WASHINGTON _ Amid a still-surging coronavirus pandemic and faltering economy, President Donald Trump is rapidly losing ground in the 2020 campaign as a significant slice of his former supporters have switched their allegiance to Joe Biden.
That presents a new challenge for the presumptive Democratic nominee: keeping those swing voters from souring on him and defecting back to Trump.
With less than four months before the election, leading Democratic operatives say the Biden campaign and its well-funded allies must redirect their focus from winning over more moderate voters to ensuring they remain in the fold, a shift they say will require a strategic rethinking within the party.
"We've gone from needing to convince people to change their opinion to now making them comfortable with the change they've made," said Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic strategist. "For three years, people have rightfully focused on swinging Trump voters back our way. Now, through smart strategy and self-inflicted wounds, they've come our way, and we need to hold on to them."
To operatives like Ferguson, the best way to retain Biden's newfound support is a greater emphasis _ especially in TV and digital ads _ on highlighting the former vice president's positive attributes, rather than solely attacking Trump. Building up Biden will be especially important, strategists add, if the Trump campaign begins to successfully drive a negative message against him, which many Democrats expect to eventually happen even if the GOP has struggled to do so thus far.
It's an approach that Biden officials have already eagerly embraced. Since beginning to run ads a month ago, the campaign has avoided purely negative TV ads against Trump, instead making sure to cast Biden in a positive light on subjects ranging from his proposed response to the pandemic to touting his empathy for Americans directly affected by the virus. The Biden campaign has also run negative digital ads against Trump.
"We are not ignoring the candidate we're running against, of course," said Patrick Bonsignore, the Biden campaign's director of paid media. "But we just want to make sure we're forging a clear and at times explicit contrast between the lack of leadership in the White House right now and somebody who has been there before and has a core empathy."
"There are a lot of really good, important things for voters to know about the vice president," Bonsignore added. "And it's really important for voters to hear from him directly. That's a big part of our thinking."
Recent national and battleground state polls show a significant shift in support for Biden since the spring. A national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released last week found Biden leading Trump by 11 points, 51% to 40%. And a new national survey from Quinnipiac University showed Biden's lead swelling to 15 points, 52% to 37%.
Data show that a small but significant share of voters now supporting Biden voted for Trump in 2016. Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC that has spent tens of millions of dollars on ads criticizing Trump, found in their own survey research of the six core battleground states that 22% of recent Biden converts said that as of two months ago, they planned to support Trump.
In the view of Republican and Democratic strategists alike, negative ads are often regarded as the most effective way to change a candidate's level of support, especially among a critical subset of middle-of-the-road voters. An electorate that holds a cynical view of politics might also be more inclined to believe the negative things said about a candidate than any kind of praise offered.
That helps explain why going negative had been the dominant approach for Democrats after Biden all but wrapped up the nomination: According to a study published by the progressive think tank Data for Progress, 88% of Democratic TV ads from early April to late May had focused on attacking the president, compared to just 11% that promoted Biden.
But if many of these former Trump supporters have switched to Biden, some Democrats argue, it shows they've already seen enough from the president to make a judgment. So deepening their support for Biden requires pushing a message that shows why they should vote for him, not just vote against Trump.
"It's important that people continue to be reminded for the next 100 and change days of all the ways the president has failed," said Lily Adams, who was until recently a senior adviser for the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country before joining the Democratic National Committee last week. "But it's also critical to make sure that voters know what Joe Biden would do differently."
Unite the Country earlier this year ran ads that praised Biden's handling of the 2009 stimulus package. Other Democrats pointed to that as an issue many voters didn't know Biden's role in, but one that helps make them feel more comfortable about voting for him during a pandemic-induced economic collapse.
Biden officials argue that any ads depicting the former vice president's experience and empathy should resonate with voters in an uncertain time. And the Biden campaign has run digital ads laying out proposed responses to help stop the spread of COVID-19.
Adams and other Democrats interviewed for this story were insistent that the party should continue running negative ads against Trump alongside those touting Biden. And Priorities USA chairman Guy Cecil pointed out to reporters last week that super PACs traditionally have concentrated more on negative ads, letting the campaigns themselves put more of an emphasis on running positive messages.
Still, progressives argued that if new voters have signaled over the summer that they plan to support Biden, it means they're likely open to hearing more positive messages about him than they were previously. And buffeting his image now could make them more resilient to attacks from Republicans later.
"It's important to try and do that because I do think there will probably be a tightening inevitably," said Sean McElwee, the co-founder of Data for Progress. "And we can get ahead of that and attach some positive views to Biden."
