The challenge is considerable. Archetype of the old-fashioned one, Joe Biden must invent Covid-19’s first presidential campaign in time. Confined for two months in his house in Wilmington, Delaware, the Democratic candidate for the presidential election in November first focused on regrouping the currents of his party, not without success. The latest rally is from the young representative of New York State, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This left-wing figure of the future will join his environment committee, which she will co-chair with former Secretary of State John Kelly.
Joe Biden must however solve a more urgent equation, that of visibility in the face of an omnipresent outgoing president who regularly presents him as locked in his basement, overwhelmed by events and steered by a team of advisers. The former vice president first reacted with the means at hand to the new situation. His campaign team tinkered with long-distance conversations with guests, or virtually reproduced impromptu exchanges with supporters at the end of meetings in which the former vice president excelled.
Faced with Donald Trump's war machine, presented as invincible by its director, Brad Parscale, who already led the digital team of the Republican in 2016, the former vice president is forced to leave the craft. He announced the doubling of his teams and the arrival of famous figures in the new digital communication tools, who had worked for other candidates in the Democratic primary, Beto O'Rourke, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.
Time is counted
As Joe Biden was slow to respond to an alleged sexual assault that allegedly occurred in 1993, giving way to the conservative ecosystem on social media, democratic voices began to rise to demand a more impactful strategy. "Faced with an outgoing president, a candidate cannot be content to play in defense", two former Barack Obama advisers, David Axelrod and David Plouffe had assured in a column published by the New york times, May 4.
The two men argued for a stronger presence and for better anticipation of the changes that the pandemic may introduce, such as the transformation of the national convention mass into a virtual event, or the expansion of postal voting. In the same daily, Lis Smith, another former adviser to the last Democratic president who powerfully contributed to the emergence in 2019 of an initially unknown candidate, Pete Buttigieg, also advocated on May 7 the transformation of the septuagenarian into "Most stylish disrupter" (("Hottest bad boy") digital campaigns.
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