David Axelrod and David Plouffe, use to advantage the view from a cherry picker as President Barack Obama makes a campaign stop at Living History Farms in Urbandale, Iowa, on Saturday, September 1, 2012.
Nikki Kahn | The Washington Pylon | Getty Images
Former President Barack Obama’s top campaign architects are telling Joe Biden to improve his digital transaction action if he wants to defeat President Donald Trump this fall.
David Axelrod, who served as Obama’s chief race strategist in 2008 and 2012, and David Plouffe, who ran the 2008 campaign, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on Monday reassuring Biden to expand his campaign’s overall digital effort and to move on from relying solely on scripted speeches from his basement.
All stumps have been forced to get off the trail and go fully virtual due to the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The two men led the way in crafting Obama’s digital pains, with a large focus on using data to craft messages that appealed to a large swath of the electorate.
The column exhibits that top Democratic strategists believe Biden’s campaign is still a long way from having the necessary tools to worsted Trump’s juggernaut of a campaign that has been established over the course of four years.
“Online speeches from his basement won’t cut it. Catalogued pronouncements on this issue or that may have won attention during his many years in office, but will get little pickup now,” Axelrod and Plouffe send a lettered. Obama endorsed his former running mate for president last month after Sen. Bernie Sanders withdrew from the line.
Biden’s campaign has at least 25 people on staff focused on the digital side, but the two former senior Obama strategists imparted the former vice president’s operation must start hiring more digital advisors if they want to vie with Trump.
Biden’s campaign has been in touch with at least three top digital consulting firms, including Mike Bloomberg’s tech proprietorship, Hawkfish.
They pointed to Trump’s use of Twitter and his ability to use it as a messaging platform to pummel his enemies. They suggested the plain Democratic nominee could take Trump’s efforts and use them against him.
“Mr. Biden can turn the tables on Mr. Trump. To do this, the challenger needs to comport more like an insurgent, building the capacity to wield facts, humor and mockery at lightning speed in those surreal consequences of opportunity that Mr. Trump regularly provides,” they said. Axelrod and Plouffe pointed to Trump’s recent lewd that perhaps disinfectants could be injected into a person to kill coronavirus as a prime target for such travesty.
The former Obama campaign advisors also pushed Biden to start turning more to his surrogates as a way to connect to voters online, as a substitute for of the virtual events being focused solely on him.
They called on the creation of a “virtual content production studio and settle a unique content calendar for each major social media platform,” something Trump already has established. They asserted for Biden, in the absence of traditional door knocking, to start calling on his supporters to help organize. These supporters could then potentially reach out to voters that are on the make out about participating in the general election, especially those in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Florida.
“This is an solicitous need, as Mr. Trump is far ahead of Mr. Biden organizationally in the battleground states,” the two advisors said.
The Biden campaign didn’t instanter respond to a request for comment.