Biden’s Campaign Manager Candidly Throws in the Towel in Florida: Not in Play

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Florida Democrats have been fighting the perception that the Sunshine State is invincibly red this election cycle, but were just dealt a blow by a blunt comment by President Joe Biden’s campaign chair.

In an interview that Puck’s John Heilemann described as a “rare and candid conversation,” Jen O’Malley Dillon was asked about the Biden team’s strategy for 2024, including what states the campaign viewed as true battlegrounds they could win:

Heilemann: If you boil it down, what you’re saying is that 2020 was a national election; there were battleground states, but you ran the campaign like a national referendum on Trump. But in 2024, you’re running a half-dozen targeted state campaigns—which gets us to the topic of your paths to victory. I named six states [Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia]. You’d agree those are battlegrounds, yes?

O’Malley Dillon: Yes.

And you’re saying you see North Carolina also as a battleground state?

Yes.

Florida?

No.

Thank you. I was afraid you were going to lie.

“The job of the campaign is to keep as many battleground states in play for as long as possible so we can navigate any flexibility in the race,” O’Malley Dillon explained, pointing out how Biden had won Georgia and Arizona in 2020 despite those states not being “in play at all at this point” in the election cycle, “and certainly were not traditional battleground states.”

She added that she was still “bullish” on North Carolina this year like she was for Arizona in 2020 “[b]ecause we lost it by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020 and we did not play there,” the effects of a restrictive abortion law passed in the wake of the Supreme Court Dobbs decision, and “a beyond-extreme candidate running for governor in [Mark] Robinson .”

O’Malley Dillon’s comments come just days after Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison visited Tallahassee for a Florida Democratic Party (FDP) rally and told reporters there he viewed the state to be in play, and party activists have cheered the successful effort to recruit candidates to run in all Congressional and state legislative districts , a feat FDP had not accomplished in three decades.

The candidate recruitment effort already resulted in one win for the blue team, with former state representative (and vocal critic of Gov. Ron DeSantis ) Carlos Guillermos Smith winning election to the state senate unopposed , but such a blunt and definitive dismissal by the Biden campaign chief undoubtedly stung. When I researched past Florida election cycles for a deep-dive analysis into DeSantis’ claimed “landslide” re-election in 2022, multiple FDP activists and candidates bemoaned how the Biden campaign had essentially forfeited Florida in 2020, which “removed hundreds of millions of dollars from the political ecosystem that would have otherwise been invested by the Biden campaign, the DNC, and various PACs in voter contact, list building, messaging, and get-out-the-vote efforts across the state.”

Florida’s multiple media markets make it an extremely expensive and difficult arena in which to compete. In 2020, the Biden campaign’s calculus that he could win 270 Electoral College votes without Florida proved to be correct, and it’s not a shock that O’Malley Dillon is taking a similar view this time around.

Still, Biden is not the only Democrat on the ballot, and the dismissal of the state by the president’s campaign doesn’t totally undermine Harrison’s comments. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) is running for re-election in November, and despite having immense personal wealth that he has poured into his past campaigns, he’s squeaked by each time he’s been on the ballot. He was first elected as governor in 2010 by 1.15% (defeating Alex Sink (D) 48.87% to 47.72%), won re-election by 1.07% (defeating Charlie Crist (D) 48.14% to 47.07%), and winning election to the Senate by 0.12% (defeating Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) 50.05% to 49.93%).

That last election was the closest U.S. Senate race in Florida history , requiring a manual recount that showed Scott winning by a mere 10,033 votes.