Democrats Make Multimillion Dollar Investment in Six Battleground States
WASHINGTON – The Democratic National Committee said Wednesday it intends to spend millions in six battleground states to ensure they are in the win column for the party’s eventual presidential nominee come November.
The investment in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all states won by President Donald Trump in 2016, will be used to hire organizers and build out an election infrastructure that the nominee can harness immediately after the party’s convention next summer.
“The DNC is making historic, early investments to lay the groundwork for our eventual nominee to win in 2020. We are taking nothing for granted as we work to make Trump a one-term president and win up and down the ballot in 2020,” DNC chairman Tom Perez said in a statement.
The plan outlined by Democratic officials, “Battleground Build-Up 2020,” is akin to gassing up the car and then handing the keys off to the next driver.
In the past, the officials said, candidates would create their own primary campaign infrastructure and then have to ramp up quickly to bring their effort up to a national scale.
“In the 2016 race and in past campaigns, they’ve all stressed to us that the most important thing the DNC can do is lay the groundwork for the nominee to come in and build up dramatically,” one official told reporters on a mid-day conference call Wednesday.
Helping the nominee do that more quickly will also help Democratic candidates lower on the ballot, the official said.
The DNC said it would add more states and investments to its battleground list as the nation moves deeper into the 2020 election cycle.
Party officials declined to give specifics about how many staffers will be deployed and just where the staffers will go. Details will be released in the coming weeks, party officials said.
However they did note the investment will double the number of paid party organizers across the states.
With Trump virtually assured of the Republican nomination barring some unforeseen development, the president’s re-election campaign has already made itself a significant presence in battleground states like Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Like the DNC, the Republican National Committee has continued to invest in its battleground state organizing and data operation, though it has been a bit more circumspect than the Democrats in publicly discussing these efforts.
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