Biden's strategy to reach tuned-out voters: Content over crowds

President Joe Biden’s recent battleground state campaign tour didn’t draw major crowds. But critically for the Biden campaign, it did produce a lot of content.

Biden paired a rally in the Philadelphia suburbs with a more intimate, at-home sit-down with a small-business owner at his home, generating social media posts and days of local media stories. A visit to a Milwaukee campaign office offered him a chance to connect with a young boy who’d written to him about dealing with a stutter, an unscripted interaction that made its way to TikTok. Backstage before a health care event, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris recorded a light video discussing their March Madness picks.

And Biden didn’t even hold a rally during his swing through Michigan — but he did have a private chat (and issued a playful golf challenge on an indoor putting green) with a local pastor and his son.

The Biden campaign says there will be a time when holding big public rallies with its most ardent supporters will be important, even as he’s unlikely to outdraw former President Donald Trump. But right now, rally turnout among the die-hards is less important to it than the disengaged voters who have soured on Biden’s presidency and could decide the election. And the campaign is focused on reaching them with digital content, especially content produced outside Washington that showcases personal connections and Biden’s empathetic side.

Biden’s campaign hopes to reach those people through their own social media and what is known as relational organizing. The strategy relies on an army of volunteers and paid campaign staffers not just to knock on doors and make other voter contacts but also to tap into their own personal networks, especially online, to share information — news articles, images and videos — that carry the campaign’s message to people otherwise tuning out political outreach.

“One of our core tenets of this campaign is that people talking to their friends and family is one of the most important things that they can do. And getting content that gets shared is a huge part of that,” Biden deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty said in an interview.

If those below-the-radar conversations are to make a difference for Biden in the election, giving supporters things to talk about is paramount. That’s why an arm of the Biden campaign digital team has been traveling with the president for weeks, recording planned, intimate voter encounters with him focused on particular issues while keeping watch for golden unscripted moments to amplify.

The day after his State of the Union address, Biden’s first stop wasn’t a public campaign rally but the home of Jack Cunicelli, one of the owners of a Philadelphia-area restaurant that remained open through Covid-19 and beyond in part because of funds through the American Rescue Plan, the first major legislative initiative of Biden’s presidency. Biden and first lady Jill Biden met the extended Cunicelli family and sat down for pizza.

The stop got coverage from local and national media at the time, including follow-up interviews with the family. A month later, the campaign released a nearly four-minute video, narrated by Cunicelli, with more behind-the-scenes material, including a discussion of his daughter’s favorite books, the chickens they keep in the backyard and even mutual acquaintances of his family and the Bidens.

“That was, what, March 8, when that happened? And we’re still putting content out here in early April,” said campaign communications director Michael Tyler, who described Biden’s road strategy as having a “crescendo effect.” “Our strategy isn’t to replicate broadcast media on digital platforms. It’s to integrate our content to the ways in which people are actually sharing their content.”

In other cases, the content the campaign amplifies isn’t its own.

During a trip to North Carolina in January, Biden did a traditional campaign stop with Gov. Roy Cooper at a popular burger joint. Then, he visited the home of Eric Fitts, a Black educator who’s benefited from the administration’s federal student loan debt relief plans.

A TikTok video recorded and posted independently by Fitts’ son, Christian, generated 4 million views on the platform. “no way the president just chillin in my crib,” the short video says.

Another recent video, showing Biden’s impromptu golf contest with a Black pastor and his son in Saginaw, Michigan, also generated thousands of views on the platform. The video garnered notice, though the trip was marred by complaints that Biden didn’t go far enough in his appeal to the city’s Black community.

Pushing video to voters

In addition to quickly disseminating it on public social media channels, the Biden camp also makes some of its content part of a menu that organizers can push to their own social networks to reach undecided voters.

It’s part of the Biden team’s work with online influencers and public figures to find creative ways to engage with less political audiences. When Biden was in New York for a fundraiser with Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, they recorded a podcast that is expected to be released in June. Before the main event, Biden campaign officials also held a pre-party at a nearby restaurant with online influencers. A video posted by a TikTok influencer invited to the New York fundraiser, known as Clarke, got more than 100,000 views in a single day.

The effort has roots in lessons learned in the midterms and in 2020, when the campaign had to reach voters during the pandemic without traditional in-person campaigning and organizing.

After Biden’s victory, his campaign and the Democratic National Committee set out to determine what new techniques from a largely virtual campaign proved effective and might be worth building on. Now, the campaign also sees additional value: reconnecting voters to Biden the person, not just Biden the president.

“The essence of Joe Biden is quality, personal, real engagement with somebody,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in an interview.

She noted that one of the 2020 campaign’s highest-performing videos was a simple one — showing Biden giving his flag lapel pin to a young boy. The campaign has also seen a strong response to his interaction this year with 9-year-old Harry Abramson discussing stuttering, which generated more than 1.2 million views on TikTok, a platform favored by the younger voters who have grown discontented with Biden in the last three-plus years.

Measuring success will take time, but O’Malley Dillon noted that Biden has fully embraced the approach. She recalled the team showing Christian Fitts’ TikTok video to Biden, and “he loved it and instantly knew how powerful that was, because it’s real.”

“[We] could have done that a million other ways. But Joe Biden’s way is to sit down with someone in a place that they can be comfortable to talk about what’s going on in their lives,” O’Malley Dillon said.

The next challenge is ensuring key voters see the content.

Before it scaled up on the ground in battleground states, the campaign worked with the DNC on pilot programs in Arizona and Wisconsin, where organizers would spend two hours making calls to volunteers and then be prompted to share content on their social media networks promoting the party’s message on key issues. Then, through a campaign app, the volunteers would match their contact lists against voter files to help determine whether people in their networks are registered to vote or have requested early ballots and start conversations with them.

“For a lot of voters that we need right now, permission structuring matters. People coming out and saying that they support the president — even if they don’t fully agree with him — matters,” Flaherty said. “In these communities, with these voters who are pretty low-trust, the folks that they follow on social media are really important, as are their friends, as is the media. And so we just need a strategy to handle all of them together.”

Altogether, Flaherty said, the effort is building on “the strong culture of organizing that the Democratic Party has had for decades.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com