Credit...Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan and Lisa Sheehan

Election 2020

How Do You Run for President During a Pandemic?

Joe Biden’s primary victory seemed like a vindication of the idea that in politics, the internet isn’t real life. What happens now that it is?


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A typical day in captivity for Joe Biden begins around 8 in the morning. After waking up in the house in Wilmington, Del., that has been his Elba since the middle of March, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee works out on the Peloton or the elliptical machine in his home gym. Next he showers and downs a protein shake in his kitchen. Then he retreats to his first-floor home office, where he holds two conference calls — the first with medical and public-health experts to go over the latest developments in the coronavirus pandemic, the second with a team of policy advisers to discuss the economic crisis it has spawned. Only when all that is done does Biden head down to his basement to try to make contact with the greater outside world.

In the initial days of Biden’s self-isolation, as the pandemic forced him to cancel rallies and drop off the campaign trail, the 77-year-old former vice president suddenly disappeared from public view — and his opponents were making much of his absence. On Twitter, Bernie Sanders supporters, posting with the hashtag ­#WhereIsJoeBiden, speculated that he was “incapacitated” or had “lost his faculties.” On Fox Business, the Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany (who in April would become White House press secretary) accused Biden of trying “to hide from the American people.”

Biden’s campaign advisers scouted his house for a suitable location where he could film campaign (and proof-of-life) appearances. They quickly settled on an out-of-the-way spot in his basement in front of a bookshelf adorned with family photos and personal artifacts, including the American flag that flew over the United States Capitol in honor of his late son Beau. Over the course of two hectic days, a video-production crew installed the wiring, lighting and camera necessary for a full-fledged TV studio. On March 23, standing behind a lectern affixed with his campaign logo, Biden prepared to address the nation via live­stream for the first time. “And you’re live!” an off-camera voice said. “Ready to go?” Biden responded.

In the subsequent weeks, the lectern has been replaced with a chair, and Biden, who as vice president became accustomed to having interviewers come to him, has tried to acclimate himself to the remote setup. Now rarely a day goes by that the candidate — sometimes in a suit, sometimes in a sweater, always in front of that bookshelf — doesn’t pop up on “Morning Joe” or Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, the local news in Detroit or his own Facebook page, to let Americans know he’s still out there. “I’m locked in a basement,” he told the Pennsylvania A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s virtual convention in April. “Like a lot of you.”

For Biden, who has always seemed to require personal interaction the way other people require oxygen, the benefits of these appearances are not solely political. While he waits for the TV hits to begin, he’ll often engage in longer-than-usual chitchat with the producer; on one occasion, he bent the ear of a producer’s son. He enjoys few other respites from his isolation. Away from the cameras, his teenage grandchildren, who live nearby, stand in Biden’s backyard while he and his wife, Jill, sit on the back porch and talk to them about their days. Occasionally they’ll toss the kids an ice cream bar. His advisers, meanwhile, now arrange for Biden to make at least one and often several telephone calls a day to “normal people” — first responders, campaign volunteers, someone Biden met when he was on the trail. “He is hungry for people,” Anita Dunn, Biden’s chief strategist, told me, “so we’re trying to make sure he has people on his schedule.” On a Tuesday afternoon in late March, Paul Ruiz, a Biden campaign volunteer in Northern Virginia, received a phone call out of the blue from a Biden staff member telling him that the former vice president would be calling him in five minutes. “He talked to me for a long time,” Ruiz recalls. He told Biden not just about his phone-banking but also about how his stepfather, a school-bus driver in Illinois, had been laid off because of the coronavirus lockdown. “I wasn’t expecting to have that in-depth a conversation with the guy,” Ruiz says.

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Joe Biden in his basement TV studio in Wilmington, Del.Credit...From the Biden campaign

Some on Biden’s campaign team have pushed for making videos that present the candidate in settings other than his basement. But because health guidelines prohibit the presence of a film crew in Biden’s house (the camera in the basement studio is run remotely from Sioux City, Iowa), this is difficult. For Earth Day, a campaign aide — one of just a few who are allowed access to the house — did manage to shoot a video on his iPhone of Biden and Jill speaking about the environment in their yard. Publicly, at least, Biden has not yet demonstrated the ability to produce this kind of content himself. As he confided to a group of donors during a virtual fund-raiser in early April, “I’m the same guy that when something happens on my cellphone, I turn to one of my granddaughters and say, ‘Can you help me out here?’” He added, “But I’m trying to learn.”

In late March, when Biden beamed into a CNN town hall from his basement, Anderson Cooper asked him what he would say to families planning funerals for loved ones who died in the pandemic. It was the type of question Biden has answered expertly for nearly 50 years. Just a month earlier at a CNN town hall in South Carolina, he brought some people to tears when he told a minister, whose wife had been killed in the 2015 Emanuel A.M.E. Church shooting, about his own unfathomable losses and how his religious faith gives him “some reason to have hope.” Now, speaking to Cooper, Biden again recounted his personal tragedies and acknowledged the heartbreak experienced by the many people who have lost loved ones to ­Covid-19, particularly those who haven’t been able to be with family members while they are dying. He urged these families to “seek help, to talk to people who have been through it,” so that they “can tell you that you can get through it, you really can.” Still, Biden seemed unsatisfied with his answer. It was clear he wanted to say more. “And by the way, call — ” he caught himself. “No, I’m not going to give my phone number,” he mumbled, before continuing in a clearer voice. “Those who have been through that, you can contact my campaign. I’m happy to try to talk to you.”

It was one of a number of appearances during the pandemic in which Biden seemed a bit out of sorts, even stymied. Here, at the dawn of the general-election campaign — a time when he should be barnstorming the country, appearing in front of cheering crowds with his defeated rivals, bringing Democrats together to do battle with Donald Trump in November — he finds himself confined to his basement, forced to talk to a camera instead of a person, struggling to make the human connections he typically forges and so visibly desires. “He would be the first to tell you that this is not the campaign that he expected,” Dunn says, “but it’s the campaign that he’s got.”

“It’s the terrible irony of this moment,” a former Obama White House official says. “The crisis is perfectly set up for Biden. It calls for the things he’s so good at — showing empathy; working the instruments of government; providing steady, competent leadership. At the same time, the mediums he now has to use do not play to his strengths as a communicator.”

On the morning of March 12, about 150 Biden campaign staff members gathered at their headquarters in a Philadelphia high-rise. They were told that because of the pandemic, the headquarters and field offices would be shuttering the next day and all 400 campaign staff members would be working from their homes for the foreseeable future.

As it happened, the meeting also marked the arrival of Biden’s new campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who was hired for the job the day before. O’Malley Dillon was a top aide on Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and managed Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 presidential bid until he dropped out last year. Although Biden was on the verge of locking up the Democratic nomination, no one believed that his operation, which until then was managed by Greg Schultz, had been especially well run. Biden and his advisers hoped that O’Malley Dillon, who at 43 has become one of the Democratic Party’s most respected tacticians, would be able to not so much fine-tune as overhaul his campaign. This was a daunting task even before the pandemic rewrote her job description. “I don’t envy Jen,” says David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 campaign. “I think she is the right person in the right seat, but the scale of difficulty here is pretty significant.”

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Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden’s new campaign manager, working from her home outside Washington.Credit...Greg Kahn for The New York Times

“The fact that we are going through a global pandemic and that we are not only trying to communicate and campaign but also function as human beings affected by this ourselves is incredibly challenging,” O’Malley Dillon told me. It was the middle of April, and she was talking on the phone from her home outside Washington. Because the campaign had gone virtual, her husband, Patrick, a political strategist and former Obama White House official, ceded the home office to her. It was now cluttered with Biden campaign ephemera as well as the craft projects of their twin 7-year-old daughters and 2-year-old son. When O’Malley Dillon took the Biden job — and signed up for spending much of the next six months away from home as she commuted between Philadelphia and Washington — she promised Patrick and her children that they would get a dog when the campaign was over. With the children out of school and stuck at home, though, that promise had come due earlier — and she could now see out her office window the family’s new labradoodle tearing up the backyard. “I’m not a big dog person,” she said.

In some ways, the pandemic has worked to the Biden team’s advantage. In a typical campaign, this is when the incumbent president would be trying to decapitate him with an advertising onslaught, but that’s not happening. While the last two competitive Democratic primary contests dragged into the summer, Sanders conceded the race to Biden on April 8, saying he couldn’t “in good conscience” continue with his campaign during the pandemic. But those are silver linings in a very dark cloud.

Biden’s triumph in the primaries was in some quarters interpreted as a vindication of the argument that the internet is not real life. The online energy that pulsed around Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and for a time Pete Buttigieg, and the sophisticated digital operations those campaigns built, did not yield the votes necessary to thwart the former vice president. Maybe Biden didn’t know the difference between a text message and a website — “Go to JOE 30330 and help me in this fight,” he confusingly told voters in one Democratic debate. But he did know Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, had been friends with him for 30 years and traveled to Charleston last September to attend a memorial service for Clyburn’s wife, Emily. And so Clyburn blessed Biden with his endorsement, propelling Biden to a tide-turning victory in the South Carolina primary. The implicit, and sometimes explicit, argument for Biden’s candidacy had to do with his very offline ability to project decency and empathy — especially when set in contrast to a president who often seems to be the human embodiment of social media’s tendencies toward the opposite. But now that the pandemic has rendered offline campaigning impossible, at least for a time, the question confronting the Biden campaign is how to adapt to a world in which the internet suddenly is real life — by government order. “No one has had to run a campaign like this ever — period,” Dunn says.

One of the biggest challenges for the campaign will be organizing supporters without, for now, the door-knocking and phone-banking that project usually entails. While other 2020 Democratic candidates boasted extensive digital organizing efforts, Biden’s was decidedly old-school. “The Biden campaign, in the primaries, didn’t innovate nearly as much as we saw other campaigns when it came to online organizing,” says Tara McGowan, the founder of Acronym, a nonprofit digital-strategy group that aims to help progressives. “They are starting at a deficit.”

To make up for that deficit, the Biden campaign’s still-small digital team is now looking to borrow pages from the playbooks of other Democratic candidates. One effort involves empowering the people behind Biden “stan” (online slang for “fan”) accounts on social media — like ­@JoeMamas2020, “a national group of moms, caregivers, moms to be, aunts & all the parental figures in between,” with about 27,000 Facebook and 900 Twitter followers. These stans are brought into the campaign fold with daily emails laying out messaging goals and offering training on how to organize their followers. “We’re trying to give them a little more ownership of the events that they’re running and the ‘asks’ they’re making,” says Courtney Corbisiero, Biden’s national digital organizing director. Similarly, the Biden campaign has organized a content-creation team of roughly 30 volunteers with graphic-design, meme-making or video-production experience who receive daily guidance about what the campaign is looking for; their work is then distributed to a Slack channel of more than 6,000 Biden organizers and supporters to in turn distribute to their own networks.

The Biden campaign is also mimicking an organizing strategy employed by Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren during the primaries, using community service as a way to cultivate support. One afternoon in April, I listened in on “check-in” calls made by Ben May, a young campaign staff member who organized for Biden in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, Missouri and Illinois but was now working from his parents’ house outside Boston. “I’m just calling because I know right now, with everything that’s going on in the world, it’s a really uncertain time,” May told a registered Democrat in Utah. “And I just kind of want to see how you’re doing with everything that’s going on recently, with the coronavirus and social distancing and just everything.” If the person on the other end of the line had a problem — like strained finances or difficulty getting food delivered — May, and every other Biden organizer, had a list of local social-service groups.

“Door-knocking, which is the gold standard of organizing, is about having the conversation and making the case, but it’s as much about showing up and caring enough about that person,” O’Malley Dillon says. “So now that we can’t have door-knocking, how do we get the essence of that? We do it by showing up for people, checking in on them, seeing how they’re doing, building the relationship. We’re not calling to ask for something from you. We’re calling you because we want to make sure you’re OK. People are going to remember that.”

There’s a school of thought among some Democrats that Biden is actually benefiting from his relative absence from the public eye — or at least, he benefits from Trump’s relentless presence. “People complain: ‘Why isn’t Joe on TV more? He’s ceding the public arena to Trump!’” says Ed Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor and longtime Biden supporter. “Yeah, how has Trump done having the public arena to himself?”

Democratic ad makers view the president’s daily news briefings as a gold mine of material. In late March, the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, which plans to spend $200 million on anti-Trump ads during this election cycle, released “Exponential Threat,” a 30-second spot that features an animated chart showing the rise of coronavirus cases in the United States and an audio track of Trump statements like “We have it totally under control” and “One day, it’s like a miracle; it will disappear.” While “contrast” ads typically compare a candidate with his opponent, Democrats are now running ads that ignore Biden entirely and simply contrast Trump with reality. “People can see what is happening,” says Guy Cecil, the chairman of Priorities USA, “and it doesn’t comport with what Trump is saying.”

[Trump’s campaign manager isn’t worried.]

At a White House news briefing in March, Trump lit into NBC’s Peter Alexander for asking what he would say to Americans who are scared, replying, “I say that you’re a terrible reporter.” The Biden campaign responded with a digital ad two days later that featured a split screen of Trump’s answer alongside the answer Biden gave to a similar question asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper during a Democratic debate earlier that month — “This is about how we bring people together,” Biden said — and closed with the message, “THIS MOMENT CALLS FOR A PRESIDENT. IN NOVEMBER YOU CAN ELECT ONE.” The ad received more than two million views on Twitter.

But most of the Democratic officials and strategists I spoke to still believe that Biden needs to be doing more to make that case himself. “This is a moment of hyper­engagement, particularly by people who normally wouldn’t tune in to politics until two weeks before the election,” says Dan Pfeiffer, a top Obama campaign and White House aide. “You have the chance to speak to them now on a topic that’s literally life-or-death. This is a chance to story-tell or give them information. You’re not trying to move polls now. They’re not deciding who to vote for. But you want to imprint data points in people’s brains and create the context for decision-making in the fall.”

Instead, the Democrats making the biggest impression at the moment are governors dealing with coronavirus outbreaks in their states, like Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. “There’s nothing that Biden or his campaign can say about the virus response that probably isn’t better coming from a governor or a mayor,” concedes Addisu Demissie, who managed Cory Booker’s 2020 presidential bid. As a politician who currently holds no office, Biden has also found himself taking a back seat to the Democrats’ House and Senate leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, as they battle with the White House and Republican congressional leaders over emergency relief packages. “The Biden campaign is in the really tough position of having the responsibility to make news,” Demissie says, “without a lot of the power to do so.”

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Biden at home in an ad commenting on President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.Credit...Screen grab from YouTube

That has forced the campaign to try to shed some of its more hidebound instincts. “We’re thinking of it almost as if we’re producing a Joe Biden TV show,” Rob Flaherty, the campaign’s digital director, told me. “We’re not going to round-table our way out of this. It’s a good format, but we have to think out of the box.” It was a Saturday afternoon in April, and Flaherty was speaking to me over the phone from the bathroom of his studio apartment in Philadelphia. He and his girlfriend, who also works for the Biden campaign, had rented the tiny studio in Center City on the theory that neither of them would spend many of their waking hours there. Now that the apartment had become their office, they took turns working from the main room and the bathroom. It was Flaherty’s turn for the bathroom.

One goal of Biden TV, as Flaherty envisions it, is “making sure there’s just a ton of Joe Biden content in the places where people are consuming content.” The campaign is posting regularly, sometimes hourly, on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and it is experimenting with Minecraft, Reddit and other more unconventional platforms. But Biden TV is also about counter­programming — creating content that serves as a sort of super­ego to the never-ending Trump show’s id. “Trump’s inflammatory, and he’s cruel, and those traits work well on the internet, but for every nasty thing online that’s successful, there are videos of soldiers coming home or of a grandma being sung to on her birthday during social distancing that are equally successful,” Flaherty says. “The key to winning the internet is either to be really inflammatory or be the opposite, which is super empathetic. And if you’re going to succeed at defeating Donald Trump on the internet, you don’t do it by trying to be Trump or by trying to be Trump’s foil and play his game. You do it by being empathetic, compassionate, and forging connections to people. Those are Joe Biden’s super­powers. And the program we’re building for him features humanity and connection and empathy.”

In early April, after a colleague noticed that Prime Minister Erna Solberg of Norway held a news conference for kids to ask questions about the coronavirus pandemic, Flaherty put together a virtual “family town hall” featuring Biden and Jill along with three You­Tube families, during which Biden explained the powers a president can use by invoking the Defense Production Act and demonstrated proper sneezing etiquette. Later that month, the Biden campaign ran what it billed as a “virtual rope line” for Biden, using the video­conferencing platform Zoom to rotate in supporters for brief conversations with the vice president in his basement studio.

In these settings, Biden sometimes seems as if he’s running to be the next Fred Rogers, not the next president. “For him to be sitting in his basement next to his wife and in casual clothes,” Jeremy Johnston, one of the You­Tube vloggers who participated in the family town hall, told me, “it felt like we were doing a Face­Time with the grandparents.” A couple of weeks later, the campaign did in fact release a video of a Zoom call the Bidens did with one of their granddaughters. She asked them if there were any TV shows they have enjoyed during their quarantine. “Everybody’s watching this ‘Tiger King’ show, so I turned it on,” Jill replied. “And we watched about 20 minutes, and Pop looks at me, and he says, ‘What are we watching?!’ I mean, it was like so crazy!”

“There is no voter in America that is looking at this situation right now and is like ‘Geez, Joe Biden’s studio doesn’t look great’ or ‘I really wish that he had a press conference on his lawn,.” O’Malley Dillon told me. “I just don’t think that’s what people are going to vote on. I think, honestly, they want role modeling.” The importance of “modeling” good behavior is a refrain among Biden advisers. It’s why, when Trump announced in early April that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommended that people wear masks in public but that he himself wouldn’t do so, Biden made a point of saying he would wear one. It’s why, for that matter, Biden was stuck in his basement. “Voters want him making sure that he is doing what everyone else is being asked to do,” O’Malley Dillon says. “We are spending so much time talking about how important it is to stay at home and keep safe and protect others that I think there’s an expectation and a desire for him to do that.”

Of course, Trump’s political career, and life, is premised on the notion that the rules do not apply to him. And it seems likely that if and when social-distancing guidelines are relaxed — if not before that — Trump will push the limits of what is considered safe and responsible campaigning. It’s easy to envision, for instance, Biden standing on a sound­stage in Milwaukee in August and accepting the Democratic presidential nomination at a “virtual convention” and then, one week later, Trump receiving the Republican nomination at a basketball arena in Charlotte filled with tens of thousands of roaring MAGA-hatted devotees. The networks would give both conventions equal amounts of prime-time coverage — which, Democrats insist, is the only metric that truly matters — but the optics of Biden in relative seclusion and Trump surrounded by a cheering crowd would only fuel the Trump campaign’s attacks on Biden as old, enfeebled and “sleepy.”

It’s even easier to envision Trump pushing the envelope when it comes to campaign tactics; on Twitter, he has already encouraged people to protest stay-at-home orders in states with Democratic governors. “If I was Brad Parscale” — Trump’s campaign manager — “and I had $250 million and I’ve been building a strategy of echo chambers and a campaign geared toward disinformation,” says Greta Carnes, the Buttigieg campaign’s national organizing director, “and then you told me I’d be running in a year of people being afraid and confused and not having accurate information, I’d be thrilled about Donald Trump’s re-election chances.”

But the Biden campaign is operating on the assumption that as much as the pandemic has changed the mechanics of the election, it has also raised voters’ understanding of its stakes — so much so that they will now want qualities in a president that, in recent years, they’ve tended to devalue. When I asked Anita Dunn about the difficulties of Biden’s current predicament, and whether it was harder to run as the candidate who was trying to behave responsibly instead of the one flouting all the rules, she responded with a question of her own. “What if the American people are ready for the responsible person,” she asked, “because they’ve seen what having the irresponsible person gives them?”

Jason Zengerle is a writer at large for the magazine. He last wrote about Alabama’s Republican Senate primary.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: How Do You Run for President From Your Basement?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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