To win, he has to find a way to get beyond the basement tapes and project himself into our ever more digital world.
Joe Biden’s most memorable moments on the campaign trail have come through spontaneous, intensely moving encounters with people who, like Mr. Biden, have endured searing struggle and loss. His authentic sense of empathy is a quality uniquely suited to this agonizing moment.
Now Mr. Biden is mired in his basement, speaking to us remotely, like an astronaut beaming back to earth from the International Space Station.
The former vice president is a man of vast experience in government. He ran the Recovery Act for President Obama in 2009 during the economic crash and was Mr. Obama’s active partner during other crises like the H1N1 pandemic that same year and the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Yet in the midst of a catastrophic virus and devastating economic coma that command our full attention, Mr. Biden finds himself on the outside looking in. Governors and mayors have taken center stage in the only story that matters.
And while President’s Trump’s well-watched White House briefings have been, for him, a decidedly mixed bag, video of the president in action has been a striking contrast to the image of his solitary challenger, consigned to his basement.
Whether the president’s rollicking open-mic nights endure and actually help him is highly questionable. The percentage of Americans who trust what he is saying about the crisis is dismally low and falling. Mr. Trump has consistently trailed Mr. Biden in public polling and the president’s fate may well be inexorably tied to perceptions of his handling of the crisis and the path the virus and the economy take from here.
But that’s an assumption the Biden campaign can ill afford to make.
As with every other facet of our lives, the Covid-19 pandemic has transformed how the presidential race will be run. Every aspect of campaigning must be rethought, from how you present yourself and reach and organize voters to how you stage a national convention in a time when large public gatherings are proscribed.
Adjusting to the new political realities is imperative for Mr. Biden, who ran his first campaign for office a half-century ago. In order to break through and be heard, he will have to up the tempo of his campaign, fully utilize his army of powerful surrogates and embrace a new suite of virtual, data-driven tools and creative tactics.
Online speeches from his basement won’t cut it. Written pronouncements on this issue or that may have won attention during his many years in office, but will get little pickup now. Broadcast interviews are fine, but most valuable only if they generate a great and memorable line that becomes a widely shared and consumed video moment.
For Mr. Biden, the challenge is to transform a campaign that lagged behind many of his Democratic competitors during the primary in its use of digital media and timely, state-of-the-art communications techniques. While television remains a potent force, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are all essential in a Covid-19 world in which candidate travel and voter contact will be severely limited. In many respects, they are the campaign, not an important part of it.
As much as Mr. Trump personally revels in television exposure, his campaign has been digital first from the start. Team Trump knows where and how voters get their information and tests a tremendous amount of content to find the winning material their targets will consume and share. Mr. Trump’s surrogates are a relentless presence on social media and his massive digital following dwarfs Mr. Biden’s by a factor of 15 to one.
So what should the Biden campaign do? Here are some suggestions.
Act like an insurgent, not an incumbent.
You don’t defeat an incumbent president by playing defense.
