wrong with that advice. But voters will primarily be looking at Biden and comparing his persona and platform with the president’s.
To present a favorable contrast, he doesn’t need to make himself artificially edgy and juice his online engagement. He simply needs to be accessible to the media, at the local, state and national level. Pete Buttigieg’s media maven, Lis Smith, this week argued Biden’s “personal warmth … translates well on TV,” and so, “he should be willing to go everywhere.”
Biden can take that advice to the extreme, much as Buttigieg did. In addition to the usual diet of national, state and local news programs, go on Fox News (as he did two months ago). Go on Howard Stern, Joe Rogan, Ellen, The Breakfast Club. Hell, go on Chapo. Make news by having interesting conversations and civil debates, showing depth as well as empathy. By communicating with a wide range of media personalities, Biden would be true to his overarching message that he will be a uniter that listens to all Americans, and present a stark contrast with Trump’s chronic divisiveness. Will Biden have off-message moments as a result? Most likely. But Biden had plenty of off-message moments in the primary. Yet he still was able to successfully convey his main messages and engender good will in the process. As David Karpf, professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University, told Wired, “for all the digital media tools out there, all the fundraising and organizing you can do, all of that matters—but the thing that matters more than we ever think is crafting, shaping, influencing, manipulating media narratives.”
By spring 2016, Clinton was already showing volatility. While she led Trump most of the way, she experienced several dips that shrunk her lead to less than 3 percentage points, and occasionally less than one or slightly behind. And between late April and late May 2016—when the FBI investigation into her email server ramped up—she suffered a 9-point drop, allowing Trump to edge ahead for the first time.
Biden, in contrast, going back to September 2019, has never held a national lead in the Real Clear Politics average over Trump of less than 4 points, and since January, his lead has generally remained somewhere from 5 to 7 points. Of course, things can always change: In the past five months, we have experienced an impeachment, a pandemic and now a sexual assault allegation against Biden, which he denies. And the needle still hasn’t moved much. Yes, there’s still time for the Tara Reade story to inflict political damage on Biden. In fact, Biden’s RCP average ticked down from 6.3 to 4.4 over the last two weeks—a period when Biden’s free media coverage because of the allegations was far from ideal. But the answer to preventing that number from sinking any lower is better free media coverage, not better tweets.
Should Biden run as if the race will come down to handful of votes? Of course. Should he build the best digital operation he can to help connect with hard-to-reach voters? Absolutely. But gutting out a narrow win should be a campaign’s Plan B. Plan A should be to win the argument, decisively. That’s how Biden won the primary. All available data strongly suggests he’s winning today.
Biden will probably always be an analog candidate in a digital world. But considering how exhausted many Americans are with a president who governs by tweet, an analog candidate may be exactly what the electorate is looking for.
This article originally appeared on Politico.
