Both Biden and Trump, Trump more than Biden by the numbers, are hitting tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of voters with streams of produced, coordinated campaign events—delivered totally online. Biden is hosting a readily available podcast and having split-screen conversations with big-name current and former elected leaders and attempting to approximate the one-on-one interactions that he craves. And the Trump machine—quite apart from Trump’s briefings or news conferences, which the president increasingly has treated as de facto campaign appearances—is pumping out a relentless schedule of spin-off shows of sorts, every night at 8, starring characters familiar by now to Trump fans and detractors alike (Donald Trump Jr., Corey Lewandowski, Diamond and Silk …).

“These,” longtime Democrat strategist Hank Sheinkopf told me, “are the new campaign set pieces.”

What does this new campaign trail look like? Without getting on a single flight, or driving a single mile in a rental car, or spending a single night in a hotel room, I spent seven days consuming close to every bit of digital content offered by these campaigns.

“Complain, be worried, lament—all of that doesn’t negate the fact that this is how the candidates are running.”

—Julian Zelizer

For anyone willing to tune in and follow along, it’s personal, revealing and sometimes kind of bonkers. I saw Don Jr. call Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib “the Hamas caucus” and talk about people in China eating bats—after he had, he said, guzzled six Red Bulls. I saw people in little boxes in a Zoom wearing masks chant, “Let’s go, Joe! Let’s go, Joe! Let’s go, Joe!” I saw lots of ads for Trump—and not as many for Biden. I saw commenters roil and rail in a constant on-screen churn that I came to view as the internet equivalent of a red MAGA-capped crowd. I watched Senator Amy Klobuchar sit in her house and praise Biden’s deep-seated empathy but not before noting she had forced her husband and daughter to shut off their devices to try to make her feed less choppy. (It worked!) I saw a member of Congress champion the healing properties of the sun. I saw Vice President Mike Pence’s wife say he was relaxing late at night by watching “Patton” and playing Trivial Pursuit. I saw a pastor pray at length to God to give the president the “wisdom” “to rule and to reign in the times we’re living in.” I saw Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, point to his Hillary Clinton toilet paper.

The virtual campaign trail is also, to be sure, missing some important elements—most notably the accountability that comes from face-to-face encounters with the press. Nobody is able to even shout at Biden questions about, say, Tara Reade as he hustles from a side door to a waiting black Suburban. At this point, only Trump, to his credit, is engaging in any regular jousting with the Fourth Estate.

There’s some bad news for Biden, too: Though it’s hard to put a fine point on the number of the aggregate views of the two campaigns’ videos on Facebook, YouTube, Mixer, Twitter and Twitch, suffice it to say Trump is swamping Biden when it comes to exposure—a function of, among other things, the fact that Trump has 79 million followers on Twitter, more than 29 million followers on Facebook and 382,000 subscribers on YouTube, while Biden has a little more than 5 million, a little shy of 2 million and some 48,000, respectively. Biden, for what it’s worth, isn’t even on Mixer and Twitch. His campaign, only recently consolidating party support, is playing catch-up. The Trump campaign, which launched years ago in essence its own television programming hosted on social media, is in this space savvy, energetic and unabashed. The backdrops of the ad-hoc in-home studios in the Trump content, I noticed, compared to Biden’s frequently (although not always) have less of a DIY look, and not by accident. The Trump campaign sent to surrogates, I learned, kits of lights and Trump-branded objects to try for a tad more visual quality and consistency.

“Right now, everything is virtual,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Erin Perrine told me, “and we’re exceedingly good at it.”

It’s not just those on Trump’s payroll saying so. “There is no denying—no denying—that Brad Parscale is an evil genius,” said Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist and Fox News contributor. “He absolutely has the Trump campaign on a much more advanced digital footing than I think any other presidential campaign in history.”

It’s not clear how much this chasm will matter to the outcome on November 3. Could slick production values really turn an election that likely will be a referendum on the response by Trump and his administration to a once-in-a-century pandemic—and when so many people are crammed obstinately into their partisan corners, ready to vote the way they’re going to vote almost regardless of what transpires between now and Election Day? Looking at polling showing Trump sinking and Biden inching up overall, and in key states, too, in almost inverse proportion to their respective exposure, many analysts and operatives believe the latter’s lower profile is actually for now the smartest play. Biden, in other words, might be able to win not in spite of the fact that he’s stuck in his basement but because of it. However this shakes out, it’s difficult not to wonder how much of these all-digital efforts will survive the pandemic and change how candidates campaign period. There’s plenty of reason to think that what we’re seeing here is more than just Biden vs. Trump online but also an early window into the future of politics.

“There’s not many other ways to contact voters—right?—other than virtually right now,” Rob Flaherty, the digital director of the Biden campaign, told me. “In the same way that it’s sort of like a battle for the soul of the nation”—one of Biden’s favorite pitches—“in a lot of ways, it’s sort of a battle for the soul of the internet.”

Not up for debate, though, is that this year’s campaign, as radically different as it is from its antecedents, is as real as it’s ever been for anybody who wants it to be.

MONDAY, APRIL 20

‘Buckle up!’

On the traditional campaign trail, there’s a lot of getting up early and staying up late, a lot of driving and then … waiting. Listening to warmup songs before finally hearing the walkup song. It’s different on this trail. The Biden campaign announces events and times in emails to reporters or supporters or posts on Facebook or Twitter. It’s even easier with the Trump campaign. Every night. Always 8. Click and watch.

“BUCKLE UP!” That’s what it said on my screen now. The imagery mimicked a roller-coaster ride. It felt like a trailer before a movie. Earlier in the day, I had listened to Biden’s 20-minute podcast with Minnesota’s Klobuchar, who is considered a top contender to become his running mate. No real news, fairly soft stuff: She extolled his empathy borne from awful experience, and he thanked her for her endorsement, suggesting he wouldn’t have won her state without it. And I had just finished watching a 50-minute town hall about gun violence, anchored by Biden supporter Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was murdered in the school shooting in 2018 in Parkland, Florida. I was, I suppose, ready for something somewhat lighter.

“Welcome to Team Trump Online!” Set to a fast-paced, foot-tapping tune, the digital roller coaster jerked up, down and around, past a Space Force sign and iPhone-shaped billboards showing hats for sale, and shirts, and Christmas gifts. “ENJOY THE SHOW!”

It was called “Black Voices for Trump Real Talk Online.” The host was Katrina Pierson, the stern-faced onetime tea party activist who was the national spokesperson for Trump’s 2016 campaign, and she was joined by Paris Dennard and Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson—noms de guerre “Diamond and Silk.”

Pierson kept the conversation brisk if predictable. “Let’s move on to a topic that we are all too familiar with, the fake news media, which is the true enemy of the people …” Dennard, the Republican National Committee’s senior communications adviser of black media affairs, praised the administration’s handling of a disease that is disproportionately killing people of color. “The decline of fatalities” and “the leveling of the curve,” he said, is “because the American people are responding to what the president and this task force have put together in a very methodical and very smart and an expert way. …” But it was hard not to focus on the daughters of a small-town pastor who has hawked wreaths to ward off witchcraft.

This brassy sister act, it was reported this week, got the boot from Fox News due to their record of peddling conspiracy theories. “I love Diamond & Silk,” Trump responded. The thing about these two, though, is that they come from Raeford, North Carolina, but really they come from YouTube. They periodically show up at the podium with Trump at his rallies—I saw them in Charlotte in March—but they actually work better not in person, or even on TV, but on a smaller, less professional screen. It’s where they’re most at home. And in this respect, it seems to me, they are very much an embodiment of Trump’s political project as a whole. They were nobody vloggers who became saucy surrogates for a tweeting insurgent who then became the president who now is running a robust reelection operation squarely situated in the internet’s more freewheeling wilds. This for Trump and his campaign isn’t a pandemic-forced adjustment so much as a return to a platform on which they are quite comfortable performing.

“When you leave somebody shut in their house instead of them catching coronavirus, they’re gonna catch diabetes!” said Diamond.

“One thing I know about us being the land of the free and the home of the brave, we’re not the home of the slaves!” said Silk.

“The Democrats tend to take the black vote for granted because they look at black people as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold!” Diamond said.

“That’s right,” said Silk, the reliably sing-song sidekick.

TUESDAY, APRIL 21

‘He’s not Mr. Internet’

It’s no secret Biden shines when he’s with actual people in an up-close setting. It’s unquestionably his top political skill—always has been, and certainly is now when his oratory is manifestly less smooth. Last year, for example, in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, I (and many other reporters) watched him intermittently stumble over his stump speech before vigorously shaking hands and sharing stories for more than an hour. That physical contact matters to him, it is clear when you see it up close, and it matters to those people. “The one-on-one, the connectivity, the rope line,” Moe Vela, a senior adviser to Biden when he was vice president, told me, “that’s where he thrives.”

With this in mind, Biden’s campaign set up a “virtual rope line.” Staffers pieced together in a video that was underlaid with a soppy score four minutes of highlights of his Zoom chats with a flight attendant from San Francisco, a woman from Fort Lauderdale with a special needs child, a woman from East Brunswick, New Jersey, whose mother was a conductor for Amtrak. Biden bantered and smiled.

“Hey, Erin, how are you?”

“Hey, Jason, how are you, man?”

“Who’s that behind you, your son?”

“Folks, I found that interesting. I hope we can keep doing this, try to keep these going. If you’d like to join us, go to joe biden dot come slash ropeline,” Biden said. “I appreciate it. Bye-bye.”

If “virtual rope line,” though, sounds like a contradiction in terms, that’s because it is. One of the biggest differences between being on the Trump “campaign trail” and being on the Biden “campaign trail” is the disparity in discernible ease. The sense is that Trump and his associates are just doing what they do, full speed ahead, while Biden is shoehorned into something makeshift—a Zoom or some other second-rate replacement for whatever might have been.

“He is not,” Sheinkopf said, “Mr. Internet.”

“The Trump broadcasts look like they’re having fun. Biden seems like he’s in a doctor’s waiting room.”

—Jason Miller

Biden doesn’t just show that discomfort. He says it. “What I’ve been able to do is just reach out and talk to people like I used to do on a rope line,” he said on the Klobuchar podcast, but he also said it was “not quite as satisfying” and “frustrating not being able to get out.”

“Broadcasting 101: If you don’t seem like you want to be there and you look like you would rather be somewhere else, then people are not going to tune in” said former Trump aide Jason Miller, now co-host of a pro-Trump podcast. “The Trump broadcasts look like they’re having fun. Biden seems like he’s in a doctor’s waiting room.”

Trump is no less annoyed about being deprived of the energy of the audiences at his rallies, but his surrogates don’t convey any irritation. On the contrary—they’re in most cases established personalities in the Trump orbit, recurring characters, cultivated for years, reliably playing their respective roles. The Trump fare for this night, for instance, was “Evangelicals for Trump Online,” and I watched pastors Paula White and Guillermo Maldonado talk about Trump. “Sometimes I think he’s more pastoral than people that I know that are pastors,” she said. “I’ve never seen somebody so open to God,” he said. “We have to keep President Trump in office,” she said. “And now,” said host Mercedes Schlapp, “let’s turn to prayer.”

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22

‘Chat is disabled’

“Waiting for Joe Biden,” it said on the bottom left corner of my screen. His Zoom with Al Gore was supposed to start at 2:30. It was 2:31. It was 2:32. It was 2:33. The campaign sent out an email. “The event will begin soon …” It was a sunny day. Out the window by the desk in my office at my house I looked at all the trees’ green leaves. A man from Amazon pulled up and left a package where my walkway meets the sidewalk. I watched the girl from across the street amble past with her fluffy dog. It was 2:41. It was 2:44. And then, at 2:46, with no lead-in, there he was.

“Happy Earth Day, everyone,” Biden said. He had on a blue sports coat and a shirt with no tie. His backdrop in his basement rec room was some white bookshelves with a football and some challenge coins, and a folded American flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol to honor his late son, Beau, from the date of his death to the day of the funeral. Biden welcomed to the Zoom his fellow former vice president, calling Gore a “climate change pioneer,” offering viewers an introduction that meandered for more than three minutes. “But I should stop talking, Al,” he said.

Gore finally flashed on the screen, set up in front of a nondescript, mostly gray wall, leavened only by some sprigs of white flowers. “This is not rocket science,” he said. “This is the most consequential choice in a presidential election that we’ve ever had in American history. Donald Trump is the face of climate denial, globally. He is lifting the constraints on polluters, putting more pollution into the atmosphere, making all these changes to all of the protections that we do now have, and we need more. And so your election is absolutely crucial, Joe, and I want to do everything I can to convince everybody that cares about the climate crisis—particularly those people—that this is, this is a no-brainer. This is a real simple choice. And if anybody has any doubt about that, come talk to me.” He practically shook with seriousness.

“Well, Al, thanks so much,” Biden said. “That means a lot to me.”

They of course kept talking—I heard Biden say something about Trump self-identifying as a “stable genius” and insisting “that windmills cause cancer,” and I heard the wonky, famously “wooden” Gore say something about how Biden as president could put the U.S. “right back” into the Paris Agreement, and I heard Biden say something about Trump preaching “America first” but that it means “America alone”—and I found myself looking over to the right side of the screen.

On JoeBiden.com, it asked for money—five bucks, 10, 25, 50, 100 or more. Over at YouTube, the Biden livestream asked in effect for quiet. “Chat is disabled for this live stream,” it said.

Later that night, on the other hand, Lewandowski emceed “Team Trump Online!” His guests were two of the most Trump-backing members of the House, Matt Gaetz from the Panhandle of Florida and Elise Stefanik from upstate New York. “It’s very clear the president took this very seriously from the start,” she said of his response to the threat of coronavirus. “President Trump’s the first president in my lifetime to truly understand China, to understand the threat that they pose,” he said. Gaetz also mentioned that he had been doing some reading about the Spanish flu 100 years ago. “They actually used to wheel out some of the patients onto the beaches and into the sunlight and into the fields,” he told Lewandowski, “because they saw less transmission from patient to patient under those circumstances than when people were locked up and in more confined spaces.” This was the night before the briefing at which Trump floated the notion of restorative powers of ultraviolet light or potential injections of disinfectant.

But it was the flurry of simultaneous public comments that was hard to ignore. On the Trump trail the comments are definitively … not disabled. “I just wanted to say again you are the very best President we have ever had,” said Jane Norris. “God Bless DJT!!!” said Eric Morris. “TRUMP 4EVA,” said Heart of Dixie. On display was not only blunt devotion but unalloyed evidence as well that the campaign’s messages—some being delivered at that moment by Gaetz, Stefanik and Lewandowski—were hitting their marks. “CHINA IS EATING BIDEN’S LUNCH!!!” said SHC. “Save Trump they are Destroying the country. Must open now. Hoax,” said Texas Country. “Who else thinks China // Deep State let this virus spread on purpose?” said MAGA BABE. “… you people,” Frank Zen concluded, “make me feel good that Trump will be reelected.”

The contrast between the way the two campaigns stoke—or ignore—their respective audiences is a stark glimpse into the “enthusiasm gap” many have noted heading into the thick of this election.

The screen that is the Biden campaign trail, fair or not, feels inert, in a way the Trump screen simply does not. The Trump screen is moving. The Trump screen is dynamic. And the echo chamber of that hive of scrolling chatter, from The Irritated American to Qanon17 to WINWINWIN TRUMP, never, ever stops.

THURSDAY, APRIL 23

Backdrops on background

“How you look,” Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political adviser, once told me, “is more important than how you sound.”

I found myself thinking about that while watching a “Virtual Town Hall” put on by “Women for Biden” and conducted on Zoom.

Klobuchar (again) was the headliner. She sat in her house in Minnesota and gave an update on the health of her husband, who had, and has recovered from, Covid-19. She dubbed the four-part docuseries about Hillary Clinton on Hulu “actually really good.” She made a joke about a Senate colleague who had a video go viral when he made what she called “this really gross tuna melt.” She offered up a spirited call to arms in spite of the circumstances: “So remember when you get lonely and you’re at home, you’re like, ‘Oh, I wish I could be out there at some kind of rally or doing this or on a march again,’ you are on a march. It’s just a little quieter. And you might have to get on a website or do a tweet or make a call to continue the march. But we’re going to do it. And that’s how we’re going to win.”

And her backdrop, too, was thought-out and aesthetically quite effective. Nice tan set of shelves. Bunch of books. Some family photos. A Twins cap to rep her local baseball team. But the two Biden aides who appeared with her on occasion on the screen? One looked like she was in the corner of an empty room in the kind of furniture-less apartment I lived in as a workaholic twentysomething. The other had situated herself in front of a wall that appeared to be totally plain, with the exception of a busy, multi-colored world map.

While this was billed as a “Virtual Town Hall,” it can’t be watched on Biden’s Facebook or in his YouTube queue, as one can with other events labeled the same way. According to the campaign, it was never meant to be public but rather more like a semi-private convening of supporters—for which reporters could RSVP, which is what I did. The Biden campaign said presentation for this occasion wasn’t a consideration. Fair enough. Nonetheless, it made me consider the overall look of the Trump campaign’s content compared with Biden’s.

Biden himself has a good enough backdrop, with his shelves with the coins and the football and the flag for his son. But the backdrops on the gun violence town hall and even with Gore were … nothing. Nothing that said Biden just by looking at the picture. Just people on a Zoom. The Trump surrogates’ backdrops weren’t uniform, either, and they weren’t perfect—Gaetz was in an empty room—but Dennard wore an eye-catching purple sport coat and black TV-ready glasses and stood in front of Trump signs, and so did Pierson, and so did most of the people on most of the livestreams. The Trump campaign, a staffer told me, sent kits to surrogates when everything shifted to all virtual—lights, mics, decorations for brand-true backdrops ranging from signs to straws to bumper stickers to coffee cups and KAG hats.

“When you work for President Trump, you learn right away that production value is king,” Miller said. “Presentation means everything in Trump world.”

“Voters are not going to cast their ballots based on the production value of a virtual event,” a Biden adviser told me. “They care about having a leader who is going to help them keep their job, get a paycheck, protect their health and actually lead the country through the greatest public health and economic crisis we’ve ever faced.”

Maybe it shouldn’t matter. Especially right now in the midst of a public health catastrophe. But to a lot of people, even subconsciously, it probably does.

FRIDAY, APRIL 24

‘Team Trump sounds like talk radio’

“Trump was the ideal candidate for the political world unleashed by talk radio and its progeny,” Brian Rosenwald wrote in his book that came out last year, Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States. “His pugnacious style—constantly lashing out at liberals, the GOP establishment, and the mainstream media—was exactly what talk radio had offered for almost three decades. Trump supporters, many of whom cherished their favorite hosts for giving voice to what they felt but could not express publicly, at last had what they had craved for years: a candidate who sounded like their champions on the air …” Starting in 2015, when Trump announced his intention to run, and still now as the president, in the words of Rosenwald, “he offers up infotainment, a sometimes-toxic blend of misinformation and never-sedate packaging.”

Here, then, was his namesake son, hosting his own specially branded piece of “Team Trump Online,” titled “Triggered”—the name of his book—his letters not gold like his father’s but licked by flames. In the appointed 8 o’clock hour, it was the week’s longest hit. It was also the crudest and the most contemptuous, a little lurid and a little dangerous. Don Trump Jr. told viewers he was hopped up on a half a dozen Red Bulls. He called what was happening a “Facebook podcast,” a “videocast,” “whatever the hell you want to call these things.” It felt a little provocative just because. It felt shock-jock-y.

It felt like talk radio.

“I promise you what you experience over the next hour will at least be entertaining if not also informative,” Trump Jr. announced. He sat on a couch next to Kimberly Guilfoyle, his girlfriend since he got divorced in 2018, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s ex-wife and a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. “My quarantine partner,” he said. It was, he noted, the two-year anniversary of their first date. “So Kimberly’s been romanticizing me all day long.” He said he still was going to “kick her out” after the first segment. “I have to go cook your dinner,” she said.

With that, Junior kickstarted the show by referencing something he had seen on Fox News that was recycled by the Daily Wire. “The United States intelligence declassified documents that of course the mainstream media would never even think about touching saying that Osama bin Laden had letters and correspondence going back and forth with some of his other leaders about how he wanted to assassinate then President Barack Obama because it would put Joe Biden in charge,” he said. (The second paragraph of the article on foxnews.com said this was first reported in 2012 by the Washington Post, and provided a link.) Junior forged ahead: “To me this is some amazing material.”

His conclusion: “Osama bin Laden essentially endorsed Joe Biden because he believed that would destroy America.”

“And by the way,” he added, “let’s not forget this is like 10-plus years ago, and that was when we could all still depend that Joe Biden was still a lucid individual, as opposed to a guy who’s so far over the hill you can’t even imagine.”

“Team Trump sounds like talk radio. That is what the base is conditioned to hear—and what they want to hear.”

—Brian Rosenwald

So it went. Flanked on the screen by the heads of David Bossie, Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016, and Chris Carr, his political director in 2020, who parroted his points, Junior unleashed an hour-plus of transgressive bashing of the “really, really worthless” Biden, Nancy Pelosi and her $24,000 fridge, “MSDNC,” the “deep state” “the Hamas caucus” of AOC and Tlaib, the Democrats who are “becoming the party of socialism and communism,” and reporters, too, “each one” of whom “literally has an agenda, and that is to destroy Donald Trump.”

And China.

“I have an opinion,” Junior stated. “I think the world would be a lot better place if China worried a little bit more about feeding their people, so they don’t have to eat bat.”

“It’s a neighborhood bar. It’s a community that’s a place where you can go and you can wear shirts that you might get a lot of crap for in a different venue, where someone would say, ‘Oh my God, you’re racist.’ Or, ‘You’re sexist,’” Rosenwald, the author of the book about the Republican Party, Trump and talk radio, told me.

“Team Trump sounds like talk radio,” he said. “That is what the base is conditioned to hear—and what they want to hear.”

SATURDAY, APRIL 25

‘The boys on the couch’

Wearing a T-shirt and faded jeans with too many rips and holes to count, I sat on the deck on the back of my house. The puppy chewed on a spatter of purple Play-Doh stuck to the patio furniture, and the pepperoni pizza showed up thanks to DoorDash. A light breeze blew. And on my laptop I watched Joe Biden stage what his campaign called a rally, celebrating one year since he began his presidential bid, a progression of livestreams featuring the mayor of Atlanta, Congressman Cedric Richmond of Louisiana and the head of a firefighters’ union in the swing state of Wisconsin. Billy Porter sang a song. Those people in the masks in the little boxes of a Zoom chanted Biden’s name.

“Today’s about showing the heart and soul of this country and the values that are powering us every day,” the presumptive Democratic nominee said toward the end of the 45-minute, heavily choregraphed program. “Unity. Compassion. Empathy. And respect for the dignity of every single person.”

The bad news for Biden: There was next to no coverage, certainly nothing like what would likely have been produced had this happened in front of a sprawling crowd somewhere like Philadelphia, the site of his campaign headquarters. “The boys on the bus,” Sheinkopf said, referring to Timothy Crouse’s iconic account of reporters on the 1972 trail, “have now become the boys on the couch.” But if you’re a reporter on your couch, you don’t have any better seat than any random member of the general public, and that doesn’t exactly make reporters essential to the process. Biden’s rally on the internet ended a little before 8. At 9, the Washington Post published an article about his campaign one year in. It literally included the sentence, “To mark the anniversary of his campaign, Biden can’t celebrate with a rally.”

The good news: Some 424,000 people had watched the rally (as of Thursday evening) just on Facebook.

The maybe better news: There was no way for anybody to ask Biden about Tara Reade.

It was getting darker on my back deck. The candles on the table made the wine bottles glow. I closed out the Biden tab and opened up the Trump tab.

That night’s “Team Trump” offering had Lara Trump in New York talking to Brad Parscale in Florida.

“When social distancing first occurred, I mean, it was a transition for the campaign, but … we built the entire infrastructure of the campaign on a digital-first attitude because we knew how important it was in 2016,” he said.

“Everything starts with the internet,” he said of Trump’s reelection efforts. There is no Trump 2020 digital department. “No one’s not digital.”

He capped the night by pointing over his shoulder. “That’s a roll of Hillary Clinton toilet paper that I use every time I’m in a bad mood,” he said. “I have boxes of it and I take it into the bathroom.”

The president’s daughter-in-law laughed.

The viewership for this episode of the Trump show? Only about 50,000 more than the Biden rally.

SUNDAY, APRIL 26

The war room never rests

The Lord’s Day. Biden, from a public standpoint, rested. For “Team Trump,” it was time for “War Room Weekly,” which I obviously watched. Trump 2020 communications boss Tim Murtaugh hosted. He had on Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. He then was joined by Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the campaign, and Marc Lotter, its director strategic communications. They were loaded for bear.

The quarry felt … pretty familiar. Fake news this and fake news that. The Democrats, the Democrats, the Democrats. This, I thought, was the campaign trail after all. The ways Trump uses rallies hit the same themes and tweak the same foes—it’s all the same here with his surrogates on screens. Although I was sitting in my house, staring out the window of my office, a familiar sensation of sameness washed over me.

I shut my computer.

‘The political business will never be the same’

Even within his own party, Biden was never the guy with the fizziest, flashiest online operation. The Democrats who ran for president this cycle that had the best, most interesting, most innovative digital operations, judging from my conversations with digital strategists from some of those campaigns as well as others, were (in no particular order) Elizabeth Warren (those selfie lines), Andrew Yang (memes and MATH merchandise) and Pete Buttigieg. It has to do with an overall philosophy as much as any actual strategy. “Everything that exists exists online now,” a former Buttigieg staffer told me this week. “There is no wall between reality and reality on the internet.”

The Biden campaign wasn’t like that, and still isn’t, some say.

“It’s not the way that campaign has functioned,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist and a veteran of five presidential campaigns.

“On the other hand,” he quickly added, “I would point out that he defeated everybody who thought they were doing really good stuff online.”

Biden indeed stands as his party’s presumptive nominee. So how much does any of this even matter? The content? The numbers of views and shares? The smaller, less enthusiastic crowds (following the smaller, less enthusiastic crowds IRL)? The “One America” ad the campaign was particularly proud of? The Zoom call just the other day with Hillary Clinton in which they stared out from the screen in their side-by-side boxes for 23 very awkward seconds before it appeared as if somebody to Biden’s right told him it was time to start talking. In which Clinton, for chunks of the conversation, somewhat oddly talked about Biden, rather than with him or to him? What about yesterday’s Instagram Q&A with soccer star Megan Rapinoe?

Of course it matters. Especially in an election, like all the other presidential elections at this point, that likely will be decided basically by relatively few people in relatively few places, the result the product of what sometimes feels like the whims of some moms in some suburbs in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin.

“What Joe Biden needs to do is just be Joe Biden. Let ‘em watch the Trump show! He doesn’t have to compete with the Trump show—no—he’s got to create the Biden show.”

—Hank Sheinkopf

“It matters a lot when you’re locked in your home,” Sheinkopf said.

“What Joe Biden needs to do is just be Joe Biden,” he continued. “Let ‘em watch the Trump show! He doesn’t have to compete with the Trump show—no—he’s got to create the Biden show.”

“I think the conversation with Gore—the conversation with Ron Klain—they’ll keep doing all that stuff,” said Bob Shrum, another veteran Democratic strategist. “And I think it will get attention and it will get more attention as time moves along.”

In the meantime, too, does it matter, and might it matter even more, that Biden calls people like Monica Watry, an ICU nurse at a hospital in Milwaukee?

The campaign shared some clips that added up to less than three minutes. “God love you, dear,” Biden told her. But the Zoom call, Watry told me on Wednesday, lasted 45 minutes—after which Biden called her on her cellphone and talked to her husband and her kids for 20 minutes more. Watry, 35, said he told her about his losses, of his first wife and his daughter and later of his son, and his experiences with nurses and health care, and she told him about her frustrations with the persistent shortages of PPE and inadequate testing for the coronavirus. “I was definitely leaning very strongly towards Vice President Biden,” Watry, a registered Democrat, said when we talked, “but this definitely sealed the deal for not only myself but many of my friends and family as well.”

Does it matter that Biden talks several times a week to former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy to ask about the pandemic and public health in general?

“I think it really has changed the nature of what we will do when we’re allowed out of our houses and back into groups, because you can be so much more inclusive online.”

—Andrew Mamo

“What I’ve experienced is a leader who has a remarkable ability to bring his head and heart together in fashioning solutions for the public,” Murthy told me Thursday afternoon. It’s on display most often when the cameras are off, in private moments, when you see him spending time talking to somebody on the phone or in person who’s just lost a loved one and is struggling with the grief of that moment.”

He told me a story about his swearing in as the surgeon general in 2014. His grandmother was there, in a wheelchair, and Biden approached her and got down on his knees to be on her level and put both of his hands on her hands. “Grandma,” he told her, “look at what you’ve done.” I could hear Murthy over the phone choking back tears.

Does that matter?

It’s something, of course, that’s done best—perhaps only done?—in person. And so the broader question, perhaps, is how much of the virtual nature of the current campaign trail bleeds into 2022, 2024 and beyond. In terms of campaigning, is the pandemic present a glimpse at the post-pandemic future?

“When it comes to political campaigning, I hope we never have to truly, fully give up the ability to go and actually meet people face to face, to shake their hand, to hear their plight, to hear their concerns, to connect with people in a meaningful way,” said Vela, the former senior adviser to Biden. “I really hope—fervently I hope—that the rope line will be back. That’s been the heart and soul of political campaigning.”

And yet: “This is where voters are being courted. It is a mistake to think this doesn’t exist,” Princeton political historian Julian Zelizer told me. “Complain, be worried, lament—all of that doesn’t negate the fact that this is how the candidates are running.”

“The political business will never be the same,” Sheinkopf said. “The way we elect people will never be the same.”

“I think it really has changed the nature of what we will do when we’re allowed out of our houses and back into groups, because you can be so much more inclusive online,” said Andrew Mamo, a spokesman for Democratic New Jersey congressman Andy Kim’s reelection campaign who was the chief of staff for communications for Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. “If you’re working from home, if you work odd hours, if you can’t get child care, if you have to be home because you’re caring for an elder, you can still join and be a part of the community.”

“It’s going to drive a lot of new stuff that I think will change strategies as we move into a new sort of era,” said Flaherty, Biden’s digital director. “This is go time for the folks who have been doing digital work for decades.”