WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s campaign is making a play for white working-class and rural voters.
In a campaign memo obtained by USA TODAY, Biden’s campaign outlined a pathway to victory in 2024 that runs through the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
It also highlighted investments in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada and indicated that Biden would be competing in Florida and North Carolina — two states that have voted Republican in recent years but the Democratic president hopes to flip.
Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez said the campaign sees “room to grow” its coalition in suburban areas, citing the election last month to the Wisconsin Supreme Court of a liberal judge.
“These suburban voters are particularly motivated by Republican attacks on reproductive rights,” Biden’s campaign manager wrote in her memo.
Chávez Rodriguez said communities of color will also be “central to our victory” in the upcoming presidential election and promised to reengage young voters who skipped the midterms.
Biden’s pathway to victory
- Biden’s campaign said Democratic victories in battlegrounds states in the 2022 midterms set Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris up to “enter this cycle with a number of viable pathways to 270 electoral votes.”
- The sitting president is aiming to beef up his support from independents and Republicans, his campaign signaled.
- “Like we did in 2020, the Biden-Harris campaign will shore up the ‘blue wall’ with early investments in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, along with states we defended in 2020 like Nevada and New Hampshire,” the memo says.
- The campaign also pledged to “protect recent Democratic gains in states like Arizona and Georgia, and look to expand the map even further in states like North Carolina and Florida.”
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Biden’s campaign ran ads this month in six battleground states and Florida and North Carolina that focused on the president’s economic agenda. A previous ad that ran in Phoenix, Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and other major cities emphasized Biden’s support for American democracy.
The president’s approval rating is sitting at 42% on average, according to the polling website FiveThirtyEight. Yet the president’s advisers have long argued that national surveys are not reflective of the choice that voters will have to make in the next election between Biden and his eventual Republican opponent.
“Polls and pundits have underestimated Joe Biden his entire life, and he’s proved them wrong time and time again,” the Chávez Rodriguez memo said.
