Campaign Manager Bluntly Throws in the Towel in Florida

A pointless pursuit…

Despite Democrats’ attempts to make a dent in Florida, President Joe Biden’s campaign manager knows when it is time to call it quits.

In an interview that Puck’s John Heilemann described as a “rare and candid conversation,” Jen O’Malley Dillon was asked about the Biden team’s strategy for 2024, including what states the campaign viewed as true battlegrounds they could win.

Mediaite has more:

Heilemann: If you boil it down, what you’re saying is that 2020 was a national election; there were battleground states, but you ran the campaign like a national referendum on Trump. But in 2024, you’re running a half-dozen targeted state campaigns—which gets us to the topic of your paths to victory. I named six states [Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia]. You’d agree those are battlegrounds, yes?

O’Malley Dillon: Yes.

And you’re saying you see North Carolina also as a battleground state?

Yes.

Florida?

No.

Thank you. I was afraid you were going to lie.

“The job of the campaign is to keep as many battleground states in play for as long as possible so we can navigate any flexibility in the race,” O’Malley Dillon explained, pointing out how Biden had won Georgia and Arizona in 2020 despite those states not being “in play at all at this point” in the election cycle, “and certainly were not traditional battleground states.”

O’Malley Dillon’s comments come just days after Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison visited Tallahassee for a Florida Democratic Party (FDP) rally and told reporters there he viewed the state to be “in play.”

In 2020, Biden successfully won 270 Electoral College votes without Florida and it seems his campaign may be forced into a similar approach.