Biden's closing Iowa message: Imagine a post-Trump world
January 28, 2020Former Vice President Joe Biden is launching his final television ad in Iowa ahead of the caucuses there, urging voters to imagine what a Biden administration could accomplish after President Donald Trump is defeated.
The ad, shared first with POLITICO, will begin running on television in Iowa markets on Tuesday and makes an implicit electability argument for Biden.
“Imagine all the progress we can make in the next four years,” Biden, who is narrating the ad, says before listing affordable health care, fighting climate change and banning assault weapons. “What we imagine today, you can make a reality. But first we need to beat Donald Trump.”
The campaign told POLITICO that the ad would run in five Iowa television markets and statewide on Hulu through the caucuses, which will take place next Monday.
The new television ad will run in conjunction with a spot released by the campaign last week that makes a more explicit electability argument. “Joe Biden is the strongest candidate” to face Trump, the narrator of that ad says, citing head-to-head polling numbers. “This is no time to take a risk. We need our strongest candidate.”
Both ads come as Biden battles a surging Bernie Sanders for a lead in public polling in the state, with Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren both remaining within striking distance.
The ads lean into Biden’s perceived strength in the election: that he is the candidate best suited to defeat Trump. In a New York Times/Siena College poll released in Iowa over the weekend — in which Sanders led the horse-race polling question — a plurality of voters said Biden was the candidate who would be best for defeating Trump, at 32 percent. Sanders was in second with that question, at 24 percent.
The campaign is also releasing a new digital ad featuring Biden’s wife that strikes a similar tone. “Imagine waking up and the news isn’t about a late-night tweet storm, and when they show the president, you don’t turn the channel,” Jill Biden says in that ad. “Because it is someone who can bring this country together. That’s my husband, Joe Biden.”
The ads come amid a final sprint for Biden, who is spending the week in the Hawkeye State. Biden, who, unlike some of his top rivals, is not stuck in Washington because of the Senate impeachment trial, is in the midst of a bus tour across the state.
But Biden is still center stage during the Senate process. Trump’s lawyers tried to recast the trial into an alternate-reality hearing of former President Barack Obama and Biden’s administration, following a bombshell story by The New York Times that reported that Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton directly linked Trump’s withholding aid to Ukraine to his wanting an investigation of Biden and other Democratic rivals.
Source: https://www.politico.com/