'Swing is king': Ex-Clinton adviser warns Biden against 'pitching too much to the base'

12 May 2024

As President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump campaign to secure their second presidency, the Economist notes that the November 5 election "will be the first rematch election in almost 70 years."

While both candidates remain "unpopular" among American voters, pollster and former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton adviser Mark Penn, in a message to President Joe Biden — points out in a Sunday New York Times op-ed the one key demographic that will ultimately decide who wins: swing voters.

"I’ve spent decades looking at the behavior of swing voters and how candidates appeal to them, including for Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996," Penn writes. "If Mr. Biden wants to serve another four years, he has to stop being dragged to the left and chart a different course closer to the center that appeals to those voters who favor bipartisan compromises to our core issues, fiscal discipline and a strong America."

He adds, "Take Michigan, a battleground state where Mr. Trump has led Mr. Biden by as many as three percentage points in the last month. To overcome that gap, Mr. Biden would need to bring out nearly 250,000 additional voters (3 percent of more than eight million registered voters) just to tie it up in a state that has already achieved a record of over 70 percent turnout in a presidential year. Or Mr. Biden could switch just 125,000 swing voters and win."

Penn also notes, "The reality is that swing voters in battleground states who are upset about immigration, inflation, what they see as extreme climate policies, and weakness in foreign affairs are likely to put Mr. Trump back in office if they are not blunted."

In an MSNBC column earlier this week, NBC News' chief political analyst Chuck Todd wrote: "The question I’ve been pondering — and what many a strategist in both the Trump and the Biden camps is trying to figure out — is what these last undecided voters need to hear. What’s the best way to get them off the fence, whether it’s the Biden-or-Trump fence or the 'do I bother to vote' fence?"

Penn suggests:

I believe most of the 101,000 'uncommitted' votes that Mr. Biden lost in Michigan will come home in the end because they have nowhere else to go, and the threat Mr. Trump poses will become clearer and scarier in the next six months. But regardless, there’s a much bigger opportunity for Mr. Biden if he looks in the other direction. Mr. Trump lost nearly 300,000 votes to Nikki Haley in the Michigan Republican primary. These people are in the moderate center, and many of them could be persuaded to vote for Mr. Biden if he fine-tuned his message to bring them in. And remember to multiply by two: convincing those 300,000 Republicans to cross party lines has the equivalent force of turning out 600,000 Democrats. The same math applies to other battleground states, like Pennsylvania, where 158,000 people voted for Ms. Haley instead of Mr. Trump in the Republican primary — even though she dropped out seven weeks earlier.

The pollster also notes:

The 2024 election is a rematch, but Mr. Biden should not assume that he will get the same result as he did in 2020 in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and other battleground states by running the same playbook. This time around, Mr. Biden is seen as older, and the assessment of the job that he has done is in negative territory. While he won’t get any younger, he could still move more to the center, hoover up swing voters who desperately want to reject Mr. Trump, strengthen his image as a leader by destroying Hamas, and rally the base at the end. But that means first pushing back against the base rather than pandering to it, and remembering that when it comes to the math of elections, swing is king.

Penn emphasizes, "By pitching too much to the base, he is leaving behind the centrist swing voters who shift between parties from election to election and, I believe, will be the key factor deciding the 2024 race."

Penn's full op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).

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