Biden Campaign Says It Will Push Ahead Regardless of New Hampshire Results
Joe Biden Team to Push Ahead Regardless of New Hampshire Results
(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden’s campaign is determined to fight past Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, a top campaign official said Monday, in the face of low poll numbers in the state.
“We believe that regardless of what happens tomorrow night, we’re going to continue on with our plans to compete hard in Nevada, South Carolina, Super Tuesday and beyond,” deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said at a Bloomberg News reporter roundtable in Manchester.
The former vice president has made “very clear that he’s fighting for every vote here in New Hampshire,” Bedingfield said. But, she continued, “from the outset our campaign has argued that no candidate has been the Democratic nominee for president since 1992 without the support of African American voters.”
Biden remains in the lead in South Carolina, which has a large African American Democratic primary electorate. His campaign had long stressed he expects to do better there than in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the electorate is overwhelmingly white. But now that he is flagging in those early contests, outsiders have begun to question his viability later into the Democratic nominating calendar.
Bedingfield said she remains confident about Biden’s chances in South Carolina even if he follows up his fourth-place finish in Iowa with a similar showing in New Hampshire. “Joe Biden is currently the candidate who has that support, who I think has the longest relationships and connections in the African American community,” she said.
Despite speculation that Biden does not have the money to keep up the fight, Bedingfield said the campaign is fine financially. “We have the resources that we need to compete, execute on our plan,” she said. “We feel confident that we have what we need.”
Former New Hampshire Governor John Lynch, a Biden endorser, said he would take recent state polls, which have Biden finishing at best in third place, with “a little grain of salt.” He recalled 2008, when a poll released just before his state’s primary showed Barack Obama leading by low double digits, only to have Hillary Clinton to win by 2.6 percentage points on primary day.
On Sunday, Biden went on the attack against Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, on the stump and in a digital ad that compared Biden’s long record of public service to work Buttigieg had done as mayor, including installing lights under a bridge.
The ad has been criticized for belittling the work of mayors, but Bedingfield said that “of course” Biden thinks the work that mayors do is important. Even so, she added, “it doesn’t mean that a mayor of a small town is prepared to be president of the United States.”
Biden often says he’s not comfortable attacking his fellow Democrats but Bedingfield said, “of course he was comfortable, it was his ad.”
(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
To contact the reporter on this story: Jennifer Epstein in Manchester, New Hampshire at jepstein32@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Max Berley, Magan Crane
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