A house of many basements: Biden's ad strategy and why it's working

IT'S BEEN more than briefly fashionable to dismiss or distill the current pandemic-driven style of former vice president Joe Biden’s presidential campaign as a war being waged from his basement in Delaware. The Trump 2020 re-elect campaign, denied the chance to go after Biden on traditional campaign turf (the country itself), has doubled down on the Biden-in-the-basement meme, alleging that Biden’s phoning it in, taking shots at President* Donald Trump from the equivalent of a bunker in New England.

But the cheap shots didn’t take for very long. The basement-bunker myth was wrong, of course: Biden's been on the road for months, in various small-scale campaign events at towns in Iowa and Pennsylvania, and others besides. But the Biden 2020 team took the lemons of a challenge – seeking common ground with a bitterly-divided American people in an election year, amid a raging pandemic – and made some potent political lemonade.

What may have started as a one-off campaign video has yielded dividends as a memorable, ongoing 21st-century gloss on the fireside chat, one that’s helped make the former Obama vice president a prohibitive favorite in the race for the White House. 

Trump has been flashing around the country, the guest of honor at various sparsely-attended rallies, carpet-bombing supporters with the pomp and panache of the presidency. Biden has countered with a quieter, more measured, more circumspect campaign style, one that dovetails with the pace of American life during COVID-19. Why’s it been working so well? 

Read the full piece at The Swamp

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Image credits: Biden: Jim Bourg/Reuters. The Swamp logo: Copyright 2020 Jerrick Media LLC.