A Look At Most Of The Campaign Team Responsible For The Biden Victory In 2020

Following the end of Election Day 2020, this blogger had a morning-after conversation with his elder offspring (son), that lasted an hour. Toward the end of the 11/7/20 call, there was an eruption of cheering in the son's house because the Associated Press had announced the Biden-Harris victory. Shortly after hanging up, a link appeared in the blogger's email In Box that was email resent to him from his son's In Box. The original email was from the blogger's daughter-in-law to her husband. That link provided the Vanity Fair essay that is today's post to the blog. If this is a (fair & balanced) H/T to the blogger's daughter-in-law and his son, so be it. And for old times' sake...

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"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

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“She Is A Master”: Joe Biden’s Campaign Manager Told The Political Future—And Was Right
By Chris Smith

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Jen O’Malley Dillon will not be showing up on cable in a ratty college sweatshirt like James Carville. Or brandishing a whiteboard like Karl Rove. Dillon probably won’t be appearing regularly as a talking head, period, unlike her predecessors as managers of winning presidential campaigns. But for steering Joe Biden across the 270-vote Electoral College line in his third run for the White House, in the middle of a pandemic, against a uniquely potent and craven incumbent president, Dillon deserves just as much fame and credit as those who have come before her.

There is, of course, plenty of credit to go around inside the Biden and Democratic worlds. The candidate leaned on old hands Ron Klain, particularly when Coronavirus hit the country; Mike Donilon, a consultant who has been with him since 1981; and Steve Ricchetti, who has significant ties to the corporate world. Lawyers Bob Bauer and Dana Remus assembled hundreds of attorneys to fend off Trump’s attempts at suppressing votes. Anita Dunn (who happens to be married to Bauer) was elevated to run the campaign at a pivotal moment, taking control after Biden’s dismal fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses; she was especially influential in crafting communications strategy during the general election campaign. Symone Sanders was with Bernie Sanders in 2016; her jump to Biden three years later shored up his connections to progressive, Black, and younger Democrats. In Pennsylvania, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman’s plan to chip into Trump’s rural-vote margins worked, while activists boosted Biden’s margins in Philadelphia and its suburbs. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo didn’t waste their time moaning about Abrams’s bitter 2018 gubernatorial-race defeat, instead constructing a key Peach State turnout and voter-protection operation. In Wisconsin, state Democratic Party chairman Ben Wikler fought off a hostile Republican legislature and judiciary and flipped a crucial state.

Yet no one did more than Dillon, the rare and most powerful new kid in Biden’s inside circle, who today becomes the first woman to ever manage a winning Democratic presidential campaign (and the first of any party, if you don’t count Kellyanne Conway’s nearly three months atop Trump’s 2016 run, when she replaced Paul Manafort). Dillon, 44, worked her way up through the Democratic-campaign ranks as a field organizer, moving from John Edwards to Barack Obama in 2008, then becoming executive director of the Democratic National Committee before rejoining Obama in his 2012 campaign. Beto O’Rourke’s hiring of Dillon, in March 2019, to run his primary campaign, was considered a major triumph for the former Texas congressman, but he still never got traction. When O’Rourke dropped out, Biden pounced. He knew Dillon from his vice presidential years. Last March, Dunn reached out to Dillon first, before Biden heavily recruited Dillon to head his general election machine. “Jen is a brilliant strategist who knows the battleground states like the back of her hands, and who knows the Democratic Party mechanisms and infrastructure down to what type of data infrastructure needs to be built to reach persuadable voters,” says Ben LaBolt, who was an Obamaworld colleague. “She is a master of both the brass tacks of traditional campaigning and the modern, digital ways of campaigning.”

Dillon’s central, essential strategic contribution for Biden was to stay relentlessly focused on reclaiming the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, places that had narrowly swung to Trump four years ago. Biden’s campaign spread the field a bit, playing in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and North Carolina as opportunities presented themselves this fall. But Dillon and the Biden braintrust resisted the temptation to spread their time and money too far. Dillon never wavered from the disciplined push to bring back the three states whose demographics lined up well with Biden’s appeal and that could put a total of 46 electoral votes in his pocket. Biden, for instance, traveled to Pennsylvania 13 times, triple his number of trips anywhere else. “That’s what Jen does: see the main opening and make sure every detail is in place to follow through,” a Biden insider says.

All while maintaining a low media profile. That approach fits with the Biden style of individuals ceding the bulk of the spotlight to the candidate. Dillon is hardly a recluse, though her husband, Patrick—also a political strategist and an Obama White House alumnus—is a feistier and funnier presence on Twitter. Her overwhelming priority is the inside game of political blocking and tackling, however, which gave Dillon’s one prominent public statement in the presidential campaign’s closing days even greater weight. On October 14, with hype building about a possible Biden landslide, Dillon tweeted, “We think this race is far closer than folks on this website think. Like a lot closer.” She was right. Fortunately for Biden, Dillon was right about a whole lot of other things too. ###

[Chris Smith is a media and communications professional with demonstrated skills in writing, editing, journalism and content and data management. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair; prior to writing for that magazine, Smith has written for New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and RealClearPolitics. He is the author of The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests (2016). Smith received a BA (communication) from Hamilton College (NY).]

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