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Biden team eyes expanding map to Texas, Florida despite Trump leads

John T. Bennett, CQ-Roll Call on

Published in Political News

WASHINGTON — Biden campaign officials said Monday they see “multiple paths” to President Joe Biden winning reelection, targeting a handful of swing states — and even trying to grab states he lost to Donald Trump in 2020.

“From day one, the Biden-Harris campaign has firmly believed this race will be won on the ground across key states that are core to our multiple pathways to 270. As we enter the general election, we have multiple clear paths to victory through a number of critical swing states,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden-Harris 2024 campaign manager, wrote in a memo.

Even as Trump has opened up a lead in most national and state polls, Rodriguez wrote that campaign officials are eying strategies aimed at “expanding the map in places like Florida and Texas.”

In Trump’s new home state of Florida, Trump led Biden 6 percentage points (48 percent to 42 percent) in a St. Pete Polls survey taken March 11-13. In Texas, Trump led Biden by 9 percentage points (51 percent to 42 percent) in a poll conducted by Florida Atlantic University Political Communication and Public Opinion Research Lab that was conducted Feb. 29-March 3.

“Now at the end of the day, we know this is going to be a very tough, close race,” a Biden-Harris 2024 campaign official told reporters on a conference call Monday. “That’s why we’re investing in multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes, including in the southeastern battleground states.”

The official stressed “early outreach” to voters and “mobilizing our diverse coalition.”

 

As the Biden campaign tries to grab states he lost last time, Rodriguez wrote that his top reelection staff “aren’t taking any state or any vote for granted and are building strong teams to shore up important building block states to 270 such as Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia.”

But the campaign chief made clear, in many ways, any path to a second term goes through the same battleground states that handed him a victory over Trump in 2020.

“At the center of those pathways are three key regions of the country: the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, western battlegrounds like Nevada and Arizona, and southern states like Georgia and North Carolina,” Chavez added.

Biden will travel to Nevada and Arizona on Tuesday for a mix of official White House and campaign events — but raking in likely millions more in 2024 donations from supporters is a big objective for the trip.

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©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. Visit at rollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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