WILMINGTON, Del. – Driven by strong fundraising and growing advantages in state and national polls, the Joe Biden campaign is accelerating its spending on staff and television as the campaign approaches 100 days before Day of the Elections, according to a new internal campaign memorandum obtained by NBC News.
Just over 100 days ago, Bernie Sanders officially abandoned the presidential race, making Biden the presumptive Democratic candidate. Now, after recalibrating its entire structure to what has become an almost entirely virtual operation, Biden’s campaign argues that it is “firing on all cylinders” to carry its message to voters in the fall, focusing on the failures of the President Donald Trump on the coronavirus pandemic and the economic consequences.
The election, deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield writes in the memo, is a choice between a sitting president “who has proven himself incapable of effectively leading” in a crisis, and a challenger “who has proven time and time again that he can deliver the leadership we need when it counts most, and who has the character to carry it out. “
“The conclusion that voters continue to draw is clear and direct: Joe Biden cares about you and your family, and Donald Trump only cares about himself, the super rich and corporations, and it doesn’t matter who he hurts,” he writes. Bedingfield.
Biden’s campaign is marking the 100-day milestone with what it calls a weekend of action in battlefield states across the country, with 500 virtual organizing events planned. On Sunday night, the campaign will also host a series of star-studded fundraising events including a baseline public concert with John Legend and Barbra Streisand.
By August, Biden’s campaign, the DNC and their partners in the states will have “more than 2,000 employees” deployed for the reach of voters, the memo says. However, just as important in this pandemic, the campaign says it has nearly doubled the “active email list” in the past two months.
And after shocking the Trump campaign in May and June, the campaign is investing another $ 14.5 million in television advertising in its main target states: Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. That adds up to a similar ad purchase over the past week, meaning the campaign is now spending as much each week as it did the previous two months.
Biden’s latest announcements have focused directly on Trump’s response to the pandemic and on his own newly launched economic plans. This is against the Biden campaign estimate that the Trump campaign and its allies have spent $ 60 million on ads since April 1, most of which are trying to portray Biden as mentally unfit for the presidency, and indebted to a radical left that would make Americans insecure.
Bedingfield says that despite that onslaught, Biden’s favorability ratings have only risen as the president declined.
“Over and over again, Trump advisers boast that they are confident that the eighteenth restart of his anti-Biden message will work in this round, only to then quickly find himself on defense, having heightened problems in which Donald’s record Trump is extremely vulnerable. ” Bedingfield writes. “Trump has no argument as to why he deserves to be reelected, so investing money in ineffective attacks on his opponent is his only option.” In terms of what Donald Trump understands, it is the only club he has in his bag. “
Bill Stepien, Trump’s new campaign manager, said in his own 100-day briefing with reporters on Friday that his path to victory would be “a fight brought down and dragged to the end,” and insisted that Trump still had ” a better team, a better ground game, a better fundraiser, a better digital, better data “and” a better candidate with a better record “.
“Many Americans know about Joe Biden, but fewer still know a lot about Joe Biden. Our job here every day is to change that and define it as who it is today: a tool on the far left, ”said Stepien.
Stepien also challenged Biden’s campaign to expand his advertising from Arizona to Texas and Georgia if he really felt he had momentum. “I’ll even buy your first ad,” she said. “We had the same conversation in 2016, so you know we felt good about three states. All of these states go home, they had the same conversations four years ago. And we saw that they all came out on Election Night in November. “
CORRECTION (July 25, 2020 10:48 PM): An earlier version of this article misspelled the first name of a popular singer who supports Biden. This is Barbra Streisand, not Barbara.
