President Joe Biden is heading southwest this week to shore up the coalition of voters from Black, Latino, union, suburban woman and other key constituencies who helped deliver Democratic victories in 2020 and 2022 in the swing states of Nevada and Arizona — his fifth and sixth swing state campaign stops in the less than two weeks since his State of the Union.
Campaign officials said on Monday that Biden’s trip and their ground game through the fall will focus on their organized labor advocacy in union-ladened Nevada, former President Donald Trump’s election denialism in two of the states that were at the center of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the Biden administration efforts on immigration and border security in the two border states, and the fight for abortion rights and access to reproductive health care.
“The president will spend this week in the Sun Belt states of Nevada and Arizona – diverse, pro-choice states that are gaining hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs thanks to the president’s policies,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote in a public memo on Monday outlining their strategy and message. “In both states, we’re building robust campaign infrastructure to meet voters where they are and to engage the broad coalition of voters who powered President Biden’s victory in 2020 and Democrats’ wins up and down the ballot during the 2022 midterms.”
On Tuesday, Biden will be in Reno, Nevada, for a campaign event and then Las Vegas for a speech in his official capacity on housing costs. Then on Wednesday, in Phoenix, Arizona, Biden will speak about his administration’s infrastructure investments and attend two campaign receptions. That night and on Thursday, he will be in Dallas and Houston for three more campaign receptions in a red state where Chavez Rodriguez said the campaign will still work to turn blue, a longtime aspiration of Democrats that has yet to bear fruit.
National polling so far this year has the two rival candidates within a few percentage points of each other, typically with Trump leading. In Arizona, not a single major public poll has had Biden in the lead since November. In Nevada, Trump has beat Biden in nearly every poll since last June, with recent ones showing him winning by double-digit margins. In 2020, Biden won Nevada by less than three percentage points and beat Trump in Arizona by less than a third of a percent — under 11,000 votes.
The issues Biden will focus on in Arizona and Nevada — jobs, organized labor, democracy, border policy and abortion — are areas where the president and his campaign believe he can make a strong case for his resume and agenda. But they are also areas where they see an opportunity to highlight Trump’s positions and actions in a negative light.
“On the issues that matter most to voters in the states, we have a clear advantage over Donald Trump from job creation and union protections to reproductive rights,” a campaign aide said on a press call on Monday. “In both Nevada and Arizona Trump's election denialism has become a primary plank of the Republican Party platform, putting them at odds with a large number of independent and swing voters that will decide this election, just like they did in 2020 and 2022.”
In Arizona, election audits spurred on by Trump supporters after the 2020 election lead to death threats and a mass exodus of election workers. In Nevada, state Republican Party chair Michael McDonald has been indicted alongside five other party officials for signing documents that attempted to certify Trump as the winner in their state despite his loss.
And, as recently as an interview that aired this Sunday, Trump has said he would be open to a national abortion ban.
“We’re going to find out,” Trump said when asked by Fox News host Howard Kurtz if a 16-week ban would be “politically acceptable.” “Pretty soon I’m going to be making a decision. And I would look like to see if we can do that at all, Howie. I would like to see if we can make both sides happy.”
Last year, a Nevada Independent poll found 62% of Nevadan voters support adding the right to an abortion to the state constitution. Last year, the progressive polling firm Data for Progress tallied 60% of Arizona voters identifying as “pro-choice,” a label for people supportive of abortion access.
“I speak for millions of Arizonans with a clear message: These deeply personal decisions should be made between a woman and her doctor – not politicians and the government,” Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs said in her “State of the State” address in January, adopting a line of argument nearly identical to the one Biden and his campaign have made. “I will always defend Arizonans’ freedoms, and I refuse to back down in the face of those who want to criminalize doctors and outlaw abortion.”
At top of mind for the Biden campaign in their public messaging on Monday was the 2022 midterms and the coalition that helped protect Democratic Senate seats in both states, win Democrat Katie Hobbs the governor’s race over avowed election denialist Kari Lake and ensure Democratic officials would be the respective states’ top election officials in 2024. Despite Republican confidence in a strong showing across the country in 2022, Democrats gained a seat in their Senate majority and limited the House GOP to a slim majority.
“In those midterm elections and President Biden's direction, the DNC more than tripled its investment in Nevada and Arizona as compared to the 2018 cycle,” the aide said.. “Now, the staffers who ran those midterm efforts in both Nevada and Arizona are running our campaigns in those states again. These operatives know how to win these states, period.”
Vice President Kamala Harris was in Arizona and Nevada earlier this month to woo voters there, as well. At a Las Vegas rally she noted it was her third trip there in two months and her 11th as vice president.
In particular, the Biden campaign is focusing heavily on the Latino vote in Nevada and Arizona, where around one in five and one in four registered voters are Latino, respectively, according to data from the The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund. While polling suggests a majority of Latinos have sided with Democrats in recent cycles, surveys from this cycle shows a decline in support for Biden.
According to the White House, Biden recorded two interviews with Spanish-language radio shows on Monday that will air on Tuesday morning.
His campaign aspires to have 40 staffers across both states by the end of the month, Chavez Rodriguez wrote. By the end of the 2022 cycle, Democrats had 180 staffers in the state — triple the number they had the previous midterm election in 2018, she added. The campaign has already opened a field office in the Phoenix community of Maryvale, where around 75% of the population is Latino.
“If you're talking about Latinos, Black voters, AAPI voters or any other constituency and coalition, that these are not monoliths, and they are not simply as supporters to be nudged to come out,” the Biden campaign aide said on the press call. Another aide on the same call noted the campaign has had bilingual staffers in the states since the fall.
And on the airwaves, the Biden campaign has hit Arizona, Nevada and Spanish-speaking voters early and often. Every national ad buy includes Arizona and Nevada, Chavez Rodriguez said, and aids specifically targeting the state highlight manufacturing jobs created on Biden’s watch. In one Spanish-language ad, a narrator rattles off a list of points in Biden’s favor: declines in Latino unemployment, growth in Latino business ownership and the president’s efforts to push pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of insulin to $35.
“Every act, every program of Joe Biden’s is for someone,” the narrator reads over images of Biden signing legislation. “That someone who President Joe Biden is fighting for is not the rich and powerful, it is us.”
Two national polls conducted in December and another in February found Biden and Trump within a few points of each other among Latinos polled, though the sample sizes were notably small and the margins of error large. A Univision poll of 1,400 Latinos, including 625 Republicans, in September had Biden beating Trump 58% to 31% with a margin of error of just +/- 2.6 percentage points. In 2020, when millions more Latinos voted than ever before, Biden won their votes “by very wide margins across the country,” researchers at UCLA concluded
“Arizona showed just what that power could result in when Latinos act as a concentrated voting bloc, clenching victory for Joe Biden and flipping their second Senate seat blue in just two years,” the researchers at UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative wrote in their 2021 report. “In Arizona, one of the most hotly contested states in the 2020 election, Latino voters were decisive.”