Joe Biden Sucks at Digital Media. So What?

Politico

If Donald Trump’s digital media operation is, as his campaign manager Brad Parscale described it this week, a “Death Star,” the consensus seems to be that Joe Biden’s digital presence more closely resembles Jar Jar Binks.

Trump has 80 million Twitter followers; Biden has 5 million. Trump’s Facebook page has 27.5 million likes; Biden’s has less than than 2 million. “From mid-March to mid-April,” Karl Rove noted in his Wall Street Journal column this week, “Mr. Trump had seven times the social-media interactions, 620 million to Mr. Biden’s 87 million.” Biden’s live-streamed events, such as his first “virtual rally” on Thursday, are often hampered by technical glitches. It’s bad enough that David Axelrod and David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign gurus, took to the New York Times to vent that Biden must “transform a campaign that lagged behind many of his Democratic competitors during the primary in its use of digital media.” To put it succinctly, as a New York Times headline declared last month, “Biden Is Losing The Internet.”

Maybe he is. So what?

Biden won the presidential primary with an analog campaign while being outmatched online by his rivals’ much more sophisticated efforts. That should not be dismissed as a fluke event.

Political operatives and journalists have a tendency to size up campaigns based on the size of their campaign apparatuses. Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign looked indestructible because his digital footprint was so enormous, he could generate a huge crowd almost anywhere he went. Mike Bloomberg seemed unstoppable because he had hired thousands of field staff, stuffed mailboxes and flooded the airwaves. Now Trump looms large because of his massive war chest and his campaign’s digital savvy, and Biden’s campaign has responded in recent days by hiring several prominent digital strategists from the campaigns of former rivals Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke.

But piles of money and social media engagements don’t matter if your fundamental argument falls flat.